Russian physician, dramatist and author Anton Chekhov once wrote in a letter to a friend, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.” Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born American novelist and physician called medicine “an arranged marriage”. While Somerset Maugham and Michael Crichton abandoned medicine and devoted themselves to writing, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of detective Sherlock Holmes, continued to serve as a field doctor. Last year practicing oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s biography of cancer The Emperor of All Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize. Physician turned mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik is another success story.
All these “doc-thors”, who dared to “make an incision” with words, seem to have an edge over fellow authors for they come face-to-face with human conditions every day. For they get to know pain, misery, and agony up close and personal. For they have the nerve to stare adversity in the eye. Likewise they know how to paint a picture of happiness for the world. Therefore, from fiction to non-fiction, mystery to history, science to love stories, they are penning it all.
Slice of rustic life
Coorg-born Dr Kavery Nambisan, an alumnus of St John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, who went to England for her FRCS, has served in rural Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. A pioneer in rural surgery, Kavery is currently working in Kodagu, Karnataka as the Chief Medical Officer in charge at Tata Coffee Hospital.
Kavery has six critically acclaimed novels in her kitty. For her, the written word is the best channel of communication between people, between worlds and societies that are entirely different. “It helps us understand human nature with all its eccentricities and conflicts. It helps develop our sensitivity. As a young surgeon working in Vrindavan, UP, I started to write short middles for newspapers and then children’s stories. That was easy and I enjoyed it. But when I started to write adult fiction, I became sure of myself as a writer with some talent,” she informs.
Finding a publisher wasn’t difficult. Her first The Truth (almost) About Bharat (as an attempt to live the life of a male) was published by Penguin India. “David Davidar accepted it even though I was an unknown first-timer. He said he had given it to Khushwant Singh to read and he had said it was good. That’s how I started.”
A consistent and fairly disciplined writer, Kavery bestows equal love and care on medicine as well as writing. “I don’t and can’t have a preference. I’d be unhappy if I could not treat people and I’d be unhappy if I did not write.” Her upcoming novel A Town Like Ours is set in Karnataka, a story of a village morphing into a town, voiced by a prostitute, will be published by Aleph early next year.
Queen of Versatility
‘Are you a full-time writer?” Mumbai-based paediatric surgeon Dr Kalpana Swaminathan can’t quite take in that query. “It’s a baffling question — nobody can possibly be that. There’s always this question of ‘sinful stomach’. So we must set out to do what others call ‘work’. And all the while we’re being aviators, tailors, electricians, chefs, architects, surgeons, plumbers, professors or journalists, we keep our dirty secret safe.”
The writer of a detective series including The Monochrome Madonna and I Never Knew It Was You, Kalpana has earlier written Bougainvillea House, Ambrosia for Afters and Venus Crossing, a collection of short stories. She also collaborates with surgeon-photographer-writer Ishrat Syed as Kalpish Ratna. Their last novel, The Quarantine Papers, dissected the concept of identity and hate through various episodes in history. They write for newspapers and magazines.
So, is the other thing that she does — surgery — different from writing? She claims that she never looked at them as separate disciplines, as surgery demands the same set of skills as writing does, and the same stamina. “There’s a very thin wall between medicine and literature, and it’s constantly breached. In Venus Crossing, the stories are all about this osmosis. Those are the stories written over the last 15 years, and while the anecdotes may be fiction, the human condition is not,” reveals Kalpana.
Medicine meets sexuality
As he was training to be a doctor in a small government medical college in a small, moffussil Maharashtrian town called Miraj, a thought occupied his mind: “What if I inject large quantities of grotesque medical imagery into my poems instead of or in addition to urban angst, I might have a winner.” That was a start for Dr Ambarish Satwik, a vascular surgeon, now stationed at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi where he sews blood vessels for both pleasure and profit.
