DEC 23, 2010. It took us ages to get through the plumes of dust and smoke to reach the hospital. ‘No entry for healthy children’, a sign at one of the side entrances announced. They thought it wise to qualify their statement. The authors of the notice surely had an eye for detail.

The same could not be said about those assigned to look after the general health of the facility which, like names such as Sardar Nishtar, had the feel of an antique from the Pakistan Movement. It could have joined the race with the worst in Pakistan and still lost the competition by a huge margin.

It could beat the worst, spit for spit, spirit for spirit — the best emergency treatment available for people spread over hundreds of kilometres and located within chanting distance from the hometown residence of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

The facilities in the hospital offered a stark contrast to the stories the dust-and-smoke plumes harboured inside. From the court munshi to the progressive farmer to the not-so progressive maulana sahib — they hardly needed any more proof of the corruption of the Gilani-Zardari set-up.

They said they knew it for a fact and by the look of it, there was no one from the other side to convince them into believing otherwise. It was the going rates they cited which, one more time, brought out the fact of just how far behind the times these people actually languished.

The munshi quoted someone he ‘could blindly trust’ as telling him that a hundred thousand bucks could get you the coveted bank transfer. He also swore by a story about the top man charging those calling on him by the minute. “And as the top man does so, he makes sure to bill his callers for the telephonic conversations he undertakes on their behalf during the meeting.”

The strange part was that all these precious minutes the top authority in the country was said to be spending with those seeking his favour added up to only a few millions.

He could have been far better off not applying the rather laid-back Multan manner and instead using his time to pursue financially more satisfying ventures.

The Multan stay was much too brief to allow a solid survey of trends, but it did suggest one thing: in his hometown, the Gilani set-up was paying little attention to countering or explaining or denying the allegations that were being levelled against it.

One model how this can be done was offered by a Lahore hospital this writer found himself at not too long after Multan. It was a private hospital, one the Sharif family had established in the backyard of their Model Town residence.

The hospital wall in this case sported an advert about one Mian Sahib who had gone missing. On a closer look, that was a false signal for an observer forever looking for faults in the working of the ‘best administrators’ among the political lot.

The place had the Sharif stamp all over it, and in case anyone forgot, attendants were around to sound a quick reminder, even if the doctors were too occupied or too unconcerned to spell out pneumonia for the impatient. And so what if a patient had to be moved to another facility after spending almost a fortnight under treatment in Model Town. Ittefaq se, the new hospital was a government-run facility created by who else but the Sharifs.

This one was a relatively recently established hospital dedicated to treating the heart. In their moment of misery and pain and want of care, the hundreds who thronged to the place were exposed to the onlooker’s gaze.

They wore the same features as their — distant? close? — Multan cousins, though displaying a relatively more complaining attitude. They did ultimately resign themselves to fate, but not without a protest here and there.

(Hopefully) the last leg of the hospital tour of Punjab brought this writer to Rawalpindi after a short but dangerous diversion to Islamabad. The venues this time were out and out representatives of the civil and military establishments based in the twin cities.

The old Islamabad facility has in recent years been overtaken by its modern and much better equipped alternative, the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. To an old employee of the state and one of the first Islamabad residents, however, it remained the preferred option. He had the belief in the ability of the clinic and we will have to wait for his full recovery to know if that trust has survived the stunts an on-duty doctor was determined to perform at his expense.

Obviously fatigued and suffering from lack of sleep, the good doctor chose to direct his staff from his bed as an 80-year-old battled with what to a lay attendant was a second heart attack in three days.

The patient was ultimately shifted to an army-run coronary-care centre in Rawalpindi. There were plenty of notices around but two particularly caught the eye. One told the security personnel to be vigilant while another sought to rid the old Urdu warning of its unnecessary frills and etiquette to plainly say ‘Khamosh’.

The ‘warning’ was largely effective and over almost four days, there was only one exchange by this writer long enough to qualify as a conversation. The flight to Saudi Arabia did figure in it but it was about how the well-paying jobs in the Gulf deprived us of good doctors — in the civilian hospitals. It was reassuringly one hospital in the series where the politicians and their corruption was not the subject of discussion — as yet.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.