Calcutta, June 13
Like many other refugees, she lay dying of exhaustion and disease on the ground below the steps of the small and over-crowded hospital at Barasat, an Indian town 15 miles from Calcutta.

It was a face among the millions but, unlike most Bengali women she had short grey hair and I recognized her the moment two gaunt refugees dragged her limp figure to the hospital steps. I first saw her 10 days ago. She I was helping her husband (or perhaps it could have been her brother) along the road near the border town of Hasanabad, 30 miles to the west.

The refugee camps in Hasanabad were already overcrowded and the old couple bad joined the stream of men, women and children marching westwards to the next town in search of shelter and food. Her male companion, older, toothless and bent over with age, had been, clinging to her arm as the old couple hobbled slowly and painfully out of the border town and westwards towards the next refugee camp at Basirhat.

But the refugee camps at Basirhat, five miles to the west, had been overcrowded for weeks and thousands of refugees were already marching westwards on the 25-mile march to Calcutta.

I saw the old couple for the second time five days later. They had been unable to keep up with the main column of marching refugees and they were squatting alone under a tree in the rain.

Yesterday, I saw her for the third time when two gaunt, middle-aged refugees placed her limp figure below the steps of the hospital. She lay on the ground with her face in the dirt, coughing and repeating a Bengali phrase.

There was no sign of her male companion. Perhaps be bad died on the 25-mile march.

One of the refugees pushes his way through the crowded doorway to search for a doctor. But there are no doctors available. One of the 14 on duty is in the operating theatre and the others are frantically busy in the overcrowded cholera ward.

The corridor are crowded with patients and, as we approach the cholera ward, the stench is unbearable. The veranda is laden with victims of cholera. They are all lying on the ground with neither blankets nor mattresses to comfort them.

A nurse inserts a transfusion needle into the veins of a five-year-old boy. He is lying next to the dead body of an old man. Another aging man shudders and dies.

The two four-bed wards, about 20ft by 20ft in size, are overcrowded with 58 men, women and children. Most of the patients are sprawling across the floor. A nurse is attending to a woman who is lying under one of the four beds in one of the wards.

"The situation is improving. We were admitting up to 100 cholera patients a day last week”, a hospital clerk says.

The doctors are too busy and we return to the crowded entrance. The old woman is already dead and the flies are settling on her.

A gaunt and aging refugee carries a young boy of about three, a victim of cholera, up to the hospital entrance. As he passes he looks down at the dead woman. As he raises his head, his eyes meet mine and for a brief second we stare at each other.

His eyes will haunt me for the rest of my life. I have only seen that expression once before and that was 10 years ago when my dog, his spine crushed by a car wheel, looked up at me with pleading eyes.