The genial heart surgeon wanders through the shell of a two-storey building and stops in the doorway of a stark rectangular first-floor room. Cooking pots, rubble and workmen's clothes litter the floor; bare windows stare out across dirt tracks and arid farmland.
'This will be the operating theatre,' Dr Hasnat Khan says with a proud smile, before turning to the architect and the senior British nurse accompanying him to pore over plans and discuss the layout and where medical teams should scrub up before surgery.
The idea of a modern hospital with a cardiology unit here, in one of the poorest parts of rural Pakistan, seems as incongruous as a goat farm in downtown Islamabad. But despite its ramshackle appearance, the country's first charity-run hospital with a heart unit is just months away from opening. By the end of the year, it should be carrying out life-transforming surgery, in particular on poor children whose families cannot afford treatment elsewhere.
The hospital is slowly taking shape amid a cluster of tiny villages off the lorry-choked highway from Islamabad to Lahore, some 30 kilometres from the town of Jhelum, the boyhood home of Khan. Its opening will make reality a dream that cardiologist Khan has nurtured for decades and that he once secretly shared with the world's most famous woman.
Khan, who for the past 20 years has worked in hospitals in and around London, was the lover of Princess Diana - the man she called her 'Mr Wonderful' - for the last two years of her life. A discreet and fiercely loyal figure, Khan is seen as the great love of Diana's life after her marriage to Prince Charles broke down and, since her death, has arguably proved himself the most - perhaps only - honourable man to have shaped her final years.
In a rare interview, the 53-year-old Khan speaks of his determination to make a contribution for the good in his home country - and his continuing loyalty to Diana's mission and vision even after the unhappiness that marked the end of their relationship.
THEY CAME FROM DIFFERENT worlds. He was a dashing young surgeon working under Magdi Yacoub at the Royal Brompton Hospital and she was the world's most photographed woman and mother of the heir to the British throne. They met when Diana was visiting a friend who had undergone heart surgery and for the princess, the attraction was instant.