Lara Zuberi's Blog, page 2

On my way to work I pass the school zone and I sometimes frown when I am obligated to drive at 20 mph. Occasionally the school bus appears before me with the unmistakable stop sign projecting from its side forcing me to halt my car, thus allowing several children to safely cross the street.

Does it make me a few minutes late for work? Perhaps.

Does it make me secure that in this part of the world, cars will stop for my son when he is old enough to cross the road? Certainly.

Does my heart bleed for Malala Yousufzai when I think about how we fail to protect our children in Pakistan as they commute to seek their rightful gift of education? Every day.

It was not that I had left you. It was a mere separation of two years. It's just that I had to lose you in order to find myself. Today, it was good to embrace you, dear white coat-we are soul mates after all.

So, now that my son is independent in relative terms, nearing his third birthday, and the book is written, I am back to being a doctor. I was nervous, navigating my way through the foreign corridors of the hospital while attempting to educate myself about the computer systems, but it went smoothly I guess, seeing patients being the best part. In the evening my son asked me as I was telling him about my day, "Ummm..I'm not a doctor. Can you make me a doctor?"

I will return to my next blog post when I have found the answer to his question. In the meantime, let's hope my white coat and I live happily ever after.

People often ask me what inspired me to write a novel, and I find myself quite unprepared for the answer. I am fortunate not to have had major tragedies in my life, which have been known to fuel the ink of a large chunk of literature that exists today. This is the simple answer that has come to mind:
There are perhaps four ingredients one requires to create a novel. The first two I believe I always had- empathy and imagination. The other two took several years to find, which is why I could not have written a novel ten years ago: maturity and time.

Since I feel like a nurturer towards my book,The Lost Pearl, I also want the very best for it. I knew I wished for it to go beyond critical appreciation and financial reward, so I decided to make a commitment to donate 20% of the royalty to a cause. It is sometimes hard to choose which cause, because how can one give a rank to human suffering? Since I'm a Hematologist/Oncologist, I opted for underprivileged cancer patients. For the small book signing I'm hosting next week, I have set the donation at 100% of the royalty, and although the sales are only slowly picking up, I feel rewarded already.

I dreamed about writing a novel since I was seven years old. I forgot about it for almost three decades while I pursued and embraced my medical career. The dream became invisible, but didn't die. When I took a break from work to care for my two year old son, I learned that the niche I had needed was time, and that niche had been granted to me. Once I started writing, I wrote compulsively, because this was, after all not a fleeting fantasy, but rather, my lifelong dream. Eighteen months later, The Lost Pearl was born. I wrote it not because I wanted to write it, but rather, because I needed to write it.
If you enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it, you will become, for me, the ultimate realization of this dream.
Please visit http://www.larazuberi.com