In the waiting-space, between all the consulting rooms where you patiently wait your turn, you have one job: to keep others from jumping the queue and taking your turn. While in the Netherlands, I might pass this time reading a magazine or scrolling on my phone, here, there are no magazines, and even if there were, it is too noisy, crowded and chaotic to read anything at all. And being distracted by your phone leaves you vulnerable to losing your place in line. I immediately understood why some people waited directly in front of the doctor’s door; while this initially comes across as being “pushy”, it’s just simply “ensuring your place”. Sometimes, there are entire families ensuring their place, clustered at the same door.

For my daughter — who went to the toilet on the verge of vomiting but came out even paler, her nausea worsened by the stench and filth in the bathroom — this kind of commotion was too much, and my motherly instincts kicked in. I just want to take my daughter, push past everyone, skip all the normal steps and get her into an MRI so I could get to answers faster.

And yet, Fortis is considered a quality hospital for people with money. Access to proper care — or any kind of care at all, for that matter — is very different for people living outside the city. For example, I heard a story about a the wife of a driver from Himachal Pradesh who had an accident: she was riding in the open doorway of an overcrowded bus and literally flew out of the bus as it took a very sharp curve at high speed, hitting her head on a rock. She fractured her skull and was carried by fellow passengers into the car of a passerby who noticed that urgent help was needed. In these areas, you need helpful people like that because either there aren’t any ambulances available or the many curves and potholes of the mountain roads make the wait for transport too long in an emergency. Not to mention the high costs.