Ambition, Interrupted

The great caregiver rotation debate (and other daily devotions)

It’s Tuesday afternoon. My laptop sits open on the kitchen counter, email notifications stacking up like dishes in the sink. Constitutional law casebooks tower nearby, syllabi drafts sprawled across the dining table. Just weeks ago, I was celebrating a tenure-track offer—the beginning of everything I’d spent years reaching toward.

Until recently, this scene would have included Shabbir’s laptop too—multiple monitors glowing, his phone buzzing with investor calls. The corporate executive who generated three business ideas before breakfast, whose days ran on pitch decks and quarterly projections.

Then came the diagnosis.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Shabbir sighs from the couch, gently fluffing the tufts of post-chemo fuzz at his crown. “I’m just over here ... wasting away... while you type away at your little computer.”

I look up. “You literally just spent twenty minutes examining your scalp in the bathroom mirror.”

“That was research. I think my hair’s coming back thicker. What if chemo gave me Bollywood hair?”

This is our new normal: cancer with a side of obsessive self-examination—sometimes philosophical, sometimes just about his hairline.

The Art of Productive Interruptions

Shabbir has perfected the office pop-in. Just when I’m deep in case law, parsing the Due Process Clause, his head appears in the doorway like a curious meerkat.

“Quick question,” he says—which is never true. “Do you think the desi community’s pessimism is actually about protecting the group rather than the individual?”

“Shabbir, I’m literally mid-sentence.”

“But people act suspicious when I’m not miserable. Like I’m violating some unwritten grief contract.”

“We can unpack this after I finish the paragraph.”

“Sure, sure.” He turns to leave. Then pivots. “But also—why do you think my dad keeps bringing up drumsticks? Not chicken drumsticks, but the weird vegetable from Bismillah 355. And goat liver. And pomegranates, but specifically California pomegranates. Is it about love? Control? The antioxidant industrial complex?”

We both know what he’s doing. The philosophical spirals are easier than naming the fear that sits between us like a third roommate who never does the dishes. So we overthink our way through it, turn anxiety into abstract questions neither of us really needs answered.

A verse from the Qur’an surfaces in my mind: “Shall We inform you of the greatest losers as to their deeds? They are those whose effort is lost in worldly life, while they think they are doing well in work.” — Surah Kahf

I used to read it as a warning against blind ambition. But watching Shabbir navigate illness with such deliberate curiosity, I wonder if it’s about more than that. Maybe the “greatest losers” are those who mistake motion for meaning—who confuse productivity with purpose.

His questions aren’t distractions. They’re excavations.

The Great Caregiver Rotation Debate

Some mornings, I wake before dawn to write lectures no one will hear for months. These hours aren’t stolen—they’re sacred. I’m building a future not in defiance of illness, but in dialogue with it.

Shabbir emerges soon after, stretching like a cat.

“I think we should revisit the post-transplant caregiver schedule,” he announces, as if proposing a road trip.

The logistics are more complex than they first appeared. After his bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins, he’ll need to stay in Baltimore for two months of monitoring. The kids and I will remain home, 90 minutes away, because post-transplant patients can’t share caregivers with children. So, we’re choreographing a dance of distance: me shuttling between two lives, him learning to accept help from friends and family members who’ll rotate through his Baltimore apartment like actors in an ongoing play.

“We have a plan,” I remind him. “We have a backup. And a backup to the backup.”

“I know,” he says brightly. “But what if Hina has to go back to work? What if Moon Auntie can’t figure out how to get me to the appointments? What if—”

What he doesn’t say—but I hear anyway—is that imagining every outcome is how he steadies himself. Anxiety dressed up as logistical enthusiasm.

Parallel Universes of Exhaustion

Last night, I was building PowerPoint slides about the Establishment Clause at 1 a.m. when Shabbir wandered in.

“Can’t sleep,” he said. “Everyone keeps saying I’m ‘so positive’—like it’s weird. Am I performing wellness?”

“Shabbir, it’s 1 a.m.”

“But seriously, why does jovial equal suspicious in the cancer community? Like I’m supposed to be morose to be authentic?”

He leaned against the doorframe, clearly settling in. “You know what your problem is? You compartmentalize. I integrate. My cancer thoughts and my regular thoughts are one big thought smoothie.”

“My problem is that your thought smoothie has terrible timing.”

“Fair. But have you considered there’s no good time for cancer thoughts?”

I deliver my most withering glare.

The Greatest Losers, Reconsidered

Illness has made one thing clear: not all labor is visible.

When Shabbir apologizes from the daybed near my desk—“I’m sorry I can’t do more”—I think of the war inside him. Cells multiplying. Immune systems recalibrating. Healing is his job now.

“Your body is in full-time employment,” I tell him.

He nods. “Productive fatigue. That’s a thing, right?”

It is now.

Maybe Surah Kahf isn’t a rebuke of ambition but an invitation to examine its foundation. Shabbir’s stillness isn’t surrender; it’s a different kind of striving. His questions are a form of precision—a slow, curious kind of faith.

His chemo and my casebooks are parallel devotions. Both require patience, strategy, and a willingness to trust in processes larger than ourselves.

When my offer came in—tenure-track, finally—we toasted like the future had stopped shifting. That illusion didn’t last. But I still draft syllabi. Still write. Because to do the work, even in uncertainty, is to believe in a future worth meeting.

And maybe that belief is a kind of worship—not of success, but of possibility.

Epilogue of a Daybed

Shabbir still dreams up new schedules. Still watches me work from the daybed. Still asks too many questions.

“Will you still love me if I have better hair than you?” he asked the other day, not joking.

“Please. Your hair game is strong, but genetics are cruel.”

He laughed—a real laugh. Bright. Weightless.

In this collision of timelines and to-do lists, something honest is being stitched together—not a perfect career or a perfect caregiving record, but a life. The lecture prep and the philosophical detours. The ambition and the care. The urgency and the awe.

And maybe that’s enough—even if we revisit the caregiver schedule one more time.