A dairy owner, Kamruddin had come to India in the beginning of the month to visit cousins at Mangolpuri in Delhi. “Inshallah if the people of India and the doctors keep treating me the way they have in the last few hours, I will recover well and go home,” he hopes. Later in the evening, he was put on an ambulance to be shifted to Delhi.

Among the ones holding fort at the Panipat Civil Hospital is Dr Rita Hajela, Senior Duty Medical Office, Railways. She was the first doctor to reach the Attari victims at Siwah at 12.30 pm with two staff members.

“The first two bodies they brought out were not charred but appeared to have been a result of suffocation. The rest of the bodies were badly charred, near unrecognisable, even glued together. Kamruddin had fewer burn injuries but is asthamatic and the smoke worsened his condition. He is a guest in our country and we want to send him off as well as he was before he boarded the train,” says the doctor, helping Kamruddin onto the Delhi-bound ambulance.

Ward Attendant Rohtas Singh has been going around trying to piece together the 67 bodies lying in the mortuary in death, and in life. From masses of flesh he has been picking out fountain pens, pieces of paper with numbers and names scribbled in Urdu, English and Hindi, congealed passports, bits of wallets, a small yellow T-shirt with the Pakistani flag imprinted, bangles, keys, a burnt pair of baby socks and passport-size photos — anything that may help in identification later.

... contd.