Top Most Brain Surgery Institute of Pakistan

In the General Hospital in Lahore, in the top most brain surgery institute of Pakistan, people lie in verandas in unhygienic conditions. As it is – they are either about to go in for a surgery that has low chances of success even under normal circumstances or perhaps they are trying to recuperate from one. But never do they dare ask for more since they fear being thrown out into the street – they, having already exhausted all their worldly connections to gain this limited space in the first place. Or it could be that they don’t expect more. Maybe, they simply don’t know if there can be more, that such a possibility may exist – that there can after all be more to expect.

Helpless as they are, everything is God’s will – they must only somehow pass the time until the transition to the next world where there will not be any pain, no more putting them to tests, no disappointments – where there will be justice, rivers of milk and honey and tranquility and nothing less. And this alone makes them go on. It is the only light at the end of the tunnel in an otherwise joyless life, bliss in this transitory imperfect world being nothing but a fallacy.

It is not as if they are not vaguely aware that human endeavours can change life conditions – it is just that they know that it would be too much to expect in their case – that never will they ever have the opportunity. And hence, resigned to their fate, the patients thank God for what they receive.

And their visitors secretly thank God that it is not they who are lying in their place in the veranda – and yet, they nurture this secret guilt also. The lives of the visitors are nonetheless marred with fear and dread. From nowhere comes this fear of the unknown that engulfs them. They cannot understand how they have been reduced to the point where an absence of misfortune – and that alone by itself, seems as ultimate good luck, that why expecting more is greed.

And once in a while, the patients are removed from the veranda and are hidden out of sight irrespective of their condition. The walls are then whitewashed and the corridors cleaned and scrubbed. It is the day when the dictator is scheduled to pay an official visit along with his entourage in screaming cars that ply on hastily carpeted roads.

Later in the day, the dictator claims in front of the international press that Pakistan has surplus hospital rooms and one of the best doctors in the world. That, in short, Pakistan has one of the best medical facilities for the common man......