 He is called
Kashmir’s “repair man” for his skill in rebuilding faces badly damaged in a long-running separatist Islamic insurgency that is one of the world’s deadliest conflicts. Ahmed, who has a combined degree in maxillofacial and plastic surgery, works all hours to restore the faces of people wounded in daily bomb attacks, gunbattles, grenade blasts and landmines as well as in ordinary road accidents. “Before the troubles broke out (in 1989), we just used to get accident patients with facial injuries and broken jaws,” said 57-year-old Ahmed, who is the region’s top facial trauma specialist.
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| “Now we get patients with deep splinter wounds, people who have been hit by bomb blasts and bullet injuries,” said Ahmed, a devout Muslim who starts every operation by intoning the name of Allah. “At times, there’s virtually nothing left of the face. The sight is frightening. But we keep our nerve and operate,” said Ahmed, who heads the oral and maxillofacial department at the dental college in
Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir. Officials say over 44,000 people have died since militants launched the insurgency and countless thousands more have been injured. “I don’t remember how many people I’ve treated but it’s definitely in the thousands,” said Ahmed, who often receives late-night calls from hospitals to treat patients with critical facial injuries.
“It’s very delicate work. One needs lot of patience and skill to bind the fractured bones and stitch back flesh,” Ahmed added, gently inspecting a patient from whom he extracted a bomb splinter last week. Ahmed said it takes hours to “reconstruct” a badly damaged face. Not all scars can be avoided but he said he does his best. “It took me six hours to save one patient with grave face injuries suffered in a landmine,” he recalled as he does his rounds at a Srinagar hospital.
“He not only survived but he now looks the way he did before.” One patient, Zubair Ahmed, 35, whose face was badly hurt in a mine blast, said he owed his restored self-esteem to Ahmed.
“I’ve no words to thank him. He rebuilt my face,” he said as he visited Ahmed for a check-up. Many believe Ahmed’s hands have special powers. “Before the operation, I looked terrible and afterwards I looked normal,” said Mir
Javed, 43, whose jaw was smashed in a road accident
“He’s a magician. I never thought I’d look like my old self.” Ahmed works under tough conditions with scant operating room time and a shortage of equipment in Kashmir’s financially stretched healthcare system. As the only such specialist in Indian Kashmir, Ahmed’s patient waiting list “runs into the hundreds,” said the doctor and father of two.
Ahmed, who unwinds by gardening, said while he enjoyed his work he wanted the bloodshed to end so he could return to routine surgery.
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