He carries a laptop to work, to jot down little bends of phrases that pass through his mind as he dissects arteries. “Between operative cases I can manage prose compositions slightly more than 22 words at a time. At the end of six months, I just string them together to form a story.”
His first book, Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire, is a rogue and deviant sexual history of the British Raj. It is a happy union of fraudulent history and excitable hokum. It charts the colonial arc from Robert Clive to Jinnah through 13 disparate stories, all about the perineum, which is the part of the body between the thighs. “It was written when I was working at Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. It was a sarkari job, with sarkari timings and at around 5 pm, I would be browsing to get the ethnography, anthropology, and finally to get the pornography right,” he chuckles.
It is a common perception that a book written by a doctor would be a health-related discourse. But Ambarish doesn’t do that; he writes for self-entertainment. He likes writing medico-sexual tracts and the dark material underneath his writing comes largely from hospitals, and medical journals.
His next project is a book of essays where he explores a new genre — the short, burlesque, illustrated essay. “To make them more piquant, the essays have been converted to the graphic format. I’ve collaborated with some of the finest graphic artistes like Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Orijit Sen, Priya Kuriyan, Prabha Mallya, Kriti Monga amongst others. So what you get is a strange kind of beast: the smutty, salacious, medico-sexual composition.”
Thrill of the Skill
His surgical team removed a tennis ball-sized heart tumour and that is the kind of adrenaline rush that excites Dr Rachit Bhushan about his profession. But it’s his writing that helps him destress and grow as an individual. A resident doctor with the Apollo Hospital group in Cardiothoracic Surgery Unit, Ranchi-based Rachit considers medicine his mother and his passion for writing his wife.
“The writer inside me was born when I lost someone dear to me and the pain and suffering I went through made me write my story. Writing has now become an addiction and I don’t want to come out of it,” he smiles.
Medicine is a tough job where you hardly get time for anything, but if you are passionate about something, you learn to manage time accordingly. “Everybody gets 24 hours in a day, it depends on how we utilise it and use our skills to maintain a balance between our profession and passion. I can’t compare or choose between the two, as both are special to me. I usually finish my hospital work by evening and save night hours for writing.”
Since he was a popular blogger, his reputation convinced his publisher and within three months of signing the contract, his debut novel By Losing You I Found How Much I Needed You was available in the market. His next It Is Never Too Late, which he is writing in collaboration with Shivani Sharma, a journalist, will be out by the end of the year.
Writing with the scalpel
Born to refugee parents in Jammu, Padma Shri awardee Dr H.S. Rissam, director of the cardiology department at Max Heart Institute, New Delhi, inherited the habit of reading from his father, who was a voracious reader. He spent his early years reading Chandamama and truckloads of Punjabi literature.
When he was 13, his first piece, Moscow Street, a short story about a girl in Jammu, was published in a national daily. Few more years into writing and he was determined to be a journalist. But his mother didn’t like the idea. She said, “Kavita likhenga te bhukkha marenga (If you take up writing as a profession, you will die hungry).” So he left for Chandigarh to become a doctor.
Although the rigours of medical school didn’t leave much time for anything else, his love for the written word persisted. He kept writing poetry, quietly, as he excelled in medicine, got married, and raised a family.
It was sometime in 2006, during his three-month sabbatical, that he decided to write a novel. He was in the French capital when the seed for his medical thriller, The Scalpel, was sown. The first installment of the trilogy hit the stands in 2010.
So how does the transition from a doctor to a writer feel? How challenging is the shift? “It’s not as easy as it sounds. One has to mentally disconnect from one to get into another. It’s like floating in two different realms. Like oil and water don’t blend and two different flowers can stay in the same vase, medicine and writing keep me busy in their respective worlds. When I am writing, it’s like I am in a trance. It takes an effort to come back to the real world,” discloses Rissam.
The next two books of the Scalpel trilogy are ready, but Dr Rissam is waiting for a filmmaker to bring the characters alive on the silver screen.