KEY POINTS:
"Father says all that a kite needs to fly is a gust of a dream. Kites have wings, men don't. Men need dreams to reach beyond roofs, trees and to dance among the clouds. Kites need men to control them to keep their dreams sane."
- from Cool Cut, a novel by Sharad P. Paul
Dr Sharad Paul has high-flying dreams. Dreams so big, most of us comparatively lesser mortals would let go with the first bluster of an ill-wind, or just never get off the ground.
Not all of his dreams have had wings. He showed an exceptional talent for physics at school, but his parents did not want to send their young son to an American college at 15. Instead, he followed his family into medicine, but discovered he needed to pursue other dreams as well to keep himself "sane".
Sitting in the Baci Lounge, a bookstore-cafe he created - it's an intimate, warm red haven above the late afternoon chill and hustle of Broadway, Newmarket - Paul pulls his indispensable palm pilot from his trouser pocket and prompts his calendar, though he knows the routine by heart.
On Mondays through Wednesdays, Paul works at his private skin surgery practice in Blockhouse Bay, where he specialises in removing skin cancers, but is also a GP.
On Thursdays, he works at Baci selling books and visits low-decile Auckland schools, reading to children from the stories he's written and, he hopes, inspiring them to want to read, write and work hard in the classroom.
Fridays he operates on complicated skin cancers at Waitakere Hospital. Weekends are spent with his family - his wife Sunita, a geriatrician in the Counties-Manukau district, and 10-year-old daughter Natasha, who he takes horseriding.
In the evenings, Paul (who, incidentally, also has a master's degree in medical law) orders the books for Baci - many of them from foreign presses - and prepares his lectures for the University of Queensland's School of Medicine skin cancer department in Brisbane, where he works the third week of every month.
And then, between 11pm and midnight, Paul writes. In the study of his Hillsborough home, he listens to the characters who share his headspace and pours them into his computer.
A prize-winning short story writer, Paul's first novel, Cool Cut - the lyrical, witty tale of three kite-flying friends in Tamil Nadu forced to grow up fast in a world of eunuchs, politics, movie stars and tragedy - was published by Picador last year. He has written another novel, on its way to the publishers, and has a third almost complete.
Paul has a gift for remembering conversations from his 42-year past, which he recycles in his stories. When the dialogue comes flooding into his head, he often scribbles down narrative for his stories on his palm pilot. "Sometimes I'm in theatre doing something on autopilot, like closing up a wound, and I'll come up with another paragraph," Paul says. But rest assured, he waits till he's out of his scrubs before jotting it down.
"When I write, I have the characters living in my head, like they're living in my house. My books are usually about guys I normally don't associate with - I mean, how many guys do you know hang out with a room full of eunuchs?"
One book set in the world of surgery has never developed past the first chapter. Paul is afraid he may base the "unsavoury characters" on medical colleagues he's met over the years, who he may bump into again tomorrow.
"It's sad, but if I made a list of the 10 worst human beings I've met in my life, I would have met seven of them through my medical career." And none of them were patients.
On the surface, the Skin Surgery Clinic on Blockhouse Bay Rd is the converse of the beauty and chic of the Baci Lounge. It's an ugly, brown, stucco building with mirrored-glass windows and a temple-like tiled roof, a couple of metres from a busy roundabout and suburban shops. But beauty is only skin deep and beyond the mirror glass, the clinic has a virtuous heart.
Paul's private clinic does 3000 free skin cancer checks and consultations each year, as a community service without any health authority funding. Paul also continues to see a group of faithful, mostly elderly, patients as their GP - patients he inherited when he bought the practice from a retiring doctor 12 years ago.
As a foreign-trained doctor, Paul battled to get his own practice and it was only through sheer determination - or pig-headedness, he admits - that he stayed in New Zealand. He's adamant he won't be encouraging his daughter to follow in the family career - politics, greed and jealousy have marred the medical profession for him.
Born in England, Paul was 5 when his parents returned to India to be medical missionaries. It was that selfless work that inspired him then and still does today. He came to New Zealand in 1991 with a guaranteed job as a plastic surgeon registrar at a regional hospital but on arrival discovered the position was gone.
"Until I landed, they probably didn't think I was Indian, with the surname Paul, born in England," he laughs. "But I never take no for an answer, so rather than quit and say I'd failed, it made me more determined to stay here."
Wanting more time to write, as well as the skills to do medical mission work as his parents had, he trained as a GP in Auckland and the Bay of Plenty.
"There was some sort of medical council assessment that said I couldn't communicate in English very well. It's always been my first language and I'm a writer of English, for God's sake. Some people may have been broken by that, but each of these things made me even more determined to succeed," he says.
Since buying the Blockhouse Bay practice in 1996, Paul has added an operating theatre to do skin cancer surgery. He's never been interested in cosmetic surgery (his own smooth skin has nary a crinkle when he smiles) and was more concerned with New Zealand's serious skin cancer problem. Paul has always offered free skin cancer checks and estimates the clinic has operated on 25,000 skin cancers.
He was highly commended in the 2003 New Zealand Health Innovation Awards from the Ministry of Health for setting up a dedicated skin lesion service at North Shore Hospital. By operating on some of the Waitemata Health patients in his own clinic, he slashed waiting times for skin cancer treatment from almost a year to around a month.
Skin cancer nurse Wendy Duckett came to New Zealand from Britain four years ago to work at Paul's clinic. Her first impression of the doctor was how welcome he made her and her family in a new country.
"I've worked for quite a few doctors, but there are not a lot who actually care about the patients like Sharad does. He has a lot of compassion and I have a lovely respect for him," she says.
"It's also like working with an encyclopaedia, he's so knowledgeable - sometimes you feel extremely inferior. Once he borrowed my car, but he couldn't get it started because he didn't know about the immobiliser and I finally felt like, 'yes, I have one over him'.
"But that [inferiority] feeling makes you learn more, to keep on top of what's going on in medicine. He doesn't look at me as his nurse - I really feel like I'm a partner professionally."
Compassion is important to Paul, who makes it clear he's astounded by the lack of it he's seen in New Zealand medicine. "There are still a lot of wonderful people in medicine, but the medicine I've seen here is different to what I saw on mission work," he says. "Medicine in New Zealand is quite commercial, run as a business; the way it's practised here isn't really patient-focused.
It's all about numbers, money, politics, yet doctors are supposed to be compassionate. I've always believed in treating patients as I would myself or my own family. "Patients waiting for their surgery say to me 'Is this a good day?' They're thinking, if he's having a bad day, it won't be good for the surgery. But I say every day is a good day. That's my philosophy.
"I can't see myself at 65 still in medicine but I enjoy my teaching and my work too much to give it away yet. It's time to quit when you ask 'why?' [rather than] 'why not?"' Money, Paul insists, has never been a driver in any of his careers. "No one starts a bookstore to make a lot of money," he laughs. "You know, [poet] John Keats trained as a surgeon but when he dropped out of medicine, he saved his soul. I understand that. Baci's profits go into a literacy programme and that's what keeps me sane."
Sharad Paul didn't tell his parents he was opening a bookstore until the opening day, two years ago. "They're not risk-takers, they've been medical doctors and medical missionaries all their life. I think if I had told them, they'd have been scared I was taking on a massive and perhaps impulsive undertaking," Paul says.
So why did he do it, when he already had so much on his plate? "I strongly believe that irrespective of your faith, whether it's Christian or Eastern, in this form you only live once. Whatever you want to do, you do it now. Baci was my dream; it's where I come to escape," he says.
Four years after he wrote down the name Baci - Italian for kiss, and an acronym for Books, Art, Coffee Inc - he created his independent bookshop, with its giant red-petalled chandeliers, antique chairs, cosy booths and a cafe with coffee, food and wine. He's never worried about customers slopping their lattes on the pages of Cistercian Monasteries or The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn. He simply wants people to enjoy reading.
