This memoir follows an Indian psychiatrist who looks back on a childhood spent between a small psychiatric hospital and a fragile family home, and traces how those early years shaped her understanding of suffering, care, and what it means to live usefully. As an adult clinician, she revisits the scenes that made her who she is: the Potpoto river and the Ranchi market, the locked wards of Kishore Nursing Home, the leaky shack that flooded each monsoon, and the relentless work of her parents as they built a life of service out of scarcity and conviction.
Told in a reflective, candid voice, the book alternates between a child’s vivid sensory memories and an adult psychiatrist’s interpretation of those memories. The narrator examines how “living with patients” and instinctively “vibing” with them as a child taught her to accept other people’s realities, even when those realities were fragmented or frightening, and how her parents’ medical habits quietly modeled humility, attention, and respect. At the same time, she confronts the psychological price of growing up inside a psychiatric institution. The memoir holds admiration and unease together, insisting on the full complexity of a family that tried to build a good life through relentless, imperfect care.
Chapter One: River Childhood
The opening chapter anchors the reader in Ranchi, in a childhood framed by the Potpoto river, weekly market days, and the crowded, sensorial world of early India. Picnics by the river, the chatter of vendors in the bazaar, the smells from the hospital kitchen, and the presence of ayahs and staff create a textured backdrop for a little girl who feels both securely held and strangely exposed.
The narrative moves between two early ruptures: being sent to boarding school at three and a terrifying night train journey, both of which plant in the child a first awareness of danger and separation. The adult narrator reads these scenes with her clinician’s eye. She considers how early experiences of being left, watched, and moved through unfamiliar spaces prepared her to sit later with patients whose lives had been similarly dislocated. This chapter introduces key themes of belonging, fear, and the search for safety in an unpredictable world, and establishes the memoir’s central lens, an adult psychiatrist interpreting the formative, puzzling emotions of a small child.
Chapter Two: Inside Kishore Nursing Home
The second chapter shifts the focus inside Kishore Nursing Home, the small psychiatric hospital that served as both workplace for the parents and playground, schoolroom, and sanctuary for the child. Here the reader walks through verandas lined with patients, peeks into wards where people mutter, sing, or sit in rigid silence, and watches the young girl strapped on the back of Duggi, a trusted staff member, as she travels through spaces not meant for children.
Key scenes include watching her mother administer ECT and tube feeds to profoundly withdrawn patients, seeing plaster casts and restraints, and sensing the exhaustion of staff who keep the hospital going with scant resources. The child feels a strange comfort in this world. She “vibes” with manic excitement, understands fragments of jumbled conversation, and accepts hallucinated fears and grand ideas as part of the normal human landscape.
From her current vantage point, the narrator asks hard questions about boundaries, power, and consent. What does it mean for a child to learn that suffering can be soothed with electricity or a feeding tube, that adults can be tied down for their own good, that reality is negotiable? She explores how these early exposures deepened her empathy and sharpened her clinical curiosity, while also blurring her sense of what was safe, ordinary, or allowed. The chapter ends by suggesting that the seeds of her later vocation were planted not only in compassion, but in unspoken fear and moral doubt.
Chapter Three: The Leaky Shack
While Kishore Nursing Home provides the institutional setting, the family’s home is a fragile shack on the edge of the hospital grounds, a place where the walls drip in monsoon season and the roof lets in both rain and rats. This chapter explores the tension between the grandeur of the borrowed palace that houses the hospital and the precariousness of the shack where the family actually lives.
The narrative recounts visceral events: a rat bite in the middle of the night, the panic and hurried treatment that follow, and a manic uncle who sets a toilet on fire, dragging the chaos of illness directly into domestic space. The boundary between “patients” and “family,” “ward” and “home,” proves thin and porous. The child listens to murmured conversations about money, staffing crises, and difficult cases; she watches her parents come home late, shoulders slumped, smelling of disinfectant and fatigue.
The adult narrator uses these memories to probe the costs of a life organised obsessively around work and service. She recalls moments of anger at parental absence, confusion over their priorities, and a lingering sense that her own needs were small compared with those of the hospital. At the same time, she recognises that living in the leaky shack taught her practical resilience and common sense, a capacity to improvise under pressure, and a visceral understanding of how poverty and illness intersect.
Chapter Four: The Parents’ Story
The fourth chapter steps back in time to tell the intertwined histories of her parents, whose partnership is both the foundation and the unanswered question of the memoir. We follow her father through missionary medicine in Amritsar, wartime surgery, and psychiatric training abroad, including time in London at the Maudsley. We see her mother stepping into medicine and hospital administration with steady, unsentimental competence, eventually running much of the day to day work herself.
Their love story involves defying racist rules to marry, leaving the safety of government service, and choosing to build Kishore Nursing Home in a half ruined palace and makeshift shack in Ranchi. Her father commutes to Calcutta clinics to keep the institution afloat, while her mother remains on site, performing procedures, overseeing wards, and raising children in the cracks between ward rounds and emergencies.
The adult daughter writes of them with deep admiration for their resilience, practicality, and tireless work ethic, yet refuses to idealise them. She names the shadows: stress that frays tempers, chronic absence, emotional distance, and moral conflicts over what treatments to offer, what risks to take, and how much of their own lives they can ethically pour into their work. The emotional spine of this chapter is the question of what a “good and useful life” really costs, not in abstract terms, but in the intimate ledger of a marriage and a family.
Chapter Five: Becoming the Psychiatrist
The final chapter brings the story into the narrator’s adult life as a psychiatrist. She reflects on how early experiences, from sitting quietly under her father’s desk while he interviewed patients to watching her mother care for catatonic patients with a mixture of firmness and tenderness, gave her an instinctive feel for minds that work differently. She considers how “accepting differences” became second nature, and how her parents’ medical attitudes taught her humility in the face of suffering and uncertainty.
At the same time, she allows herself to admit vulnerability. She writes of fear, shame, anger, and moral doubt, both in childhood moments and in later professional encounters that echo those early scenes. She explores the tension between clinical detachment and the childlike capacity to “vibe” deeply with other people’s realities, and she asks what boundaries are necessary to keep empathy from becoming self erasure.
The memoir culminates in an attempt to define a good, useful life on her own terms. Drawing from her parents’ example and her own practice, she argues for a version of goodness that is caring and honest, rooted in hard work, yet not entirely consumed by duty, a life that finds a measure of self fulfillment in the quiet satisfaction of being a good doctor. In the closing pages, the wards, the river, the leaky shack, and the consulting room fold into one continuous landscape, and the narrator invites readers to consider how their own early worlds have shaped the work they now try to do in the world.
