Every breath he took was closer to death for our Anvar, but from his end comes a beginning

Two years ago, Lucy Kalanithi completed the autobiography of her husband, Paul, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer just after completing 10 rigorous years of training in neurosurgery at Stanford. It told of a searing journey through the perversity of fate, unbearable pain, but ultimately, it was about courage and love.  ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ returned to haunt me this week.  But, perhaps as ‘When Air Becomes Breath’. Anvar Alikhan’s story too is about a cruel death, but from a bereft wife’s grief has arisen hope for hundreds of strangers.

Pigeon Handlers’ Disease is triggered by particles of bird shit – invisible, invidious, insidious. They fatally choke the lungs of those allergic. Like genteel, gentle Anvar. Adman, stylish writer, but i admired him most for sacrificing his career in Mumbai to care for his ailing father in Hyderabad.

Last Thursday, i gratefully delivered the memorial lecture, ‘All We Have Are Words’. More substantive is the aptly named SAANS (breath), a sustained Lung Health Initiative in memory of Anvar Alikhan. En route to the airport, his wife Indrani said, “I must give you a preview of our first health camp on Saturday.” We swung into two-and-a-half acres of Dakhani forest in Banjara Hills. And i was bowled over by a motherly dynamo called Dr Nasreen Hussain.After retiring, she gave herself, and her ancestral sprawl, to Hyderabad’s healthcare. ‘Shaktishifa’ has grown into an impressively equipped primary centre. Benevolent donors are cherished on the ‘boughs’ of a sculpture. Minnesota’s St Mary’s school building is painted on a shed housing a fully digitised X-ray machine bought from the funds it raised. Local kids have livened other walls with plaited girls on sylvan swings. This morning, balloons and breakfast shamianas were readying to welcome the first beneficiaries of ‘SAANS’; its pamphlets in and around Hyderabad beckoned ‘anyone with any breathing issues or in regular contact with birds’. They would be tested at Dr Nasreen’s top-end diagnostic lab. It was once the poultry.  Anvar’s spirit would be chuffed over the irony.

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Alec Smart said: “Sardar Patel united India; let’s not divide Indians.”