Head nurse Rani Jha circles around her busy kidney ward, reeling off the list of patients who were too young, too sick, too many to count.
There, lying against the far wall, is Tilak Kumar Shah, who had worked in construction for seven years in the Persian Gulf before collapsing. The next bed had belonged to Mohan Yadav, who had laboured in Qatar – until he died two weeks earlier. Next to Jha’s cubicle, huddling quietly under a blanket, is another typical case: Suraj Thapa Magar, a shy 28-year-old who had left his mud hut in Nepal to install windows on skyscrapers in Kuwait, often dangling by a rope in the scorching, 48C purgatory between the sun and the desert.
