An exclusive excerpt from the Crossword Book Award Winning Author, Omair Ahmad’s latest book, Homecoming (Speaking Tiger, 2026)
Hassan
Call him Ahmed sahib, even if that was not his real name. This one is a simple substitute, just enough to draw a thin cloth over his identity. I don’t think it would have offended him. There is no shortage of people with the name, but somehow it has not become merely common. Simple though it is, the name has its own rich legacy, and it is said that the Prophet also wore it. Even across the vast gulf of Sunni and Shia and the cleavages of innumerable sects, one can be an Ahmed and not be commented upon.
He came to me in pain, but I am a dentist and there is nothing new in that. Pain, or the fear of it, is what has drawn most people to my door. I could gather little from him at the time. His pain rendered him incoherent, and the people who brought him were an odd assortment, shopkeepers and paan-walas, some of whom I recognized from my daily walk to the clinic. I could not have told you, then, where exactly they sat, or which shop they owned, just that I had seen their faces sometime in the last five years that I had been working there.
It was not the first time that bystanders had brought somebody to the clinic, nor would it be the last, but this collection of people was an unusual one, something I noticed but did not recognize at that time. It would come to me later that while I had seen all of these people before, I had not seen them in each other’s company. Only their concern for the elderly man bound them together.
So, I registered their presence, but did not understand. My focus was on the man in pain before me. There is a poem my father had been fond of, by Harivansh Rai Bachchan, about Buddhism and how it speaks of dealing with the pain of existence. Something about how when you are wounded, you do not ask where the arrow came from, who shot it, or why, but are only focussed on the pain of the arrow and removing it. During my medical studies those half-remembered verses would come back to me, stronger than the Hippocratic oath, as the whole point of a doctor’s duty. Ask not where the wound comes from, who is responsible, what is the cause, but heal. Heal the wound.
But as any decent doctor will tell you, you treat the patient, not the disease. It is a bit like playing detective or a hunter, tracking the cause of ruination by the spoor it leaves behind. In this case it was a tiny pebble, as small as suspicion in a lover’s heart, and as dangerous. It was hidden in a paan, Ahmed sahib murmured, though the remains were there in his mouth, both of the paan and the pebble, and I did not need his words to tell me. As I worked to clean out the detritus of a broken tooth that had exposed a cavity and an infected nerve, making way only to signal Monisha and Kavi to shine a light or offer a sip of water to Ahmed sahib, I felt a small bit of admiration for the man. Maybe it was his mumbled explanation, almost an apology for the paan, unnecessary in terms of information but important in terms of courtesy, that touched me. He was in a great deal of pain, and sought to explain despite that.
I have seen brave men quail at the tools I wield. Some have fainted, some wept, though I can tell you that they had little reason for it. I’m a careful man, and work with a gentle touch. People come to me broken and in pain, I do my best to heal them, to comfort them, yet they tremble at the thought of my touch. This man did none of that, and seemed only to want to apologize for his shame. I shushed him, soothing him, even though that was a bit ridiculous too. He was far older than me, old enough that even my father, had he been alive, would have addressed him as an elder brother. But doctors are allowed this transgression, to speak to those far older to them as children.
Excerpted with permission from the author and the publisher of Homecoming by Omair Ahmed (Speaking Tiger, 2026)
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About the Book
From the author of the internationally acclaimed The Storyteller’s Tale and Jimmy the Terrorist, this is a spare, nostalgic and moving novel about love, family, home and belonging.
After years of trying to belong to Lucknow, once a city of poetry and grace where he had hoped to find something of the father he had lost, Hassan meets a kindred spirit—Ahmed Sahib, an elderly man of quiet warmth and dignity, although diminished in circumstance. Ahmed Sahib shows him a Lucknow that could become home, and gives him the gift of unspoken friendship.
Later, Ahmed Sahib also leads him to love—to Samina, seeking a harbour as Hassan himself has done for half a lifetime. Bound by their common search, they try to make a home in Lucknow, but the city is changing. When an exquisite little monument in the old quarter is demolished, departure becomes inevitable. Will the old search begin once again in a distant land? Will they be together in the search again? And where will it take them?
Spare, nostalgic and moving, Omair Ahmad’s new novella is a meditation on love, lost and gained, and on ideas of family, home and belonging.
About the Author
Omair Ahmad is the author of the acclaimed novels Encounters, The Storyteller’s Tale, Jimmy, the Terrorist (winner of the Crossword Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize), Tall Tales by a Small Dog (shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Fiction) and the nonfiction book Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys into Bhutan. He is also a prominent columnist and political and social commentator.