The calling.

I grew up in Africa, the younger of two sons of Indian parents who taught college physics. Around the time that my brother’s precocious ability with numbers was revealing itself, I discovered that I had no head for math — or for any other subject in the school curriculum. Middle-class Indian parents worshipped the professions, and only three existed for them: medicine, engineering, and law. When my brother announced, while still in short pants, that he was going to be an engineer, my parents’ joy was astonishing to behold. Nothing I had ever said had produced such a reaction. I promptly proclaimed that I intended to be a doctor. What made this remotely plausible, even to me, was that I had more than a passing familiarity with blood, mostly my own, because I was always getting into scrapes. Moreover, my unseemly interest in witnessing chicken and sheep being slaughtered for the kitchen and my fascination with watching animals give birth could now be viewed as a form of scholarship. Having announced this bogus call to medicine so early in life, I did not give it another thought. Which is why when the true call to medicine arrived when I was 12 years old, I was flabbergasted. The moment did not have the high drama of Saint Paul’s revelation on the road to Damascus. My call came quietly, but there was no mistaking it. It came in the form of a book. I loved to read and did so with little discrimination and with a prejudice toward works that I thought might be titillating. I picked up Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham because the title was promising, and I had already read Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Of course, the book was nothing Like what the title had suggested to me; it was better. The opening scene — in which Philip, a clubfooted child, is ushered to his mother’s deathbed to say goodbye — still haunts me. Orphaned and raised by stern relatives, and taunted in school because of his clubfoot, Philip finds solace in painting. After high school, he sets off to Paris to become an artist. Money is tight, and he lives on the brink of starvation. One day, he persuades his art teacher, Monsieur Foinet, to assess his paintings and tell him whether he should continue. The teacher studies Philip’s work and makes a brilliant speech about money and its connection to the arts: “Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. . . . I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.” As to his opinion on Philip’s art, he offers this: “take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else.”1 Philip, crushed and disappointed but also relieved to have discovered what is not to be his calling, returns to London and enters medical school. The learning is grueling, and the life hard. But when he enters the outpatient clinic, he realizes he has made the right choice: