This doctor isn’t famous.
He isn’t rich.
He works at a large hospital, where thousands of people come to die.

He has no empathy for these people any more.
They are wretched, and frightened. That is how they have always been.
And individuals do not kindle in him even a flicker of the warmth he lost in his youth.
But he is still kind. It is a virtue innate in him.

And so he sits, day after day, in his cubicle where the floor sucks light out of the air, where the windows are absurdly small, and where the plywood partitions glower like empty eye sockets.
And he sees many people, and a parade of miseries.
He is tired, and he feels empty.
And he is still kind.

And cancer patients tell him with tears in their eyes of the money they must save for their daughters’ weddings. And mothers of children with thalassaemia listen with stricken eyes as he tells them their children must die. And of the people they save many slink away, relieved and slightly ashamed.
And still he is kind, because that is all he can be.

And the poverty always wins; and the squalor; and the ignorance.
But nevertheless he sits there, trying to empty an ocean with the spoon they gave him.
And it wears him out; it chafes him threadbare.
But he is still kind.
Because compassion is his way of doing things.