Most people who have heard of Amritsar know one building in it. The building deserves its fame, and another essay on this site tries to say something about it in the hour before the city wakes. But a city is not its most photographed square of marble, and nobody grows up inside a landmark. When the census of 2011 counted the people living within Amritsar’s municipal limits, it found 1,132,383 of them. Each lived somewhere in particular: on a lane, above a shop, behind a gate, near the end of a bus route. That is the city I mean when I say I grew up in Amritsar. It is the larger and less celebrated city around the famous one, where the ordinary business of moving people to school, to work, to market and home again goes on every day without anyone thinking to photograph it.
“I grew up in Amritsar” is the simplest sentence in my biography. It sits on the About page of this site as a matter of record, between family roots in Khadur Sahib and the years at Spring Dale School. It is also one of the hardest sentences to finish. A city enters a life through far more than its buildings, and most of what it teaches is taught before the child has any idea that a lesson is under way.
I should say plainly, once, what this essay will not do. It will not take the reader down a remembered lane or reconstruct a childhood afternoon in the present tense. It names no house, no neighbour, no corner shop. That is a choice about honesty and about other people’s privacy, and I will try to explain it as I go. What the essay attempts instead is harder to photograph: an account of what a city does to the instruments of a person who grows up in it, of how memory and history crowd each other when one writes about such a place, and of what a person who left owes to the people who stayed.
The Unchosen Scale #
What a hometown teaches first is scale. Long before a child can put any of it into words, the city has settled a number of questions on his behalf: what counts as a crowd, how near is near, how hot a summer is entitled to be, how much noise a street may make before anyone remarks on it, how much explanation a stranger needs before he understands where you mean. These settings are installed without comparison, because there is not yet anything to compare them with. Afterward they behave like instruments. Every later place is read against them.
Instruments in a laboratory are calibrated by comparing them with a reference of known value. A childhood city is calibrated against nothing. It is not measured against the standard; it becomes the standard, and it does so at an age when the child has no way of knowing that other standards exist. That is what makes this particular calibration so durable. Nobody chose it, so nobody remembers choosing it, and an assumption that was never chosen is very hard to see.
Distance shows this most clearly. A familiar distance is rarely measured in metres. It is measured in whether one would walk it without planning, whether asking for a ride would seem excessive, whether a delay along the way would require an explanation at home. These judgements feel practical and self-evident until a move exposes how much of them belonged to a particular place. Two people can therefore agree about the length of a trip and disagree about whether it is far. One is thinking of an ordinary route through a dense city, where much of what one needs lies within a short ride. The other is thinking of traffic lights, parking and the long gaps between buildings. Neither has misread the map. They have brought different histories of movement to it.
The same is true of sound and of company. In a dense Punjabi city, a certain level of noise is simply the condition of being among people, and silence, when it comes, is an event that asks to be explained. In a quieter place the arithmetic reverses, and noise becomes the event. Heat works the same way. Anyone raised on the plains of the Majha carries a private definition of a hot day, and it is set high. None of these settings is correct. Each is a local answer to a question the child never knew had been asked.
It is worth remembering whenever a patient says how far she lives from a clinic, or how bad a pain is. Clinicians ask patients where they grew up for practical reasons: what they may have been exposed to, what they ate, which language a symptom was first described in. The question also reveals the instrument. A person’s sense of what is far, what is crowded, even what counts as a great deal of discomfort, was calibrated somewhere. “It’s not far” and “it’s not so bad” are reports from an instrument, and it helps to know where the instrument was made. I offer that as a reflection rather than as a finding, and I would be wary of anyone who claimed to have reduced it to a single number.
Fifty Kilometres to Lahore #
Amritsar adds a peculiar entry to the scale it teaches, because it has been a border city since 1947. Lahore, the great city of undivided Punjab, lies a little more than fifty kilometres to the west by road. The crossing at Attari and Wagah sits between the two, and for decades soldiers of both countries have lowered their flags there at dusk in a drill of stamping and high kicks that crowds come out to watch. On a map the distance is trivial; it is shorter than many daily commutes in California. In every other measure it is very long. For most people on either side, crossing has long required a visa, a reason and a good deal of patience, when it has been possible at all.
