This time, it was her husband Naval's turn. As deputy commissioner of police, Zaveri Bazar, where the first bomb went off on August 25, fell under his jurisdiction. While he was busy taking charge of things at his end, his wife -- the resident medical officer at J J Hospital -- did not leave the hospital for the next 24 hours.

Doctors who are given dead bodies to operate upon in the first year of studying medicine and are made to prick their own fingers for physiology tests somehow get densensitised without getting emotionally involved with the situation, Dr Bajaj feels.

But she cannot forget treating the screaming woman with 99 per cent burns; or doing the post-mortem of a woman who had been drowned for several days and whose body had bloated so much that it scarcely seemed human; or how bitterly she wept after losing her first patient -- a child -- in the paediatrics ward.

"I love JJ and working for the government," she says, "because we care for patients who have nobody to care for them."

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Also see: Zaveri Bazaar: back on its Feet

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