Once upon a time, there was a boy name Arkojjwal. He was unlike any 13-year-old with a brain tumour that I have ever seen. In 2008, when I was an exhausted resident doctor training to be a neurosurgeon in Vellore, he was admitted to the paediatric ward that I was assigned to look after. He had a curly mop of hair that sat off-centre on his head, and he wore a pair of thick glasses gingerly balanced on the tip of his nose, giving him the quintessential professor look.

“One day, while sitting in class, I suddenly noticed double-vision,” he said in his chaste Bengali-English, as I noted down his history meticulously. “And, when I reached home, my mother saw a squint in my eye.” His MRI showed a craniopharyngioma—a tumour that is hard to pronounce, but even harder to remove. It arises from the pituitary stalk and, in his case, had ensconced the right optic nerve with chunks of calcium encircling important arteries of the brain. Not only that, it pressed firmly against the hypothalamus—the seat of consciousness.