A child who grows up in such a place learns, without being told, that distance is not only a fact of geometry. Some places are near and unreachable; others are far and easy. The scale has a second axis, measured not in kilometres but in permission. I suspect this is one of the more unusual things a border city teaches, and one of the least noticed by the people it teaches, because to them it is simply how the world is arranged.
Khushwant Singh understood how closely a place’s sense of time and distance is bound to its arrangements with the world beyond it. Train to Pakistan, published in 1956, is set in Mano Majra, a fictional village on the border near the Sutlej, in the summer of 1947. The village has a railway station, and its routine is bound to the schedule of the trains that pass through it. The trains are its clock; the day’s routine is set by them. When Partition comes, the schedule falters, and a train arrives from across the new border carrying the dead. The novel’s quiet insight is that a timetable is a social contract. People organise their days around it because they trust that the world beyond the station will keep its side of the bargain. History can revoke that contract in an afternoon.
A border city lives, ordinarily and without drama, alongside a contract that was revoked within living memory and never fully restored. I do not offer that as a memory of feeling anything in particular as a child. I offer it as a fact about the instrument.
The line runs through more than land. Punjabi is written in Gurmukhi on the Indian side and in Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic script, on the Pakistani side, so that the nearest great city across the border speaks the language of Amritsar and writes it in letters that many schoolchildren in Amritsar are never taught to read. The language’s classical poets are buried on both sides. Waris Shah, whose Heer is as close as Punjabi has to a shared classic of love, lies on the far side of the line. When Amrita Pritam wrote her lament of 1947, “Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu”, she addressed it to him: she called on the old poet to speak from his grave, because where once a single daughter of Punjab had wept and he had written her whole story, now countless daughters were weeping. The poem made her famous on both sides of the border, and it is still among the works most often recalled when that year is remembered in Punjabi. Late in her life, according to standard accounts, Punjabi poets in Pakistan sent her a chaddar from the tombs of Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Sultan Bahu, and she is said to have replied that her maika, a woman’s parental home, had remembered her after a long time.
That is the scale a border city supplies, and I think it is a strange one. The nearest literary capital of one’s own language is close enough to see on a clear map and far enough to require a visa. A tradition can be shared and divided at once. The first scale I was given had a line drawn through it, a little more than fifty kilometres away, and a child raised on such a scale has no way of knowing that most scales do not.
Reading by Subtraction #
For a long time the instrument had nothing to measure. That is the oddity of a first city: it cannot be compared with anything while one lives in it, because it is the whole of the available evidence. The first real comparison always arrives later, and the comparisons I can set down here are American ones.
Little Rock, where I spent my intern year in 2007 and 2008, is a city of distinct seasons, green and humid for one half of the year and bare for much of the other. Fresno, my home now, lies flat and wide under a valley sky, a city laid out for cars, with a summer heat that would not impress anyone raised in the Majha. I still read each of them partly by subtraction: less dense than Amritsar, quieter than Amritsar, more room between one house and the next. The subtraction is not a judgement. It is only the instrument doing what it was calibrated to do.
There is an asymmetry in this that took me years to notice. The first city is never compared; every later city always is. Amritsar was simply the world. Little Rock and Fresno have each been, from the first day, a version of the world with something added or taken away. That is unfair to them in a small way, and it can make a newcomer slow to see a place on its own terms. A city laid out for cars is not a dense city with something missing. It is a different answer to the question of how people should live near one another, with its own logic of distance, its own rules about when a visit needs to be planned, its own definition of quiet.
The asymmetry has a practical consequence that matters in a clinic. A physician’s own sense of scale is one more instrument in the room, and it can mislead in both directions. To someone who grew up where most necessities lay within a short ride, a forty-minute drive to a specialist may sound like an imposition; to someone raised in the Valley, it may sound like nothing at all. Neither intuition says anything reliable about the patient across the desk, who may have no car, a shift that cannot be moved, or a lifetime of driving farther than that to buy groceries. The honest course is to treat one’s own sense of “far” as a fact about oneself and to ask. That sounds too obvious to need saying. It needs saying because the instrument does not announce itself; it simply reports, in the voice of common sense.
The calibration also runs the other way. After many years in the Central Valley, the instrument can hardly be what it was. A long residence in a city laid out for cars shortens distances that once seemed long, and turns what a newcomer would call an expedition into an errand. When I think now about the scale of Amritsar, I am thinking with an instrument that Fresno has partly recalibrated, and I cannot fully subtract the second city to recover the first. The original reading is not erased. It has simply acquired a second set of marks beside it.
