Srinagar, May 19 -- Dr. Henana Berjes has spent much of her life around pain, first as a doctor, and then as a writer trying to understand what suffering does to people.

A Kashmir-based pain physician and author, she works with patients living through chronic physical and emotional pain while also writing fiction and poetry driven by those very human experiences.

Her journey has taken her from Kashmir to the Middle East and back again, through years in emergency medicine, motherhood, loss, silence and literature. Along the way, she discovered that medicine and writing were never separate worlds.

One taught her how people suffer, the other helped her give that suffering a voice.

In this conversation, Dr. Berjes speaks about growing up ...