‘2 sleepless days on a camel’

‘2 sleepless days on a camel’
KOTA NEELIMA

SAMELON KA TALA, BARMER, (INDO-PAK BORDER): Did you have a good night’s sleep?’’ asked Dhoomi Devi handing me a cup of tea at 6 am on Republic Day. Dhoomi lives in Samelon Ka Tala, a cluster of about a dozen houses five km from the Indo-Pak border. I had arrived from Barmer the day before wanting to talk to women of the Meghwal caste who had opted for India after the 1971 Bangladesh war, and stayed in villages bordering Pakistan.

I told Dhoomi that I felt like I slept for two nights instead of one. We were soon joined by other women who had come to chat from adjoining villages. I was informed that an Indian flag was on its way to village from Nava Tala, the nearest village with a market. Samelon Ka Tala has no access road. It can be reached only on camelback or by a four-wheel drive vehicle. By 8.30, children in the village had lined up noisily near the flagpole. I was having tea when there was clatter of the utensils in the kitchen hut. Then a distant, scary roar rolled towards us.As it engulfed us, the women sitting on other cots around me jumped down for the children. The flag pole swayed and as I stood up, all around in the flat and featureless region, clouds of dust rose across the horizon even as the ground beneath our feet shook.

The small huts I saw in the distance just crumbled to the ground. Three old women who were resting inside the huts, were injured when the roof caved in. The doctor was somewhere in Gafhan which gets its name from ‘kafan’ or funeral robe deeper inside Kutch. We got the injured into the jeep and rode towards Gafhan.

About an hour after the first earthquake, the driver lost control of the jeep. Another quake hit the area, leaving first a deep depression in the greyish terrain and then a huge crack emerged. Any moving vehicle on the unstable road led to sinking of the surface, which might have been right on top of a gaping crack covered by the sand. After crossing canals on camel-back and spending two days without sleep or a bath, finally we reached Santalpur.