WE NEED ART TO MAKE MEANING OF OUR LIVES; WE NEED TECHNOLOGY TO BOIL OUR COFFEE

The first thing you notice about a person says a lot more about you. 

- SUSAMMA JOY KURIAN

For Dr Abraham Verghese, it is shoes. They help put himself in the shoes of the patient he is seeing. “We all are supposed to do that, to try to do that. A part of you has to be objective and yet you have to sort of try to imagine what [the patient] is going through,” he tells THE WEEK over Zoom from Texas, where he is attending a book fest, in early November.

His latest book—The Covenant of Water—has made him put on his travel shoes more often this year. A week or so before the interview, he was in Spain to promote the book’s Spanish edition. While his previous three books, too, had done well, the latest one is seeing success on a whole different scale—the book has made it to many a ‘best books of 2023’ list, is the 101st pick of Oprah’s Book Club and has already sold more than a million copies.

It has been a whirlwind year for him, no doubt. But he seems untouched by the busyness that surrounds him when he sits down for the interview at 7am, Texas time. He speaks in a calm, unhurried tone, with not even a hint of irritability or discomfort despite nursing a cold. Even when the audio acts up at our end, he is patient. These are qualities that show up in and at his work—both as author and physician. (He is professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane provostial professor, and vice chair for the theory and practice of medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University, California.) Be it the creative or the clinical side, he is, as Stanford Magazine describes him, the human whisperer.

In an hour-long conversation, Verghese talks about his early life in Addis Ababa, his Madras days, his life and medical practice in the US and what it means to be a writer. Excerpts:

Q/ Why do you write, Dr Verghese?