What Memory Keeps #
The difficulty of writing about a childhood city is partly that memory keeps an uneven inventory. It loses a name and preserves a feeling with unreasonable confidence; it misplaces a year and keeps the quality of a light. Worse, from the inside, its different kinds of material all feel alike.
At least four kinds are mixed together in anyone’s sense of a childhood place. There is remembered sensation, a sound or a temperature that seems to arrive directly from the past. There is reconstructed chronology, the order of events assembled later from dates and documents, often with gaps filled by inference. There is family testimony, stories told so often that they come to feel remembered by people who were too young at the time to remember them. And there is later reading: what one learned afterward about a period one lived through without understanding it. These four come from different sources and deserve different degrees of trust. Memory delivers them in the same steady voice.
Psychology has been unsentimental about this. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin asked students to record, the next day, how they had heard the news, along with an everyday memory from around the same time, and then tested them again weeks or months later. The consistency of both kinds of memory declined over time at about the same rate. What did not decline for the dramatic memories was vividness and the subjects’ belief that they were accurate. The title of their 2003 paper states the finding exactly: confidence, not consistency, characterises such memories. In an earlier study, Maryanne Garry, Elizabeth Loftus and their colleagues asked people how certain they were that various events had happened to them in childhood, then had them spend a short time imagining some of those events. When asked again, the imagined events were more likely to have gained in confidence. The authors called the effect imagination inflation.
Those two findings explain, better than any appeal to modesty, why this essay contains no reconstructed scene. A childhood street written vividly enough to persuade a reader would first have to be imagined vividly enough to persuade the writer, and imagining, the research suggests, is one of the ways certainty gets manufactured. Salman Rushdie gave his narrator in Midnight’s Children the right to keep his mistakes. Saleem Sinai discovers that he has placed the assassination of Gandhi on the wrong date and decides to leave it there, because “in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.” The sentence is wonderful in a novel, where the error belongs to a character and reveals him. In a memoir the error would belong to the author and would mislead the reader about the world.
Walter Benjamin found another way through this problem, and it has helped me more than any rule. Berlin Childhood around 1900, which he wrote between 1932 and 1938 as exile closed in, is not a life story. It is a sequence of short pieces organised around places and objects, arranged freely rather than in the order of a life: a park, a loggia, a telephone, a winter morning. Benjamin explained that he called up these images deliberately, as a kind of inoculation against homesickness, knowing that he was about to lose the city of his birth for a long time and perhaps for good. One of those pieces opens with a famous remark: not to find one’s way in a city means little, but to lose oneself in a city, the way one loses oneself in a forest, takes schooling.
A child raised in a city receives the opposite schooling. He learns not to see. A route walked a thousand times stops being looked at; a sound heard every day stops being heard. That is where the paradox of the first scale lies. The parts of a city that a child learns most thoroughly are precisely the parts that memory recorded least clearly, because they were never attended to. They were absorbed below the level at which memory takes notes. What survives of them is not a scene but a setting, a calibration, a sense of what is ordinary. I trust that residue more than I would trust any vivid anecdote, because no one, including me, could have embellished what was never observed.
History Beside a Child’s Life #
Some of what I have since learned about Amritsar is history, and history is where the difficulty becomes moral as well as epistemic.
The catastrophe by which much of the world first learned the city’s name took place on 13 April 1919, the day of the Baisakhi festival, when Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled ground with narrow exits. The official inquiry counted 379 dead; the Indian National Congress estimated about a thousand. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest at the end of May.
Two writers placed a person in the Bagh that afternoon, and the difference between them is instructive. Rushdie, in the chapter of Midnight’s Children called “Mercurochrome”, sends Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, a Kashmiri doctor, to Amritsar in 1919. He stays in the city to treat people hurt in the rioting, and the red antiseptic he uses stains his clothes so badly that his wife takes it for blood. At the Bagh, a sneeze makes him stumble and drop his medical bag; as he crawls to retrieve it, Dyer’s troops open fire. He survives beneath the bodies, bruised by the clasp of the bag, and goes home covered in blood, which his wife now takes for Mercurochrome. The reversal is the chapter’s whole moral argument in one image. In a city under that kind of violence, the healer’s stain and the victim’s blood can no longer be told apart, and the people who love you will mistake each for the other.
