The first time we met was at a barber’s shop. Technically, it was just four chairs fastened to the ground within a hole in a wall in the by-lanes of Hindu Colony, Dadar. He was the CEO of Eureka Forbes and I was an accomplished neurosurgeon. But, as Parsis, we were both loyal to our barber despite it seeming that the roof might crumble upon us anytime soon. For over a decade, we visited the same shop but our paths never crossed, until the day we found ourselves sitting next to each other and having a conversation through a slightly cracked mirror in front of us.

The barber knew I had trained at CMC — not the Chowpatty Medical Centre but the Christian Medical College, Vellore — and introduced us, as Marzin, sitting next to me, had gone there to get treatment for his leukaemia. “I was given three months to live. My bags were packed for the US, to enrol in a clinical trial there as a last resort, until someone told me about Vellore,” he narrated the story of how he eventually underwent a gruelling bone marrow transplant there. His wife and son stood solidly by his side all though his treatment.