Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese, Paul Kalanithi, Siddhartha Mukherjee, all have two things in common – surgery and writing. Belonging to the same fraternity, the surgeon-writer duo Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed (under the nom de plume – Kalpish Ratna) have produced an excellent book entitled Room 000: Narratives of the Bombay plague. I prepared myself mentally for some serious reading of a tome on medical history, but was pleasantly surprised to be turning the pages in a frenzy. Despite the weight of the hardbound copy of about 500 pages, it was a complete no-put-downer! The authors have to be commended on blending history, medicine, public health, politics, sociology, ethics and literature in the right proportions, which has resulted in a fantastic medico social drama.