Nanak Singh needed no sneeze. He was twenty-two and, by the account published with the centenary translation of his poem, was in the Bagh when the firing began, fainted, and was left among the dead. In 1920 he published Khooni Vaisakhi, a long Punjabi poem about the events that led to the massacre and about its aftermath. The colonial government banned it soon after. The poem was lost for decades, recovered, and translated into English in 2019 by his grandson, the diplomat Navdeep Suri. Nanak Singh went on to become a central figure of the Punjabi novel. The witness became a novelist; he did not need to invent his presence in the city’s worst afternoon.
The novelist has license; the witness has standing. A memoirist who was not present at an event has neither, and the temptation is to borrow both. The years of my schooling in Amritsar, the 1980s and early 1990s, were also the years of June 1984, when the army entered the Harmandir Sahib complex, and of the long and violent decade that followed in Punjab, whose record is still being assembled by courts, commissions, archives and families. I will not set a child’s-eye account beside that record. I have no wish to borrow its weight by placing a small figure in front of it.
There is, I know, a strong objection to that restraint. An essay called “Growing Up in Amritsar” that never mentioned 1984 would be a brochure. It would imply that a childhood can be described apart from the history occupying the same streets, and that is false in a way that does its own harm, because silence about a public tragedy is also a statement about it. The objection is right. Leaving history out would falsify the city as surely as inserting oneself into history would falsify the life.
The answer, as far as I can find one, is a matter of scale and of labelling. The history must be acknowledged, at the size it actually has, in words that can be checked. It must be kept apart from anything presented as personal memory, so that a reader is never asked to accept a private recollection on the authority of a public catastrophe. And the people who lived through it, who are not characters in my story, must be protected from becoming scenery in it. What can be said plainly is that a childhood and a history can occupy the same streets at the same time, and that an adult’s understanding of what surrounded the child tends to arrive later, through reading and listening, and to stand behind those years rather than replace them.
There is a mechanism in that lateness worth naming. Children do not live in periods. They live in days, in school years, in seasons. The decade becomes a decade afterward, when adults, historians and courts give it a name and a shape, and the name then reaches back and reorganises whatever memory holds. Once a stretch of years has been named for its violence, every ordinary recollection from inside it is pulled toward that name, as iron filings align to a magnet placed beneath the paper. This is not the same as false memory. It is something subtler: the arrival of a frame that did not exist at the time, which makes some recollections seem significant and lets others fade. An honest account has to admit the frame and resist its pull, which means admitting that many ordinary days in those years were, for many people, also ordinary, without letting that admission diminish the days that were not.
Rushdie’s image has stayed with me for a reason he did not intend. Most of the colour in a memoir like this one is Mercurochrome. It comes from later reading, from care, from the wish to do right by a place. It would be a small dishonesty to let it be mistaken for blood, and a larger one to pretend there was no blood in the city at all.
A Childhood Has No Chief Complaint #
There is a second distortion, quieter than the first, and it comes from my own profession. Physicians are trained to take a history in a particular shape. It begins with the chief complaint, the reason the patient has come. Everything that follows is organised around it: when it began, how it has behaved, what makes it better or worse, which other findings are relevant and which can be set aside. The history of the present illness is a powerful form precisely because it is selective. It turns a life into a sequence of pertinent positives and pertinent negatives, sorted by their bearing on one question.
The temptation, when a physician writes about his childhood, is to take its history in that format, with medicine as the chief complaint. Every interest becomes a prodrome. A boy’s curiosity about how things work becomes an early sign; a habit of reading becomes a symptom of the future clinician; the city itself becomes the setting in which a vocation was incubating. The format is so familiar that it can run without permission, and the result reads well. It is also, almost always, false, because it sorts a whole life by its relevance to a question that the child did not know he would be asked.
A childhood has no chief complaint. Whatever a boy in Amritsar cared about, and I am not going to inventory it here, mattered for its own sake and on its own schedule. Most of it had nothing to do with medicine, and that is not a deficiency in the record. In the clinic, a pertinent negative is a finding whose absence matters to the diagnosis. In a life, most of what is absent from the professional story is not a negative at all. It is simply a part of the person that was never under investigation.
