Oh, Raza is moaning, I thought. That’s good. He is alive. I still had no idea what had happened, but for some reason I understood that it was a good sign that Raza was making noise. Everything hurt as the head-scarfed nurse stood over me with the needle that still hadn’t been injected in me. What had I been doing that morning? Was I dreaming?
Teru appeared before me, at the foot of my slab. His faced looked as if he had just finished a boxing match, but he was standing on his own two feet. I wondered what Teru, from New York, was doing at the foot of my bed. The nurse stuck the needle in me. She never answered my question about whether it was clean. Who cared if I got HIV? I was in excruciating pain. The refugees. Mardan. We had been in Mardan all morning. It was starting to come back. There were so many people in the room, standing around, looking at Raza and me, splayed out on the tables. Refugees, I recalled. The New York Times. I had been photographing. The skid, the crash. It was real. Teru explained: “We are in Pakistan. We were photographing at the refugee camps with Raza, and we have been in a bad car accident.” A doctor started immobilizing my arm by bandaging it close to my body. My bones were broken. My back burned. My Pakistani dress, a salwar kameez, was melted onto the raw patch of flesh on my back where my skin had rubbed off in the friction of the accident. My hands were a raw mix of pus and blood. My ankles were sprained and swollen, and my ribs hurt. Where was my head scarf?
Teru and I were transferred to an ambulance, and Raza wasn’t with us anymore. The paramedic, Khalid, sat at my feet and leaned over me, saying his name over and over again, pleading with me to repeat his name so I wouldn’t pass out. “Khalid. My name is Khalid. Say my name.” He was relentless, and I was grateful, vaguely aware that he was trying to keep me alive. “Khalid. Say my name: Khalid.” I was horizontal, arm taped to my side, drugged up on morphine, when I realized that my camera bag wasn’t with us.
“Khalid, where is our car?” I said. “Where is my camera bag? Is the car far from here? We were on our way to Islamabad.”
“No,” Khalid said. “The car is close to here.”
I could see only within the confines of the ambulance but assumed we were traveling along the highway toward Islamabad.
“Khalid,” I repeated his name as instructed, “can we stop at the car to get my camera bag? I need my cameras, my phone.” I only half-expected him to agree.
He turned back toward the driver and said something in Urdu, then turned back to me: “OK. We can stop at the car.”
I felt the ambulance make a detour and eventually come to a stop. I was so curious what the remains of our demolished car looked like, but my arms were taped alongside my body to hold my broken bones in place, and I couldn’t muster the energy to raise myself up to look outside. The back doors to the ambulance flung open behind me, and a Pakistani policeman stepped in and announced that he had been tasked with guarding our car so that no one could steal our belongings. In an effort to prove that he hadn’t pilfered anything from our bags, the policeman then stood over me, lying flat on my back and wrapped with flimsy gauze, and held out my little change purse.
“Look,” the policeman declared triumphantly as I struggled to keep my eyes open. “All your money is here!” And he riffled through my little travel wallet, showing me that he had meticulously separated out all the different currencies, arranging them in order by country.
“Thank you. You can have the money,” I said. “Where are my cameras? Where is my camera bag? I wanted my cameras and my telephone.”