The Casualty 

Rinku woke up at five in the morning and rolled her moth-eaten mattress – a hand-me-down from one of her employers – and placed it by the steel trunk. Her two little children tossed and turned on the sagging charpai. Their father, Rinku’s husband, had wet the bed. He had come home – if a one-room loose brick contraption can be called that – at two, drunk and covered in dung and taken Rinku’s place on the charpai.

The day was breaking but that was the least of Rinku’s problems. By noon she’d done four households, dropped her children off to school, washed and hung to dry the soiled bed sheet, and brought home two sloshing jerry cans of water from a truant Jal Board truck.

By late afternoon, after having returned home, dragged the stove out from under the charpai and cooked her lunch – two chapattis, two green chillies and a dollop of last night’s dal, a hand-me-down from one of her employers, Rinku was gearing up for the evening ahead: a trip to the ration shop, four more households, dropping her kids to the tuition and making dinner for her family.

By nightfall, Rinku was nearly there. She had accomplished the arduous task of having to live one day less from the thousands more that lay in store for her. The brisk walk from her final household was scarcely a few meters from the finish line when Rinku felt a sudden pain. She clutched at her stomach with both her hands. Then she doubled over and collapsed on the road.

Then her problems began.

I am standing outside the Casualty of one of the largest hospitals of India – The Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi. The famous tomb of Safdarjung is barely two kilometres further down. It is well laid-out, with manicured gardens and a magnificent entrance to welcome the visitors – mostly foreigners – who descend from Volvo buses carrying packed sandwiches and mineral water bottles.

But the visitors who arrive at the Hospital that bears the erstwhile Governor of Oudh’s name don’t descend from Volvo buses. They don’t carry packed lunches or mineral water bottles. They haven’t come for sightseeing, or to admire the well laid-out gardens – there aren’t any. They have come with a singular purpose: to delay the end to their miserable lives, if only by a day, a week, a month. For many, though, this Safdarjung will turn out to be their tomb, a final resting place that no one will come and admire.

When I’d visited Safdarjung Hospital last – this was five years ago – it was to check up on Rinku. She had been operated immediately upon arrival – a chunk of her intestine that had burst because of an ulcer had been removed by the Safdarjung doctors – and there she was, all sewn up, lying on a steel bed in a ward that was teeming with life just like on our railway platforms. Her two kids were beside her, so was her husband, now sober. Enterprising patients wanting some privacy had hung damp lungis beside their beds from the many parallel nylon strings that ran across the length of the room. Naked kids with just a taviz tied round their upper arms played hide-and-seek around these damp colourful lungis.

I remember the scene like it was yesterday. I am standing at the threshold, a little stunned. Neha, Rinku’s seven year-old daughter recognises me. She tugs at her mother’s salwar. A tired smile forms across Rinku’s face. I nod my head, indicating to her that I’d better see the doctor first.

The recollection is vivid because of what happened next. I didn’t have to go far in search of the doctor. He was in the next ward, which reeked suffocatingly of phenyl – an overcompensation by the cleaning staff to keep the dreaded MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) infection away.

The doctor’s desk was of battered wood and his chair of torn cane. Patients were trying to break the queue they had formed grudgingly in front of his desk. The doctor was young, perhaps in his late Twenties, and he was strict. He had to be – the line now snaked well beyond the ward and spilled into the corridor. A steel bed was placed adjacent to the doctor’s chair. A patient was asked to jump on to it every now and then – jump because the bed was high and the step-ladder was missing.

I took my time reaching close to the young doctor. Then, all of a sudden, I found myself standing on top of him. He was scribbling prescriptions. His hand moved furiously and expertly, as a doctor’s hand usually does. He wore surgical gloves. The gloves had blood on them.

He looked up and knew at once that I wasn’t a patient. This irritated him – a few precious seconds were lost because of me. I stepped aside, and he was once more among his patients who, like the petals of a carnivorous plant, engulfed him in a flash.