There is one place where the clinician’s habit is useful rather than distorting. Good history-taking includes the social history: where a person lives, with whom, under what conditions, in which language. It exists because illness is lived somewhere, and the somewhere matters. If I am going to bring a physician’s habits to my own childhood at all, I would rather bring that one. The social history does not ask what the setting was preparing a person to become. It asks only what the setting was.
The City Goes On #
That last point matters more to me the longer I live away. A hometown is easy to freeze. Distance supplies an editor who removes inconvenient details and improves the lighting, and before long the place starts to resemble a brochure produced by one’s own affection. The opposite temptation is just as available: to show sophistication by listing the city’s shortcomings from a comfortable distance, as though leaving conferred expertise. Neither does the place justice. Affection becomes credible when it can survive complexity, and criticism earns its keep only when it comes from someone still willing to be implicated in what he criticises.
Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul is often read as the great modern example of a writer and his city, and it is worth noticing on what authority it rests. Pamuk wrote it as a resident. His central idea, hüzün, a melancholy he describes not as one person’s mood but as something the city’s inhabitants share as a common fate, is a claim about a community he belonged to while he made it. Whether or not one accepts his account, he had standing to offer it. An emigrant who tried to do the same for his childhood city would be reporting the mood of a place he now knows mainly through other people’s photographs and the news. I do not think I can tell anyone what Amritsar feels like now. I can tell them what it taught me, which is a much smaller and more defensible claim.
The strongest objection to that modesty comes from the other direction, and V. S. Naipaul is its most uncomfortable witness. An Area of Darkness, published in 1964, records the year he spent in India in 1962, the country from which his Brahmin grandparents had gone to Trinidad as indentured labourers. He went hoping to close the distance between himself and an ancestral past, and the attempt, by most readings of the book, left him with something close to panic, shame and disgust. The book is often unjust. It is also, in places, piercing, because a visitor sees what residents have stopped seeing. Every routine that has become invisible to the people who walk it is still visible to the stranger. That is a real gift of distance, and I would not want to deny it to anyone who writes about a place from outside.
The emigrant’s position is neither the resident’s nor the visitor’s, and it can combine the blind spots of both. He still carries the resident’s calibration, so the routes of his childhood remain invisible to him even when he returns; and he has acquired the visitor’s distance, so he notices change sharply, often as loss. What he lacks is the one thing that would make his noticing reliable: a current instrument. His readings are taken against a standard set decades ago and never re-certified. Naipaul’s harshness, at least, was the harshness of a man looking at what was in front of him. An emigrant’s judgement of his old city is too often a judgement of the city’s failure to remain the one he left.
The city, meanwhile, has not been waiting for me. It has grown and rebuilt and argued with itself. In 2017 a Partition Museum opened in the old red-brick Town Hall, a building that once served the colonial administration, to collect the objects, photographs and testimony of people who lived through 1947. It was widely reported as the first museum devoted to Partition. I find that fact moving for a reason that has nothing to do with my own memories: it shows a city deciding, through its own institutions and its own residents, what it will remember and where. That decision was not mine to make, and nothing I write from California should pretend to make it.
Amritsar has also sent its own sons and daughters to Toronto and Melbourne and the Central Valley, and taken in pilgrims and visitors from everywhere, and raised new children who have never heard of the city I carry. Its present belongs to the people who live in it now. They will disagree with one another about what it has become, as residents of every living city do, and their disagreements are worth more than any emigrant’s settled picture. It cannot be reduced to anyone’s childhood, least of all mine.
Two Edges of a Ruler #
There is an ordinary object that I have come to think of as an image for all this: a ruler with centimetres along one edge and inches along the other. Each edge measures accurately. Neither is the true one. A person who uses such a ruler for long enough learns, without thinking about it, which edge a particular job requires, and turns the ruler over when it does.
The first city supplies the first edge, and it supplies it before the child knows that there is any other. Later places add their own markings, and the work of a life lived across two countries is partly the work of learning when to turn the ruler over: when to recognise that “far” in Fresno is not “far” in Amritsar, that a quiet street is not an empty one, that a border fifty kilometres away is not a fact of nature. Recognising this does not make the first scale wrong. It makes it visible, which is a different and more useful thing. What once appeared to be a neutral description of the world can be heard as a relationship between a person and a setting. Amritsar is part of my description of the world because it supplied the first setting. The task is not to discard that, and not to impose it on every later place either, but to learn when another scale is needed.
