“Had there been a phone working, I would have called an ambulance right to my house,” Mr. Mandoo said.

After hours of desperate searching for antivenin that could help Mr. Dar, the young man bitten by the krait, and a terrifying ambulance ride through security checkpoints, he and his family finally made it to Soura Hospital in Srinagar.

The bad news came yet again: Soura Hospital had none of the antivenin, either.

What the family did not know then was that the first hospital they had visited, in Baramulla, actually had the antidote in a locked storeroom. But the clerk who controlled the storeroom had not been around and was not able to be reached by phone.

In Srinagar, the family traveled frantically from pharmacy to pharmacy pleading for the antidote. Nothing. They arrived at the gate of an army camp, which normally stocks the antivenin, but were told to come back the next day.

After every failed trip, Ms. Begum shouted at her husband, Farooq Ahmad Dar, “Sell everything, but save him!”

Mr. Dar, 46, said he had never felt so helpless. “I felt like pushing a knife into my chest,” he said.

At 10:30 a.m. the next day, 16 hours after he was bitten, the younger Mr. Dar died. His parents then traveled 55 miles back home, in an ambulance, with his body.

The antivenin arrived two days later at the hospital, from a city more than 150 miles away. It came in 30 vials in a van along with other medicines.