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The air was warm, still, vaguely welcoming. The fraying eucalyptus trees in the backyard gave off a pungent fragrance. Taking a long drag, I felt buzzed, even a bit dizzy. For the first time in months, I was in the moment. But the carefree feeling quickly dissipated as the thought—the same thought that had plagued me for months—reentered my mind, even as I tried hard to resist it:
What the hell are you doing?

I pulled out of the driveway and headed south toward the Berkeley campus one last time. I passed the International House, Sorority Row, and the dormitory where I had lived freshman year. Ice plant still lined the side of the road, and the landscaping was still immaculate, just as it had been a decade ago. Freshman year, I remembered, I had planned to major in history or political science, but Victor, my randy Russian roommate, had deterred me. He was a double major in math and physics. (And “love,” as he liked to put it. He put a mattress in our walk-in closet. Every night, moans from one of his girlfriends titillated me as I fell asleep.) Victor's enthusiasm for his chosen subjects was infectious. He lent me books on abstract algebra. He explained to me the wonderfully nonintuitive ideas of Kurt Gödel, an Austrian logician who proved that all mathematical systems are necessarily incomplete. He told me about Ramanujan, the Indian mathematical prodigy who claimed that the Hindu goddess Namakkal whispered theorems about prime numbers to him in dreams. In freshman chemistry, when I had to memorize the rules for how electrons occupy atomic orbitals, Victor taught me where those rules came from, in a quantum-mechanical language that was both beautiful and inscrutable. The exactness, the inaccessibility, of quantitative science intoxicated me. In the social group I eventually joined, math and physics had prestige, a sort of intellectual exclusivity that was deeply appealing. The spectrum of talent in these subjects was so broad, much broader than in the social sciences or humanities or even the biological sciences, where it seemed that with enough study even the grade-conscious premeds could master the concepts.
What separated me from the rest of the pack was what separated Victor from me, and what separated my friend Mike from Victor, and what separated the genius student David Moulton from Mike, and what separated the weird, stinky math professor who ambled around campus mumbling to himself from David Moulton, and probably what separated Einstein from the weird, stinky math professor. The brain function required was so specialized that math and physics seemed to me the truest tests of intelligence. So, by the end of my freshman year, my major had changed to physics, and my intellectual heroes had changed from Churchill and Gandhi to Einstein, Heisenberg, and Feynman, men who changed the world through the power of mathematics.

But by senior year it had become clear to me that theoretical physics, at least at the level I wanted to pursue it, was beyond my capabilities. So, like many of my friends who didn't know what to do with themselves, I took the LSAT and applied to law schools. Trial law had always interested me; in high school I often fantasized about leading a courtroom charge like Atticus Finch in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Law school, I hoped, would allow me to broach the big questions of ethics, philosophy, and politics that had always interested me. My father, a plant geneticist with a disdain for vagueness and imprecision (“Nonscience is nonsense,” he often said), thought it was a bad idea. He didn't need to remind me of his opinion of lawyers. I got into the top schools and even deferred my admission for a year, but in the end I decided to stay at Berkeley for the graduate program in physics. I didn't know what else to do. Though I thought I might like law school, somehow I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer.

One thing I never thought seriously about was becoming a doctor. In fact, for most of my life, medicine was the last thing I wanted to do. My maternal grandfather had been an army doctor in India before he went into private practice. As a boy in India, before we moved to America, I used to watch him at work in his iodine-stained clinic on the ground floor of his palatial flat in an upper-crusty neighborhood of New Delhi. Pitaji's clinic always smelled pungently of medicine, as
did he. Through the drawing room window I'd spy him examining patients with boils or sepsis on the mosquito-netted veranda while lizards clung motionlessly to the limestone walls. It was fine, noble work—or so I was told—but it never caught my fancy. To me, even as a boy, medicine was a cookbook craft, with little room for creativity.

