Before The Poem, There Was The Patient: A Doctor’s Debut In English Verse 

Long before Dr. Saroj Kumar Misra of Berhampur put pen to paper in English, he had spent decades putting his own comfort, leisure, and personal joys aside — trading the ordinary pleasures of life for the extraordinary privilege of healing the forgotten. His debut poetry collection is the quiet reckoning that follows. 

Before the sun rises over the hills of southern Odisha a doctor is already at work. Farmers with fever-worn bodies, tribal women carrying infants, elderly men who have walked miles on unpaved paths because there is no other clinic nearby. For Dr. Saroj Kumar Misra of Berhampur this was not an occasional morning. It was a life spanning decades of quiet unwavering service to the rural and tribal communities of Odisha.

He was a good son before the world asked him to be a good doctor. He became a good husband before life asked him to be a healer to strangers. He grew into a good father even as his hours were quietly swallowed by the needs of an entire community. He carried each of these roles with the same understated devotion, never announcing the weight, simply bearing it. The missed family moments, the deferred personal joys and the slow accumulation of a life poured into others. These are the invisible entries in a rural doctor’s ledger that no award can settle.

His patients were never merely cases. Their physical, mental and social anguish became the raw material of his interior life and eventually of his literature. The expression on a tribal patient’s face, the silent dignity of a farmer enduring illness without complaint, the grief of a mother in a village clinic with nothing behind her but hope. These images did not leave Dr. Misra when the consultation ended. They followed him home and in time they found their way onto the page.

That this literary life took root and flourished in Odisha is perhaps no coincidence. This is a land where art is not decoration but devotion. Where the sculptors of Konark carved eternity into stone, where Pattachitra painters tell sacred stories on a single leaf and where Odissi dancers carry centuries of spiritual expression in the movement of a wrist. Berhampur nestled in the coastal south of the state breathes this cultural inheritance naturally. To live in Odisha is to understand that creativity and service are not opposites but cousins and that to make something beautiful is itself a form of giving. Dr. Misra absorbed this truth deeply and it shaped both the doctor and the writer he became.

A recipient of several literary awards from various associations across Odisha he has previously authored two Odia short story collections, a novel and a poetry book in Odia, all deeply rooted in the lives and landscapes of his state. For him the stethoscope and the pen have always been instruments of the same vocation, bearing witness to the human condition with honesty and tenderness.

His debut English poetry collection The Smiles I Never Missed published by BookLeaf Publishing House marks a profound new chapter. The collection of 21 poems was born from BookLeaf’s twenty-one-day poetry challenge programme, a discipline that pushed him to commit to verse daily and unlocked a depth of reflection long carried but not yet fully expressed. The poems move across human values, rising corruption, climate change, love and the quiet magnificence of nature. The book has been honoured with the prestigious 21st Century Emily Dickinson Award, a distinction that places Dr. Misra’s voice within a tradition of poetry that is intimate, observant and unafraid of the interior life.

But the truest origin of this book is a small face and an uncomplicated smile. When Dr. Misra became a grandfather something in him shifted gently and irrevocably. The smile of his grandson carried none of the exhaustion of the world. It was simply joy offered freely with no history behind it. And in that smile Dr. Misra saw what he had spent a lifetime quietly giving away. The unhurried moments, the laughter received with full presence and the sweetness of simply being rather than endlessly doing.

The book is dedicated to his grandson, a child who without knowing it gave his grandfather the rarest of gifts: a reason to look back and the courage to feel it all. Becoming a grandfather completed the man Dr. Misra had already been. It was the final becoming, the one that asked nothing of him except that he arrived as himself and received a smile without qualification.

The Smiles I Never Missed is not simply a poetry collection. It is the autobiography of a giving life, written in the language of gratitude, addressed to a grandson and offered quietly to the world.

• Title: The Smiles I Never Missed 
• Genre : Poetry
• Award: 21st Century Emily Dickinson award
• Book : LINK