As the monitor by a 22-year-old female patient's bed wailed, Dr Aheed Khan was prompted to rush outside the labour room. Severely anaemic, she had lost a lot of blood. "Her family of about 30 was waiting outside, eager to learn of the child's gender. We waited to disclose this information after the child's birth. Soon after the delivery, the patient's husband was required to sign a document, declaring he had seen his new-born alive. When we announced it was a girl child, everyone scattered," says the resident paediatric, as he remembers the day from 2015 when he was pursuing an MBBS degree at the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Delhi. "She needed blood, and in a government hospital, a unit needs to be given to get another unit. So, our only hope was to turn to the patient's family. It was unsettling for a young doctor to see that she had been left to battle for her life." He wrote:

I woke up to clear skies and clearer roads.
A silence unwinding onto corridors
Of blue and white robes.
Like some soldier of old,
I move ahead;
and as I tread,
Into darker buildings,
no man's land,
Where wards of old,
break and fall,
and sickness stall.
~
It was around this time that Dr Khan took to poetry, to both treat and heal. He would spend hours back at his home in East Delhi, writing verse of tragedy. "I've seen patients dying after waiting for an ICU bed, some dying in the ICU because the room was contaminated, and some others because of the lack of proper facilities. The whole experience [of being a doctor] is unpleasant, and it was poetry that helped me heal. After writing regularly, my poems have matured, I think," says the 26-year-old, whose book, Bleed: An anthology—a collection of 50 poems—was published last year.