My family immigrated to the United States in 1977, when I was eight (we lived in Kentucky for two years, before moving to Southern California). Whenever the subject of lifework came up, I told my parents that I would never become a doctor. Unlike my brother Rajiv, who somehow always knew he wanted a career in medicine, I was more interested in books, literature, philosophy, the big questions of human existence, about which medicine apparently had nothing to say. Even when I experienced a flash of medical curiosity—say, when the pope got sick or a Soviet leader mysteriously disappeared for a few days—it would quickly dissipate or be subsumed by my interest in the politics of the event. I wanted to be a historian or a high-ranking government official or a famous lawyer or actor or a private investigator, something romantic, with character and flair. Medicine was so bourgeois! My father admonished me for being impractical. He wanted me to become a neurosurgeon—one trained at Stanford, no less. To him, that was the apogee of professional attainment. He understood well the privileges of being a doctor. Whenever he was on the phone with the airlines or with the bank, he always identified himself as
Dr
. Jauhar, even though he wasn't a physician. (“It really gets their attention,” he'd explain.) My mother, too, wished for me to become a doctor. For her, medicine represented an honorable path to influence, power, and wealth—all the things that had eluded my talented father. But I wanted nothing to do with my parents' dream. In immigrant Indian culture, youthful rebellion is saying no to a career in medicine.

We had left India to advance my father's career as a plant geneticist, but in America my father never achieved the kind of success he felt he deserved—denied, he believed, by a racist university tenure system, which forced him to take postdoctoral positions with no long-term stability and left him embittered and rigid and in a constant state
of conflict with professional colleagues. He learned to approach life's conundrums as if they were Aesopian fables. He adopted the habit of distilling life's problems into simple aphorisms dealing with faith, persistence, the value of work—Booker T. Washington stuff. He was always saying things like, “The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes their way.” Or he'd say, “Success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has had to overcome.” Or, “It is not falling in water but staying there that drowns a man.” Or, “Work is worship.” Or, “I'm a tremendous believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.” (Or sometimes he'd mangle the adage, as when he'd say, “Don't change horses in the middle of the ocean.”) He believed strongly in focus, determination—he'd written a plant genetics textbook in the back bedroom, littered with scientific papers and electron micrographs, while working full-time as a postdoc—and also that the mind is malleable, that satisfaction is a state of mind. He felt an overwhelming urge to keep my brother, Rajiv, my sister, Suneeta, and me from repeating his mistakes.

When I was in middle school in Riverside, California, a mediumsize suburb of tract housing and strip malls tucked away in the smog-ridden Inland Empire, my parents invited a veterinarian over to the house for tea. He too had emigrated from India, a lanky man in his forties with a curly mustache, a Nehru jacket, and baggy brown pants that looked like they needed washing. He sat on the ragged couch in our living room loudly munching on my mother's
pakora
fritters. He and my father talked about the evils of Reaganism, but the conversation quickly turned to medicine.

“I always wanted to become a doctor,” he said, looking straight at me. “But I could not afford to go to medical school.”

“I wanted to be a doctor, too,” my father said, pulling up on his fraying brown slacks so that the hair on his shins peeked out over his blue socks. Then he retold a story I had heard many times. My paternal grandfather had died when my father was only thirteen. After his death, the family spiraled into poverty. My father, an able and devoted
student, was forced to read his schoolbooks under streetlamps because there was no electricity in the house. For an indigent boy growing up in rural Kanpur, medical school became an impossible dream. My father flirted with the idea when we first came to the United States, but by then he was thirty-seven, with a wife and three young children, and it no longer seemed practical.

“Why did you go to vet school?” I asked our visitor, trying to change the subject.

“Because that is all I could afford,” he snapped. “If I could have paid the tuition, I would have preferred medicine.”

“I want to be a professor,” I announced preemptively. I desired the academic, retiring life of my father.

“He talks like a kid,” my father said sadly. “He thinks he is smart, but he is going to land in a ditch.”

“Brother, the kids have to make their own mistakes,” the veterinarian replied gravely.

