Delhiwale: Not your everyday doctor

An eye specialist and her passion for poetry

At the time, she was doing her Master’s (specialisation in ophthalmology) in coastal Pondicherry. One evening, after returning to her non-sea-facing apartment following another hectic day of work in the hospital, Dr Esha Jamal found herself intensely missing her smoggy, polluted Delhi. She then did what came naturally to her. She wrote a poem — Memories of a Delhi Afternoon.

“I have never won a poetry competition and I haven’t had any of my poems published.”

That was more than two years ago. So much has happened since then. She lost her father, Hafiz Akram Jamal, to the second wave of the Covid-19. She returned to her Delhi and now works as an eye specialist in a hospital. Chatting this afternoon about poets and poetry, during a brief reprieve from patients in the OPD room of the hospital’s eye department, Dr Jamal gamely warns that “I have never won a poetry competition and I haven’t had any of my poems published.”

Even so, in her early 30s, she has lived with poems all her life. In her New Friends Colony home, she often sat by “Papa’s side, as he watched the mushairas of Urdu poets Wasim Barelvi and Rahat Indori on Zee Salaam.” And her mother, Neelofer (BA in English Literature from Delhi University), cultivated in Dr Jamal a fondness for the poets of other lands.

“One day, when I was eight or nine, I came across the final stanza of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken scribbled on my cupboard’s door in Ammi’s handwriting, and I remember standing still, struck with the poem’s beauty.”

The eye doctor agreed to share her aforementioned poem with us.

Memories of a Delhi Afternoon

There are memories that I have

Of a time that has gone by

When life was simple

And emotions simpler

Of hazy summer days

The kind only Delhi can muster up

When the wind itself refuses

To stir things up

And a sort of silence

Tinged with a hint of melancholy

Settles into the crevices of the day

There, on a road shaded by Gulmohars and Neems

The quiet afternoon heaved a sigh of relief

And through it came those sellers of simple wares

The encompassing silence somehow

Mellowed their calls

To almost melodies

Perhaps the lilting notes of a flute

From the tall stack on a bicycle.

Or maybe some utensils

Or a wicker basket

That might be needed somewhere

A favourite was a small swing

For children to take a ride on

And sometimes some ice-cream

For a treat that still seemed like one

Always a hint of excitement

That discovering something new brought forth

I remember thinking that the days were long

And that the afternoons extended

Limitlessly into dusk

But as time unfolded

Changes came to be

What was routine before

Slowly faded away

I still find myself waiting sometimes

For those quiet afternoons

When time trickled leisurely

And living seemed easier...