Anita Sanjay Gosavi, 45, is always on call, be it daytime or midnight. If there is a critically ill person or a dead one who needs urgent transportation to or from a hospital in Pune, Gosavi’s is usually the number that is dialed first. Gosavi, the only woman ambulance driver in Pune district, has built up a reputation of almost never refusing an emergency.
It was a commitment she made to herself in 2020 during the Covid outbreak when circumstances steered her to take her seat behind the wheel of an ambulance and she hasn’t taken her foot off the pedal since.
It wasn’t always like this. Gosavi, in her forties, used to be a homemaker and drive a tempo before Covid took away her work. When a neighbour tested positive, the Gosavi family moved to her brother’s house. He owned three ambulances, which he drove with two others.
After he tested positive for Covid, Gosavi had a suggestion. “Main chalati hoon (I will come along),” she said.
“The Covid years were full of fear. We felt that whoever went to the hospital never came back except packed in a bag. But there were no drivers for his ambulances. My brother said the road was dominated by men and it wasn’t safe. I said that if we think too much, we will never be able to do anything,” she says.
At that time, with the lockdown in effect, there was no way to earn rozi roti (daily bread). She became the only woman ambulance driver in Maharashtra. Today, she has trained her sister who has also been driving an ambulance for two years.
One of her most haunting pandemic memories is of an IT professional who wanted his mother picked up from the hospital, where she had died of Covid. “But he said he would not be present as he had a family, which included a child. I was instructed to conduct his mother’s funeral. I was shocked because it is family members and loved ones who are present at the cremation of a deceased person,” she says.
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Today, she is also on call if there is a “railway cutting body” i.e, if somebody dies by suicide under the wheels of trains. This, generally, happens between 10 pm and 2 am and she receives a call to pick up the body.
“My brother has been driving an ambulance for 25-30 years and he has never gone once to pick up a railway cutting body. I go there, pick it up with my hands and take it to a hospital. People see me and say, ‘Sherni aa gayi,’ (The lioness has arrived)” she says.
