Indira Jaising

A HARROWING MEDICAL CRISIS. A DOCTOR IN THE EYE OF THE STORM. HIS ACCOUNT OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. On the evening of 10 August 2017, liquid oxygen ran out at the state-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College’s Nehru Hospital in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Reportedly, over the next two days, more than eighty patients – sixty-three children and eighteen adults – lost their lives. In the intervening hours, Dr Kafeel Khan, the junior-most lecturer at the college’s paediatrics department, went to extraordinary lengths to secure oxygen cylinders, perform emergency treatment and rally the staff in order to prevent as many deaths as possible. As the news of the tragedy grabbed national attention, Khan was called a hero for working ceaselessly to control the crisis and drawing attention to a healthcare system in dire need of repair. But a few days later, he found himself suspended and that an FIR had been filed against nine individuals, including him, for corruption and medical negligence, among other grave charges. Soon after he was summarily carted off to jail. The Gorakhpur Hospital Tragedy is Kafeel Khan’s first-hand chronicle of the events of that fateful night in August 2017 and the gut-wrenching turmoil that followed – a suspension without end, an eight-month-long incarceration and a relentless fight for justice in the face of extreme apathy and persecution.

There Is A City On The Western Shores Of India Where It No Longer Rains . . . The Sea Has Invaded Its Boundaries And Its Inhabitants Reside In A Towering Structure Called The Bombadrome, Which Hovers Above The Barren Land. Theirs Is An Artificially Equated Society; They Lead Technologically Directed Lives; They Have No Memory Of The Past. They Don’T Remember That This Place Was Once Called Bom Bahia, Or Bombay, Or Mumbai. Except For One Man, The Last Civil Servant Of The India Of Old, A Witness To The Time When It All Fell Apart, Now Bitter, Filled With Regret And Thought To Be Mad. For Decades He Has Remained Silent, But Now A Moment Has Come – Which Comes But Rarely In History – That Prompts Him Into A Final Act Of Service: To Remind People Of What Happened All Those Years Ago, Of The Events That Unmade The City, Then The Nation, And Finally Their Lives . . . Sharp, Layered And Scathing, The Black Dwarves Of The Good Little Bay Will Grab You By The Scruff Of Your Neck And Force You To Listen. Because The Sins Of The Past Can Never Be Fully Hidden. Because The End Can Never Justify The Means.