That unforgettable sight – of a doctor writing prescriptions, wearing gloves that had blood on them – somehow stayed with me over years. And like a handkerchief whipped out by a magician at the last moment – unexpected and unannounced, it is precisely this image that comes calling one more time as I stand outside the Safdarjung Casualty, waiting for Dr Kandwal.

The wall nearby advertises an ICICI-Lombard insurance policy. It is comprehensive: if you die within seven days of getting a vasectomy your family is richer by Rs 2 lakh; if a few weeks longer, then only Rs 50,000. If, on the other hand, you face Jatilta or difficulties after being discharged, there’s the princely sum of Rs 25,000 to be had.

Sterilisation has been excel-sheeted. Not long before they rename the scheme Sanjay Gandhi Nasbandhi Bima Yojna.

A man wearing a surgical mask sweeps the entrance with hurried and aggressive strokes, much to the annoyance of the many who have collected outside. They slither en masse to the side, grumbling their displeasure.

The humidity outside is stifling and I decide to venture in, negotiating my way through abandoned wheel-chairs and metal stretchers and unconcerned guards.

The smallness of the hall comes as a surprise – this is the Casualty of one of the largest hospitals in Asia. It is packed to capacity, with patients, with relatives, with oxygen cylinders, with notices – notices that implore you to vomit only in the yellow plastic bag. With steel beds, with doctors who sit in a row behind weather-beaten desks trying to bring order to the assembly, as though they were munshis on pay-day in a 70’s Hindi film. The assembly rearranges itself constantly like a cohesive shoal.

My guide, Dr Kandwal is running a few minutes late. I move my limbs, frozen and rooted till now, to wander. I see a patient being carried by his relative like a gunnysack and then off-loaded onto a bed that already has two patients. I see a woman sobbing as her husband’s pulse is checked by a doctor who, if he didn’t have the stethoscope round his neck, would appear to be a Class 12 student. I see that the doctor is diminutive, but not when he opens his mouth, which he does often to scold a patient who interrupts his pulse-taking every few seconds. I see the plaster peeling off the walls, I see the tilted and corroded water cooler, I see a small flat stone underneath one unsteady leg of a bed that has three young boys arranged head-to-toe. I see that they lie stiff, fearful perhaps of what awaits them. I see patients slap the prescription pamphlet, I see doctors slap the prescription pamphlet, I see nurses slap the prescription pamphlet, and yet no one utters a word, as though the rude gesture of slapping a prescription pamphlet held aloft were some signal understood by all. I see no ventilation to speak of, none from a window or a ventilator at least. I see the air waft in only when someone nearby rushes off somewhere shouting a name that isn’t acknowledged.

I don’t see the Health Minister, I don’t see the Planning Commissioners, I don’t see the High Commands or their Commandos.

I don’t see the Casualty. I see Platform no. 1 at the Nizammuddin Railway station.

This is how India welcomes its sick and weary to a hospital. This is how we slipped in our ‘I’ in BRICS and fooled the world. This is what makes us the aspiring superpower that we dreamt of becoming ever since an idea whose time had come, came.

This is us – naked, scruffy, sweaty, rude, impatient, in pain, angry, hopeless, searching, longing, about to die, about to live. This here is the real tomb of Safdarjung, and it carries his soul that never found peace.

How apt, then, that we as a civilisation believe in the separation of the body and the soul. Our bodies rot and then die, but this strange thing called soul, Aatma, lives on. It wanders around the wards of Safdarjung and it whooshes through the drip tubings attached to the arms of dying children and it permeates puss-laden gauze bandages and it travels faster than the sound of a scream and it soothes the crying mother and the stolid father and it emerges through to the other side unscathed and untouched.

Untouched.

It never dies. It gives us our identity. It holds our moral fabric, our centre, and it compels us to care only for the soul and not for that thing of flesh and blood that carries it.

So forget this cruel world

Where I belong

I’ll just sit and wait

And sing my song.

And if one day you should see me in the crowd

Lend a hand and lift me

To your place in the cloud.

This article first appeared in newslaundry on Aug. 29, 2013.