“But they should learn from others' mistakes!” my father exclaimed. “You don't have to touch the stove to know that it is hot.”

The vet turned to me. He spoke in the stern tone of someone who wasn't used to being challenged. “We are foreigners, you understand? As a doctor, you won't have to depend on anyone.”

“They say equal opportunity,” my father said disgustedly. “It is an eyewash, a joke.”

“You have opportunities that your father and I did not have. You're a smart kid. You do well in school—”

“He says medicine is cookbook,” my father interrupted. “He says he wants a challenge.”

“He can do research, if that is what pleases him,” the vet reminded.

“At least there is some surety in medicine,” my mother echoed from the kitchen. She was a typical Indian mother, loving, caring, committed, but small-minded, too, in that only-concerned-with-my-own-backyard way. She had struggled alongside my father, raising the three of us kids, working full-time as a lab tech, making do with much less
than she was accustomed to having, sacrificing so my father could write his academic textbooks, which sold a few dozen copies a year. (She always said that nothing good or substantial would come of writing books.) We lived hand to mouth in a house sparsely furnished with lawn furniture, kitsch, little tchotchkes and cheap knickknacks my parents picked up from garage sales. My parents took us everywhere with them, not because we were an extraordinarily close-knit family, but because we couldn't afford a babysitter. There was a time after my father lost his job that we were forced to live on my mother's lab technician salary of $11,000 a year. We couldn't tell anyone; we had to keep up appearances that my father was still working. “We have to live in society,” my mother would explain.

“You will get a good job as a doctor,” my mother said, bringing in a platter of sweets. “You will get
izzat
, respect. When you walk into the room, people will stand. At the university you may get nothing for your hard work.”

“They never let you rise,” my father said, shaking his head. “They preach human rights. They talk democracy. What human rights! Where are the human rights in this country? It doesn't matter if you are a citizen or not a citizen; it is the color of your skin. They will always hire a white American if they can. You have to be three times as good as them to get the same recognition. If I could start a practice, I would kick them. I would tell them to go to hell.”

The irony of all this was that my father hated doctors. He thought they were all crooks. (He always said scientists like him, Ph.D.'s, were the
real
doctors.) I had heard the stories growing up: the urologist who told him he had testicular cancer when he had a simple fluid-filled cyst; the dentist who botched a filling and wanted to charge him to get it done over again; the rheumatologist who overtreated him with steroids; the pulmonologist who recommended surgery after a marginally abnormal chest X-ray. Dr. Gokhale, our family doctor, had bungled the stitches I needed after a dirt-biking accident, incorrectly diagnosed my brother with water on the knee, and almost killed my grandmother
by giving her a drug for a blood disorder she did not have. My parents had a running joke between them about how much Rajiv was going to charge them for medical care in their old age. The clear if unintended message was that doctors were money-grubbers, distinguished from shopkeepers only by their higher education.

I too resented doctors for their money, their airs. At Indian social functions, the doctors would drive up in their fancy cars as we were getting out of our dilapidated old Buick. Their kids wore the best designer clothes: Le Tigre, Polo, Ocean Pacific, Vans. I hated how they looked down on us, on our shoes from Kmart and our jeans from Sears. One of them invented a rhyme about our shoes: “Buddies, they make your feet feel fine, Buddies, they cost a dollar ninety-nine, Buddies, I'll never show you mine . . .” I hated their spoiled daintiness, their self-appointed privilege. I fancied myself a champion of the underdog.

“Uncle, it is not for me,” I said to the vet. I was too ambitious, too stubborn, to pay attention to pragmatic considerations.

“One day you may have regrets,” was his reply.

I did give it a chance—once. During college, at my parents' insistence and following Rajiv's suit, I volunteered in the emergency room at Riverside General Hospital over Christmas break. The ER was quiet that first night. The biggest excitement was a teenager who came in with a cockroach stuck in her ear. She screamed as a doctor took the insect out, piece by piece.