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AMRI employees shout for help through a window, the panes of which had been broken. (Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya)
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Mornings usually break with the sound of a familiar ringtone. This one dawned with a wail.
It began somewhere in the subconscious before racing closer in an insistent, ululating wave. An ambulance screamed past. Then another. And another.
Then the phone rang. AMRI was on fire.
“Which AMRI?”
“It’s all smoke before our eyes, Dada,” cried the woman who does the cooking for us.
She stays in the slum just across the road, which meant it was AMRI Dhakuria, not the one in Salt Lake.
Our AMRI, the across-the-bridge neighbourhood hospital where you knocked for everything from getting an X-ray done or blood tests to a strip of emergency painkillers.
It might be an exaggeration to say that patients develop a relationship with a hospital, but for residents of South End Park, the tree-lined stretch between Southern Avenue and Dhakuria, the both-sides-of-the-bridge facility had over the years evolved into a reassuring edifice of 24-hour reliability.
If the bypass had Apollo Gleneagles and down south it was Peerless, Golpark, South End Park and Dhakuria had AMRI.
Less than six months back, the spic and sanitised corridors of the hospital had taken care of this limping reporter with a stricken lumbar disc.
Today, it was the hospital that was stricken.
You smelt the smoke as you hit the South End Park main road, the busy stretch that connects Southern Avenue with Dhakuria bridge. Police vehicles, ambulances and cars with press stickers lined either side of the road. A fire engine rumbled past, a lumbering red behemoth to the rescue.
Camera bag slung across, a photographer sprinted forward, lens aimed at a cloud of vapour curling from a window.
A burly fireman, obviously a few notches high in the hierarchy going by the salute he got from a fellow firefighter even in this jam-packed madness of fire engines and jostling crowd, barked orders as a giant Bronto skylift negotiated a corner in the cramped lane leading to the affected block.
Volunteers, nose and mouth covered, cleared the way through the throng of people. What they couldn’t clear, though, was the feeling of being let down, more so for a neighbourhood guy.
Before Friday, AMRI Dhakuria was a proud landmark, a dependable signpost for care. No longer. That confidence has gone up in smoke.
What if the fire had started when you were strapped to a bed, electrical impulses tingling through your injured spine?
Sujata, who lives in the slum under the shadow of the hospital block, said she saw patients screaming for help. “They kept banging on the windows, screaming and crying,” she shuddered, almost re-living the helpless horror of the witness and the victims.
Six months back, after the daily therapy was over, a friendly and attractive intern had handed a feedback form.
She smiled when she looked at the comments: “Caring staff. Nothing to complain about. 9 out of 10.”
Why not 10/10 if nothing to complain about?
The answer might be today.
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