Belonging, in that sense, is compatible with revision. One can belong to a city and still update one’s measure of it; one can carry its calibration for a lifetime and still admit that its present has moved beyond anything the calibration can read.
Punjabi folk song has known this for a long time, from the other side. Its figure of the ਪਰਦੇਸੀ, pardesī, the one who has gone to a foreign land, is often sung in the voice of someone left behind: a wife counting the seasons, a mother at a doorway, a village wondering whether the traveller still remembers the well. The emigrant is the subject of those songs, but he is seldom their singer. The voice belongs to the people who stayed, who go on living in the place and measuring the absence from inside it. I find that a useful correction to the emigrant’s habit of treating his own departure as the central event in the life of a place. In the songs, the place goes on. The traveller is the one who has stopped.
Somewhere in Amritsar today a child is walking a route so familiar that she no longer sees it. She is being calibrated, as I was, without consent and without comparison, and in thirty years, in whatever city she has ended up in, that route will be her instrument: the thing against which she measures distance and noise and the size of a crowd. Which street will it be, and what will the next city look like when she reads it by subtraction? I would like to know. The city, quite properly, is under no obligation to tell me.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. The essay relies on the author’s public biography: family roots in Khadur Sahib, upbringing in Amritsar, attendance at Spring Dale School, PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock (2007–2008), and Fresno as his present home. Amritsar Municipal Corporation population of 1,132,383 in the 2011 Census: Census of India 2011 figures as tabulated by census2011.co.in. The Attari–Wagah crossing and its evening flag-lowering ceremony: Amritsar district information (amritsar.nic.in); the road distance to Lahore is given approximately. Punjabi’s two scripts, Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi, and the location of Waris Shah’s tomb in Pakistani Punjab: general reference knowledge. Amrita Pritam’s “Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu” (1947), its address to Waris Shah, its reception on both sides of the border and the later gift of a chaddar from the tombs of Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Sultan Bahu: standard biographical reference accounts of Pritam; the poem is described, not quoted. Train to Pakistan (1956), its setting in Mano Majra near the Sutlej and the train carrying the dead: the novel, as summarised in standard reference sources. Talarico and Rubin, “Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories” (2003): Duke University record of the paper. Garry, Manning, Loftus and Sherman, “Imagination inflation” (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996): the authors’ text as posted by the University of Washington. Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, its composition in 1932–1938, its foreword’s account of images summoned against homesickness, and the opening of the “Tiergarten” piece: standard reference accounts of the work and published citations of the German text. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), including the “Mercurochrome” chapter and Saleem’s acknowledged error about the date of Gandhi’s assassination: the novel, checked against published study summaries. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919, the Hunter inquiry figure of 379 dead, the Congress estimate of about 1,000, and Tagore’s letter of 31 May 1919: standard historical reference accounts. Nanak Singh’s presence at the Bagh at age 22, Khooni Vaisakhi (1920), its banning and its 2019 English translation by Navdeep Suri: The Tribune, February 2019. Operation Bluestar in June 1984: Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Partition Museum in Amritsar’s Town Hall, opened in 2017: Associated Press report of August 2017 and reference accounts. Pamuk’s account of hüzün in Istanbul (2003): the book, as described in The Irish Times review and a published essay on the work. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness (1964), his 1962 year in India and his grandparents’ indenture in Trinidad: Virginia Quarterly Review essay on Naipaul. The Punjabi figure of the pardesi in folk song is described in general terms as a feature of the tradition; no song is quoted. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. That the author grew up in Amritsar and has lived in Little Rock and Fresno is part of his published biography. No specific street, home, neighbour, routine, childhood event or sensory memory is described, and no childhood interest is named. No personal experience of the events of 1984 or the years that followed is asserted. The child walking in Amritsar today is a general figure, not a real person. Descriptions of noise, heat and density are general characterisations, not recollected scenes.
Analysis and forecast. The idea of a hometown as an uncalibrated standard, the reading of distance as having an axis of permission, the readings of Khushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam, Benjamin, Rushdie, Nanak Singh, Pamuk and Naipaul, the comparison with clinical history-taking, and the image of the two-edged ruler are the author’s interpretation as of November 6, 2026. The remark about how patients describe distance and discomfort is a general reflection, not a research finding or an account of particular patients. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.