I often write when I visit new places in my home district—Kupwara. Not because I must, but because every village, every bend of the road whispers a story: of fading folk songs, of mothers in pherans with prayer beads, of neglected shrines and unspoken silences. Usually, my pen is drawn toward the cultural or the social, toward memory and metaphor. But this time, a man—not a mountain or a monument—inspired me to write. A doctor. A humble soul whose grace made even my broken bone feel like it had a purpose.

It was a few months ago. A plain road, an ordinary day, and then—betrayal. My foot slipped, and in that split second, the world narrowed into one terrible truth: my tibia had fractured. Not cracked, not bruised—fractured into two neat, unforgiving pieces. I remember the sound of silence after it happened. Not around me, but inside me. Like something deeper than bone had broken too—something called hope.
I was rushed to the Bone and Joint Hospital in Srinagar, half-conscious and wholly helpless. That's when I met Dr. Gh. Nabi Dar, MS Ortho, Assistant Professor at bone and Joints hospital Srinagar. From the land I write about so often—Kupwara. But in that moment, I didn’t know where he was from. Only that he carried something rare: stillness.
He looked at my X-ray the way a poet looks at a torn page. Calm, precise, almost reverent. He did not speak much. But in his silence there was assurance—not the kind that comes from textbooks or titles, but the kind that flows from knowing. Real knowing. The way an old boatman reads the river, the way a mother touches a fevered forehead.
He mended my tibia not with mere medicine, but with something invisible. Something I can only call faith wearing gloves. There was no drama. No rush. Just skill and surrender.
And today, after six long months, I walked back into his chamber.
Yes—walked.
The cast is gone. The pain has become memory. But the moment that moved me most wasn’t about me. It was about him.
Dr. Dar stood up. Yes, stood up. His face broke into a smile like sunlight on winter snow. “Are you walking now?” he asked—not clinically, but like a teacher seeing his weakest student recite a poem flawlessly.
That’s when it struck me: not only teachers feel joy when their student excels. Some doctors do too. Especially the ones who teach bones to believe again.
He remembered everything—my name, my village, even the precise curve of the fracture. How many patients must he have seen in six months? A hundred? A thousand? But here he was, asking about my tibia like it was some old friend we’d both missed.
There is something profoundly beautiful about being remembered in a world that forgets so easily. There’s healing in being seen, not as a case, but as a human.
In the hospital room, I saw something larger than medicine. I saw devotion. And I felt a quiet pride that such a doctor lives among us—not in Manhattan or Mumbai, but here, in our own Kashmir. A man from Kupwara who didn’t lose his gentleness in the sterile geometry of surgical wards.
The world speaks of doctors as warriors. But I saw in Dr. Gh. Nabi Dar something softer, something rarer. Not a warrior, but a weaver—weaving broken bones back into the body, weaving dignity into pain, weaving kindness into each appointment.
I left the hospital chamber lighter than I had walked in—not just because my bone had healed, but because I had met a man who reminded me that medicine, at its best, is not a business. It’s a blessing.
And some men, like Dr. Dar, are not just doctors. They are prayers in motion.
The author is a prominent columnist of Kashmir, known for his insightful researches on Kashmiri culture, society and Sufism.

Email:-------------------khursheed.dar33@gmail.com