Having covered stories centred around hospitals for over a decade, sitting outside Intensive Care Units or hanging around morgues waiting for autopsy reports at odd hours has become second nature to me.
It was June 6, four days after one of the deadliest train accidents in recent memory in India. The collision involving three trains in the Balasore district of Odisha had claimed 291 lives and left over a thousand injured. After spending a stressful day at the accident spot, I was on my way to the State capital, Bhubaneshwar, 200 kilometres away. Night descended over the highway connecting Balasore to Bhubaneswar. Suddenly, on a whim, I asked the driver to take me to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Bhubaneswar instead of retiring for the day.
It is easier to mill around hospitals at night when activity ceases to be hectic and people are available to talk. It was dinner time when I reached. Some police officials sat in the committee room where the process of handing over bodies to claimants was underway. The officials asked me if I had eaten. They shared their food with me and began telling me about the challenges they were facing in ascertaining whether the bodies were being handed over to the right claimants. They were trying to collect the fingerprints and scan the iris of the bodies to find a match in their Aadhaar database in order to ascertain identities. However, it was becoming impossible to recover fingerprints from mutilated bodies, they said.
