Patients seek treatment in India

Lahore: Safwan Sarfraz waved a toy gun menacingly at his younger brother as they squabbled over a bottle of soda, hardly surprising behaviour for a four-year-old.

What's more unusual was the pacemaker and rebuilt heart chamber beneath a large bandage on his small chest. Safwan is alive thanks to rare cooperation between uneasy nuclear neighbours India and Pakistan that sees several hundred Pakistanis a year travelling to India on health visas, most for heart operations.

"He's not quite ready to play cricket," said his father, Sheraz Sarfraz, 30, a cellphone repairman. "But he's growing stronger and more active every day." Decrepit government hospitals and inadequate funding have left health care in Pakistan, like much else in the country, in crisis.

The situation is made worse by mounting violence against doctors, seen as wealthy, relatively soft targets, accelerating a medical brain drain to the US, Europe and the Middle East.

For Pakistanis with serious health problems, neighbouring India offers high success rates. And although many Pakistanis arrive in India fearful — textbooks, officials and the media in both countries spread distrust — they come away from the experience with the realisation that they have a lot more in common with Indians than they expected.

"I thought they'd be mean to us, think we were the enemy," Sarfraz said. "But we met many nice people who even bought food for us. You don't behave like that if you harbour hate in your heart." Friends and relatives back home can be even warier, sometimes expressing concern before a heart transplant that their loved ones will get an Indian heart.

"How ridiculous! A heart is a heart no matter where it comes from," countered Nida Rashid, a British-educated journalist from Lahore whose aunt recently had a liver transplant.

"But if you're educated in Pakistani schools, taught to hate anything India in the textbooks, you have this sort of thinking. It's high time people realise that India has a lot to offer and they should make use of it."

Safwan's parents first noticed a problem soon after his birth when his brown eyes turned bluish green in the bath. They spent months visiting government and private hospitals before getting a diagnosis: Safwan's arteries were connected in reverse, causing pure and impure blood to mix in his heart's left chamber.

More bad news followed: The parents say Pakistani hospitals told them they couldn't fix the problem. And getting the surgery done in India would cost more than $6,000 (Dh22,000), including flights and hotels, equivalent to about 15 years' salary for Sarfraz — money and time they didn't have.

"We were distraught," said Sofia, Safwan's mother. "We did nothing but pray, felt hopeless and powerless." They were turned down by several charities before someone suggested that they approach a TV network. A Pakistani businessman saw the story and agreed to donate the money.

On May 20 at New Delhi's Fortis Hospital, Dr Rajesh Sharma operated on Safwan for 11 hours, then three more hours a few days later, closing a hole in Safwan's heart, expanding his right chamber and inserting artificial tubing and a pacemaker. "Dr Sharma has gifted hands, a blessed soul and he's a very nice person," Sarfraz said.

Congenital heart problems are relatively common in Pakistan, given frequent marriage between first cousins, contributing to birth defects, Sharma said.

Sharma, who performs about 300 heart operations annually on Pakistanis in India, said he feels a special connection with these patients. His parents were born in what is now Pakistan before moving to India in 1947 as the wrenching partition divided the two countries.