`You want to listen to the sound of crying, come with me'

`You want to listen to the sound of crying, come with me'
SONU JAIN

BHACHAU (BHUJ), JANUARY 27: Gujarat woke up this morning to wade in a sea of death and debris. And it was only when people began to pick up the pieces of what was once their lives that the enormity of the disaster began to sink in.

Bhuj was not only the killer quake's epicentre, it was death's as well. Hour by agonising hour, the numbers went up, and until this evening, in the 72 villages and towns nearby, nobody had reached to either count the dead or rescue the living. The estimates of the dead ranged from just under 10,000 to a figure that could be anybody's chilling guess. One thing is clear, though: this will be one of the worst earthquakes in recent history.

For the survivors, however, such facts seemed irrelevant. More than 24 hours after the quake, the lucky ones in Bhachau, Morvi and Anjhar, looked expectantly towards the highway which led to Bhuj for some form of relief.

Since Bhuj is the largest town in Kutch and has an Air Force base, all relief work remained concentrated there. The images of open-air surgeries, the doctors, the injured being air-lifted, the food packets and the paramilitary presence flashed across the country, seemed like a cruel joke on these people in the villages, completely cut off for the last two days.

Bhachau, a town with a population of nearly 30,000 and just 70 km from Bhuj, woke up this morning to a complete absence of any relief. The irony is that it is not in some remote inaccessible corner but right on the highway leading to Bhuj. ``I saw a few military convoys moving towards Bhuj and I waved at them. I screamed and stopped them. They told me that they had been ordered to go to Bhuj where the relief operations are centred. I just came back,'' said Chaman lal Kansari, a survivor.

Not just relief material, but no politician, no government official came the entire day yesterday, pointing to a complete failure of relief coordination. Even the police wireless had failed, making it impossible for anybody to gauge the exact extent of the damage till this morning. The deputy superintendent of police himself lay dead inside one of the police buildings in Bhachau.

Like other 72 villages in the district, the entire town has been reduced to a flat mountain of rubble. This is the only town where in the three square kilometres, not even a single-storeyed house is left standing.

Cries of help rise above the debris once in a while. Family members rush towards the mound that was once a house and turn back without saying anything. There is not a single bull-dozer, a crane or a gas cutter or even enough pick-axes to get through to those trapped inside, even on the afternoon of the second day.

``My brother is trapped inside. I can hear him but how can we break through without any machinery,'' said Haresh Kripani. Incidentally, their stylishly done up double-storeyed house had been built only a month back. In another part, some people were seen passing a bottle of water tied to a string and some biscuits to those trapped inside.

A 12-year-old girl serves as the guide to the terror. Vaishali, a student of the local kanya pathshaala, missed school yesterday since she wasn't feeling well. ``That is why I am talking to you,'' she smiles. Her entire school is rubble and nearly all the girls inside are trapped or dead. ``You want to listen to the sound of people crying, come I will take you,'' she says.

To make rescue operations even worse, are the intermittent quakes which rock the ground time and again. There have been more than 100 after-shocks since yesterday.

The bodies that are being pulled out are taken to the nearest cremation ground and burnt with the help of tyres or kerosene in the absence of enough wood to go by. There have been more than one mass cremations with 300 bodies being burnt at one time in the town. There are those who will not even get this much -- the 300 girls of the primary girls school, the 100-odd patients and staff at the government hospitals, the 40 blind students, the families of police lines and countless others.

The first to arrive at these far-flung areas were the RSS workers who arrived late last night to take the injured by bus-fulls to the nearby towns like Radhanpur. ``I am an RSS worker. I personally went to Suresh Mehta, minister of industries, to tell him about these areas but he just brushed me aside saying that Bhuj was also bad enough. I have to tell him in writing about the condition of these villages. if only he had ordered, 5,000 RSS workers would have rushed from Nagpur,'' said P.A. Thakker.

By mid-afternoon, some 100 police personnel had come for aid but according to the ASP, coordinating the operations there, his first priority was to stop looting. ``With no machinery, we cannot do much about rescuing people with our bare hands,'' said ASP B.K. Jha.

What was heart-rending was that the most of the policeman on duty had lost their own families but had no time to mourn for them.