[Reader-list] KASHMIR: VIEW FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM

[Jeebesh]

KASHMIR: VIEW FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM

BY AJAZ BABA

It is another day of curfew in Kashmir. I am travelling in an  
ambulance to the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital in Srinagar,  
my workplace and the city’s main hospital. The windscreen is shattered  
like that of most vehicles that dare to ply the roads, which are  
blockaded by either protesters or policed by irate securitymen. It is  
a blessing though, the shattered windscreen, because it offsets the  
suffocation in the van. The van carries eight persons but these days  
it is packed with medics, nurses and paramedics, this being a safer  
mode of travel.

A CONCERTINA wire blocks the road ahead and a policeman peers into the  
van. “Hospital staff”, the driver says with an ingratiating smile and  
the policeman lifts the wire and waves us on. A speeding car overtakes  
us with its horn blaring and a couple of youth hanging out of the  
windows shouting and gesticulating wildly. There has been a firing on  
a demonstration and they are carrying a young man hit by a bullet to  
the hospital. “There, it has started,” a nurse grumbles.

By the time we reach the hospital, the patient in the car that  
overtook us is in the operation theatre. A crowd has gathered. There  
is blood on the clothes of the youth who came with the patient. One of  
the accompanying youngsters is sitting near the entrance of the  
theatre weeping and pleading to be let inside. He is the victim’s  
brother. I enter the theatre. A tube sticks out of the teenager’s  
mouth through which a doctor is ventilating him. Another doctor is  
applying stitches to secure the tube that has been put in on the side  
of the chest with the bullet wound. The bag attached to the tube  
bulges with blood. It empties and fills rapidly. “He will need a  
thoracotomy,” the doctor shakes his head.

There is a brief lull and then someone comes with news that protesters  
have been fired at in a village near Sopore, nearly 60 kilometres  
away. The journalists arrive with their cameras and converge near the  
casualty entrance like birds. Stretcher trolleys are hurriedly lined  
up. A couple of hours pass and when it has begun to look like no more  
injured will arrive there is this terrifying clamour of rushing gurneys.

I rush out just in time to see a young man on a trolley being dragged  
and pushed by a score or so youngsters. Those in the front are  
brandishing sticks and are hysterical. The trolley- bearers rush in  
one direction and then another, yelling till someone directs them  
towards the operation theatre. All this happens within a few seconds  
but, like in a nightmare, the seconds seem stretched. Another trolley  
follows, accompanied by shrieking women and men shouting slogans. The  
boy on the first trolley is dead, from a single wound in his leg that  
has long ceased bleeding, the blood having drained during the journey  
to the hospital. The trip would normally take an hour but with the  
confusion, the curfew, and numerous barricades, it has taken four  
hours. The cell phone in his pocket rings incessantly, the Bollywood  
song that is his ringtone sounds obscenely out of place. The other  
victim, an elderly person, is also dead. From bullets in the chest and  
neck.

The bodies are put into a waiting ambulance, which will take them and  
the wailing relatives back to their village. The patients keep coming  
in cars and auto-rickshaws. Mercifully, the injuries are not fatal.  
One patient has a bullet injury in the abdomen. He is lucky; he has  
reached hospital in time. A teenager is brought walking with a  
handkerchief held to his left eye. He has been hit in the eye by a  
marble aimed with deadly accuracy with a catapult, one of the ‘non- 
fatal’ weapons in the hands of the security forces. The swollen eye is  
reduced to a gooey mess.

Some days I can’t help feeling that even the canniest of journalists  
is not able to capture and project what’s happening in Kashmir.  
Television channels show a clichéd account with a repetition of  
similar-looking slogan-shouting crowds, stone-pelting youth and women  
wailing their dead. The hospital scene I am daily witness to is far  
more descriptive and eloquent. The ghastly wounds tell their own gory  
tale but it goes beyond that. It is not about slogans and  
demonstrations either. These days so many donors come to offer blood  
that the hospital blood bank is overflowing though at times over 20  
pints have had to be transfused into a single patient.

AT MEAL times a couple or more of mini load carriers chug into the  
hospital compound. The sloganeers suddenly turn into solicitous hosts  
ladling out rice and gravy. Some days when the supplies run low it is  
just turmeric-dyed fried rice. Every day I see a group of prominent  
businessmen, who must be losing crores of rupees because of the  
turmoil, spending long hours in the hospital even beyond our own  
stretched duty hours. They are not ruing their losses but, without so  
much as a complaint, helping out the sick and the injured and plying  
patients and their attendants to remote corners of the Valley in  
private ambulances. In numerous ways, they provide unconditional help  
and assistance.

Scenes like these make it difficult to believe that it is just a  
handful of misguided, frustrated or paid young men who are all there  
is to Kashmir. The show of camaraderie is enough, and more so than the  
scenes on the roads, to convince even a cynic (and that, I might as  
well confess, includes me) that if this is not a mass movement then  
there has never been one.

Living in the midst of all this violence, bearing witness to fatal  
wounds every day, declaring ‘brought dead’ young men whose faces have  
just begun to sprout a fuzzy semblance of a moustache, one cannot  
continue to remain unaffected. I have never picked up a stone, but  
sometimes I feel I too am fighting, perhaps indirectly, the ones who  
inflict death. It is a pitifully unequal battle, especially when you  
are mocked by a youngster’s body, dead long before the surgical skills  
you are so proud of could help him.

Ajaz Baba is a general surgeon at SMHS Hospital, Srinagar

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