Normally, I wouldn’t let the mention of Pakistan dredge up the past for me. But today, breathing in the cumin-infused air of the restaurant, I drift to those wild days with Tilly.

“Pakistan,” I repeat.

Mom looks up at me. She raises an eyebrow and waits.

“I can’t believe it’s been thirty years since Pakistan,” I say, fully recognizing how cliché I sound marveling at the passage of time.

“It is hard to believe,” Mom says. She sets her napkin on her lap. “Tilly would have been so proud to see all you’ve done since then.”

Tilly. I can’t imagine what Mom went through from the moment she discovered that we’d left with Indigo and his van full of travelers to the moment she got the phone call from Washington that Tilly had stopped breathing. Though they’d shuttled her directly from the tarmac to the hospital, she hadn’t survived. She’d been diagnosed with cancer a few months before she went to Afghanistan, Mom told me when I was in high school.

Once I started to think back on those days with Tilly, I realized I’d known she wasn’t well even then.

It wasn’t until my third year of medical school, when I spent more time in the hospital than anywhere else, that I learned how many diseases have their own distinct smells. I also learned that I had the rare ability to sense them. Some were obvious, overwhelming even, like the rancid fish smell of bacterial vaginosis. Others, like the fruity ketones of diabetic breath, were more subtle. I had detected a handful of pregnancies, in patients and nurses, well before bellies had rounded. I would sniff urine samples before they went to the lab and stand an extra moment at a patient’s bedside to hone my skills.

I was an intern taking care of a patient who had just had a broken foot casted when I smelled something organic and slightly spoiled, a mixture of moss and mildew. I only needed to check that her toes were pink and perfused, but I asked her if I could do a more thorough examination instead.

Rolling her eyes, she’d taken deep breaths so I could assess her lungs. Go ahead, she’d said. But be careful with my ankle or you’ll owe me an extra dose of morphine.

Moments later, my fingers rolled across a small knot on the underbelly of her left breast. I felt again, to be sure.

A flash of understanding passed between us.

I’m getting married in three months, she’d said, as if in protest.

I hadn’t yet learned the right combination of words to use in those heavy moments.

The ticking of the clock is constant, but time has an elasticity too. The short weeks I spent with Tilly were a lifetime of songs, solidarity, and regrets.