"I do it opposite from a good businessman. With me, the dream has to be there first. You feel passionate about it, go for it and then look at the logistics of it," he says. "Because it's a dream you become eccentric about it. I had a vision in my dreams of a box with A, B, C, D on it - the way literacy should be. So it's Auckland, next Brisbane and then Chennai [formerly Madras, where Paul once lived and Cool Cut is based]. I can't tell you where D will be, I can't give away my business plan."
The Baci Brisbane plan is underway - he hopes that store will be open next year. Auckland's Baci Lounge is open from 10am to 10pm, seven days a week, and won Metro magazine's best Newmarket cafe last year. Paul's immensely proud that Time magazine ran a story on Baci this month.
His store design, created with the help of architects Fabian Douglas, was a finalist in a retail design challenge award. Paul insists on personally ordering all the books - fiction and non-fiction - some from New Zealand publishing houses, others imported from small European and American presses.
"We're doing okay," he says. "When we started, sure we were naive, looking at it from fresh eyes, not from within the book or cafe industries. It's a big change from medicine - for once, people have helped me build up my business. I'm humbled by it."
Paul pours profits from Baci into two literacy programmes for decile 1-2 primary schools across greater Auckland. One of the projects is a short story competition for Year 6 students; the winner receives $150 of books and the school gets at least $2000 worth for its library.
With his mentoring programme, Paul visits schools and talks to the kids about how important education is and stresses his "never-take-no-for-an-answer" approach. His dream is to give similar literacy aid to underprivileged children in India.
Paul could read well before he started school, surrounded by his parents' library of classic literature.
As a boy, he wrote stories and poems which have all since disappeared - bar one poem he wrote as a 9-year-old for a girl, now living in Canada, who kept it. "I was pretty smooth," he says. "The poem was called The Donkey." Paul was a boarder for most of his school years and his next, yet-to-be-titled novel about a Tibetan boy is partly set in an Indian boarding school. Paul trekked to Tibet as a young doctor.
His boyhood love of kites is reflected in Cool Cut, originally a short story called The Kite Flyers, which was a runner-up in a British writing magazine competition in 2001. That encouraged Paul to extend it into a novel.
When the book was launched in Chennai, Paul was humbled by locals who applauded him for accurately capturing the essence of Tamil Nadu, an Indian region which fought to keep its language alive.
"You can write for people who don't understand the culture, but to actually write for somebody who lives there; I think that was the biggest thrill for me, that the people there thought my story was credible," he says.
That was the hook for Shruti Debi, editor at Picador India, when Cool Cut crossed her desk.
"His reckoning was spot-on: the madness of Madras, the filmstar politicians that Tamilians love, truly adore - four-storey high cutouts on the melting roads of plump, powerful people. If you're not from there you'll wonder what's in the water," she says. The book sold 2000 copies in India in a year.
"It's almost embarrassing to work with Sharad," says Debi. "He might be the most positive and 'doing' person I've met. He does a million things and he does them because of his love for this life and, I'd say, a deep faith in it."
Paul writes to clear his head every night until midnight. He says patients tell him he's the hardest-working guy they know and he smiles because maybe, he thinks, that could be true.
"I think I have two advantages. Maybe it's my genes, maybe it's reasonably good living, but in my 20 years as a doctor I've never lost a full working day through illness, even though I'm always exposed to things," Paul says.
"Secondly, if you wake up every day thinking it's going to be a chore, you won't get through it as well. I'm not a workaholic, but I never break for morning tea, lunch or afternoon tea. I have a big breakfast and I eat fruit during the day. But I don't stop and I get through an enormous amount of work that way.
"Sure, I am busy, but I don't actually feel pressured by it and I approach it with positive thinking. People spend an extraordinary amount of time running other people down, but I'm busy enough doing my own stuff. I don't have time for negativity, jealousy or trying to keep up with someone else."
If there was one thing Paul could change in his life, it would be to sever the ties to his palm pilot. But how else could he keep his extraordinary life in harmony?
