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ASIM RAFIQUI FOR TIME

IHSANULLAH KHAN
PAKISTAN

A Cabbie's Luck

Ihsanullah Khan is long-shot rescuer. A Pakistani immigrant, Khan drove a cab in Washington and pinned his dreams on winning the lottery. Khan always played the same numbers--2, 4, 6, 17, 25 and 31--because they had once appeared in a dream. Every week for 15 years, he bet religiously on the numbers and lost. Then in November 2001, when the jackpot rose to $55.2 million, Khan's lucky numbers finally came through. He pulled his taxi over to the curb, took a deep breath and thought of his mother, whose dying words to him were, "One day, son, you're going to be somebody--like a king."

Moved Permanently

Khan, now 47, didn't necessarily want to be a king. But with after-tax winnings of $32,499,939.24 in his pocket, he decided to return to his native town of Batagram in the Himalayas and run for nazim, or mayor. "I wanted to make changes," he says. "Bring back the good things I saw in America." Khan got his chance.

This year, on Oct. 8, three days after Khan took office as mayor, an earthquake of 7.6 magnitude on the Richter scale slammed into the Himalayas, killing more than 73,000 people in Pakistan. Batagram was one of the worst-hit towns. That morning, Khan had strolled up a dirt path to visit his mother's grave when the force of the quake hurled him to his knees. "I thought it was doomsday, that the earth would open and swallow me up," he says. "The houses on the ridge--they were exploding, one by one."

Khan groped his way down to the hospital. It was destroyed, hammered into countless pieces by the temblor. Meanwhile, thousands were converging in the street, carrying and dragging people with terrible injuries, searching for a hospital that had ceased to exist. Using about $200,000 of his own cash, Khan says, he bought all the medicine and bandages he could find, grabbed anyone who had first-aid training and set up a tent hospital to tend to the hordes of wounded staggering in. For the worst injured, he arranged a makeshift ambulance service to ferry them over the mountains to hospitals 26 miles away. He bought 150 tents for homeless families and allowed them to camp on his land, and he has established a fund to help villagers rebuild their demolished homes. From his tent office, he's fighting with Pakistan's bureaucracy to send in bulldozers and start clearing out the fallen buildings. Even while hustling fares in his taxi, Khan says, he was convinced that God had something special in mind for him: "I just didn't know what it was until the earthquake happened."