I can never see beyond a few kilometers Mumbai’s haze. The equatorial sun sets alight the city’s smog, beckoning those who visit to focus on the abundance of life that is never more than a breath away. There is never a dull moment here, and I never have to look far to find a new story, a new life lived. Each breath taken in this city belongs to a world of unique possibilities, uncertainties, love, and hardship.
My aunt, who lives in this city full of life, celebration, and dust, was recently diagnosed with lung cancer.
On a quiet Sunday evening, after making myself tea for another Boston winter night, she called me over WhatsApp. With the same warmth and accent of my mother’s voice, she asked, “How is your medical training? Will you come to visit before residency starts?”
“I’ll try my best,” I said. “How are you these days?
Our conversation drifted gently. She mentioned a lingering cough and some allergies, then, with more excitement, spoke of her friend’s daughter’s wedding later that week. She also suspected the neighborhood street cat might be pregnant. In just a few minutes, she painted a life rich with color, her words stretching across nearly twelve hours of time difference. Before long, I stifled a yawn, and we said our goodbyes.
Three months later, my half promise to visit grew into a serious commitment. As Toronto-based family physician Rory O’Sullivan captures in his short story, “There’s a Special on Car Washes” (Fall 2024 Intima), big moments often hide in the mundane. I had just finished folding my laundry, setting aside my scrubs for another week on my cardiology rotation, when I received an email. My aunt forwarded her radiology report to our family: her chest x-ray revealed small tumor in her right lung. The weight of that moment did not arrive with fanfare. It settled in slowly, in the quiet realization that distance, time, and routine would no longer be barriers I could ignore.
Like Alexandra Godfrey’s essay titled “Sea Glass” (Fall 2024 Intima), my aunt’s story is one of fragments—of lives shaped by distance, of conversations left unfinished, of moments that become more precious in hindsight. Godfrey, who is a physician assistant in western North Carolina, writes of broken glass smoothed by time and the sea, a metaphor for how pain, loss, and separation are softened but never erased. In much the same way, my aunt’s voice on the phone, her stories of weddings and street cats, have taken on a new shape in my memory—rounded at the edges but still sharp with the weight of what was left unsaid.
Leaving my homeland means carrying these uncertainties with the knowledge that a phone call, an email, a single test result can change the shape of a life we thought we knew. But like sea glass, we are shaped by what we endure, softened by time, and held together by the stories we share across miles and years.
Priya Amin
Priya Amin is a medical student at Harvard Medical School and a graduate of Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine program. Her academic interests center on palliative care and oncology, with a focus on how narrative can illuminate the lived experience of serious illness. Prior to medical school, she worked in educational media with organizations such as PBS NOVA and later contributed medical writing and animations to ABC News during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amin is also an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Her work has been recognized by the Association of Medical Humanities, the Columbia University Film Showcase, and the Health Humanities Consortium. Her poetry has appeared in the Brown Journal of Medical Humanities (Spring 2024), and she is an editor for both the Harvard Medical School Student Review and In Vivo, HMS’s medical humanities magazine.
Amin joined the editorial board of Intima in Fall 2025.