SRINAGAR: A thunderclap of fire, concrete, and smoke tore through Nowgam police station in Srinagar’s upscale Sheikhpora neighbourhood close to 11.30pm on Nov 14. While sirens lagged behind, a hospital guard and a cook were already on the move.Ulfat Dar, a young guard at Ujala Cygnus Hospital nearly a km away, saw the orange flare crest the skyline after the explosion. He thought it was a cylinder blast. He still ran. “Drive,” he told Waseem, a hospital cook. They swung an ambulance towards the station.“They were among the first to reach,” Ujala Cygnus manager Dr Parvez Sofi said Tuesday. In their first dash they hauled eight wounded policemen out of debris and flame. More followed in two additional runs. On the last, they pried free a trapped officer whose legs were pinned under a slab. He lived.Sofi rushed from his Hyderpora home, 10km away. When he arrived, Ulfat and Waseem had already crowded the emergency floor with casualties. “Blood everywhere. Screams,” he said. He triggered internal WhatsApp alerts. CT technicians, trauma teams, emergency physicians — everyone surged in.Doctors treated lacerations, fractures, splinter wounds, and multiple head traumas. One officer arrived with massive brain bleed. Four went to ICU. Others were stabilised. Psychologists and psychiatrists were later pressed into service as several officers sat mute for hours, some suffering ear injuries from pressure waves.Senior officers visited and offered backup beds in govt hospitals. “We told them we could handle it,” Sofi said. By dawn, the count stood at 23 patients. Most are expected to be discharged in coming days.Sofi has worked mass-casualty wards before — he recalls 2008 at Govt Bone and Joint Hospital in Srinagar — but said nothing equalled the force of Friday night. “I’m used to trauma,” he said. “This was horrifying.”Ujala Cygnus has stepped into crises before. In April, when a CRPF bus skidded near Doodhpathri in Budgam, the hospital received every injured trooper and referred none. On Tuesday, J&K CM Omar Abdullah stopped by to meet the wounded policemen.What Sofi remembers most this time is not the rubble, or the blood, or the screams. It’s the scene that came before all that: a guard and a cook steering an ambulance straight towards a blast.
