Jennifer climbed from the black Mercedes sedan that the Queen Victoria Hospital had sent to fetch her from the Amal Palace Hotel. The outdoor temperature was warm but not hot. The anemic morning sun was working hard to penetrate the haze, and it reflected only weakly off the hospital’s mirror-like façade. Jennifer didn’t even need to shelter her eyes as she examined the building. It was five stories tall, and although it was cold and ultramodern, its pleasing combination of copper-colored glass and complementary-colored marble made her admire it to an extent. What made it stand out so sharply was the neighborhood. The ostensibly expensive structure was wedged cheek-to-jowl against the most run-down, white but heavily stained, nondescript concrete commercial block, housing an assortment of small stores selling everything from Pepsi to crude washtubs. The street itself was a mess, potholed and filled with trash of all sorts, along with several cows that were oblivious to the crush of traffic and beeping horns. As Jennifer had expected, the traffic was even worse than it had been the night before. Although there seemed to be fewer of the gaudily painted, beat-up trucks, there were significantly more packed-to-overflowing buses, cycle rickshaws, regular cyclists, pedestrians, and what Jennifer found particularly disturbing, packs of young shoeless children dressed in soiled rags, some deformed, others sick and malnourished, all of whom were dangerously darting between the slow-moving vehicles while begging for coins. As if that wasn’t enough, a few doors down from the hospital on the other side of the street was an empty lot filled with broken pieces of concrete, dirt, rocks, all kinds of rubbish, and even true garbage. Even so, the space was the home of multiple families, their hovels formed by pieces of corrugated metal, cardboard boxes, and scraps of cloth. Adding to the ambience were a number of stray dogs and even a rat.

“I will wait for you here,” said the driver, who’d come around to open the car door for Jennifer. “Do you know how long you will be?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Jennifer responded.

“If I’m not sitting here, please call me on my mobile when you are ready to leave.”

Jennifer agreed to do so, although her attention was focused on the hospital. She didn’t know what to expect and realized her emotions were raw. In place of feeling merely sad about her grandmother’s passing, she was progressively irritated now that she was finally here. Having heard of a second similar death occurring in so many days, she couldn’t help but think the death could have been prevented or at least avoided. She knew it wasn’t a completely rational thought and maybe was more because of her general state of mind, but she felt it anyway. The main problem was that Jennifer was exhausted and more jet-lagged than she had expected she would be. She’d slept poorly if at all.