Zubeda, The Hakim’s Daughter September 18, 2018

The Hakim's Daughter


She came from a long line of Ayurvedic doctors, a stoic, patient, and bitingly witty woman, of enormous courage and dedication. She escaped from a horrific massacre during partition, survived to save her first son (besides me in the picture) from a sinking ship, managed to get the word out to my father that she was alive and needed rescue from a refugee camp in the salt marshes where Alexander the Macedonian met his near end. By the time I came along, she had settled in Buzi, Mozambique. She had brought with her apothecary with some remedies rescued from her father’s clinic. Her lap afforded me the best view of a purple-blue sky on summer days woven as they always were by a dense canopy of tremulous jacaranda leaves near where she sat! Ah! 

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