#AmchiPuneiteAbroad – Meet Dr. Annapurna Singh

October 27, 2017

At five, Annapurna Singh left Calcutta and began first grade in Poona. Her earliest memory dates back to the life she shared with close friend, Pune’s academic icon, Madhavi Kapur. They not only lived in the same building near the synagogue, but from first till eleventh grades went to St. Mary’s school together, played together, shared common friends and were virtually a part of each other’s growing up years. Those years included drives to NDA, climbing the Parvati temple and visits to Saras Baug.

After school Annu, as she was known to her Indian friends, studied science at Fergussons and then did her MBBS at AFMC, eventually moving to Delhi where she did her MD. It was in Delhi that this Kashmiri looked up from her lab and straight into the eyes of Arun Singh, a fellow student. The two ophthalmology students literally connected over pupils. The couple moved to UK for their FRCS, before heading to the US. Annapurna did her fellowship in glaucoma at the Cleveland Clinic. Training, transfers and internships resulted in residency hopping for this young couple, between 1992 and 2001. They had to return to the UK due to trials and tribulations of permissions. Sixteen years of marriage and seventeen homes later, they finally moved to Cleveland, where they have been for the last fourteen years.

As a specialist in cataract and glaucoma surgery, Annapurna has been named as one of the ‘best doctors in Cleveland’.

Arun is an eye cancer specialist with fourteen books, countless publications and most of his time spent zipping around the world on teaching assignments. Over the years, Anna as she is called by her US friends, has developed a love for travel, often accompanying her husband on his jaunts. When she isn’t travelling, she loves to read or stay on top of new surgical techniques.

Despite being out of the country for so long, Annapurna is totally in sync with her Indian roots. Even now, Indian cuisine is soul food for her family, which includes two sons. Her life is cult immigrant lore. Twenty-seven-year-old Nakul is in his final year of Ophthalmology while twenty-four-year-old Rahul is doing a PhD in Math, Economics and Statistics at MIT.

She loves that her boys are proud of their Indian heritage and are enthusiastic about visiting grandparents in India. Herself a product of great parenting, she was keen her children also benefit from the same exposure.

For Annapurna, despite thirty years of marriage, home is where her parents are and that’s what brings her back to Pune every few years. But it’s not the Poona of her childhood and youth. The traffic drives her crazy and today’s Pune is much warmer than she remembers. Regardless, there’s something about her city. She remembers bhutta from the reliwalla during the rains and no matter how hard she tries; she can never emulate the same taste in her home in the US. As a kid she regularly ate peru from the peruwalla down the road. She laughs when she admits she still buys guavas but washes them before eating.

Her mouth waters for the bun kheema outside the AFMC girl’s hostel; the best two rupees she ever spent. Dosa at Vaishali and Marzorin sandwiches are another sorely missed food item. Unfortunately, the years of living outside India has wrecked her immune system. She can’t eat street chutney and pyaaj anymore because her stomach flora has changed completely.

Despite her quibbles with food and weather, deep down Annapurna would love to move back to her hometown. The family has a place in Pune but the reality is she has no idea if her dream will ever come to fruition. She still works full time and doesn’t know what she will do after retirement. Ideally she would like to spend winters in Pune and summers in Cleveland.

To her what’s important is she gets to breathe the air in Pune. Polluted or not, it represents home.