‘As hunger hits,I’ll have to forget my sons’

This year,Karan was in Gaurikund with his brother,father and a cousin when the floods struck. Though Karan and his brother came down from Gaurikund on June 20,almost four days after the floods,his father and the cousin could not make it. Four days after the floods,Karan walked up till Rambada,about 12 km from Sonprayag,through dense forests and boulders to see if he could identify his father and cousin from among the bodies strewn around. He couldn’t. Now,defeated,he is on his way back from Rambada to Gaurikund.

“The faces were not recognisable. My father had a tattoo on his right arm,so I started looking for that. The stench was unbearable,but I went as close as I could to the bodies. But I didn’t find that tattoo on anyone. Who knows if my father is still around somewhere,trying to find his way down,or if his is one of those bodies rotting away in Kedar?” he says wearily.

Thankfully,there is some sense of closure about his eateries. They are definitely gone,he says. He has seen the area and there is nothing there now,except for a crushed tin shed and a few old biscuit tins.

***

These days,Prakash Lal always sleeps with a torch. His house in Rudraprayag’s Sitapur village and his fields where he grew potato and corn were washed away in the floods,so he walked up to the main road,and now lives under a tin shed with his family. Every evening,when it gets dark,he flashes his torch down the Mandakini and keeps his ears open,waiting in case she starts howling again.

The noise on the night of June 16-17 still gives him nightmares. “It was around 6.30 pm when the river started roaring. There was no electricity,the power supply had snapped the previous day. So I took my torch and flashed it down the river. My house was 500 metres above the water level,but that night,the water rushed down the mountain,” he recalls.

Soon,he could see cars floating. “I could see at least 10-12 of them. Their headlights were on and the water was carrying them down. Soon,the water swirled around and the cars went round and round. Who knows how many people were inside them?”

Lal escaped with his wife and four kids,screaming out a warning to his neighbours. All of them scrambled up the hill,a steep hike of almost 3 km,to a school building,and took refuge there. “It was dark,pitch dark,and about 40 of us kept running like that,” he says.

The cars now stick out from under a rubble of sand and stones. Nobody has dared to break through the mound of rubble,reach the cars and see what lies inside them.

Bagha Lal,70,remembers the night the river “went mad”. His wife died after a severe bout of diarrhoea and chest pain. But before she died,she heard screams of the victims,he says. “There were bodies everywhere,at least 10-12 lying around. Now,the dogs and the river have finished most bodies,but I hear the voices that she heard. They scream at me. It’s going to rain again soon,and then the river will bring down more bodies,” he says.

***

The roads stop at Phata,about 4 km from Sonprayag town on the ‘char dham’ yatra route. Beyond this are hundreds of villages across the mountains of Uttarkashi,Rudraprayag and Chamoli districts that are now cut off. In most of these villages,the homes are intact but the families are broken.

Savitri,29,from Deoli village in Rudraprayag district,keeps dialling her 32-year-old husband Deepak Tiwari’s number. She is a graduate from Dehradun,one of the few graduates in the village. Theirs was a love marriage—Savitri and Deepak met 10 years ago in Dehradun—and only a few days before he left for Kedarnath,where he ran two hotels,his sisters had teased Deepak about how Savitri never ate before calling him.

Her hair dishevelled,she sits on her haunches on the floor of their house.

“He used to watch Discovery channel a lot,all those programmes about surviving the odds. So I keep thinking he probably survived somehow and that he will walk in anytime. I cannot stop dialling his number,can’t bear to hear that it’s switched off,” she says.

Savitri has been trying his number since she woke up on June 17 and saw a missed call from him. She had missed his “last call” because her phone had run out of battery.

Now there are other pressing problems on her mind—like attending to her two daughters,5 and 7 years old,and Deepak’s ageing parents.

With schools and colleges shut for the summer break,many of the young men and boys had gone up with their mules to ferry pilgrims to Kedarnath. Now,a lot of them are missing. Some villages have reported 10-12 missing people,others 20 and some 50.

***

At Shirwani village,a basti of Harijans near Guptkashi in Rudraprayag district,there is no sign of government relief yet. Two of Prakash’s sons,aged 13 and 15,are missing. They were ferrying pilgrims on mules near Rambada town. But he has no time to grieve for them. “Once the grief ends and hunger strikes,what will I do? I have three more children and a wife. There are so many mouths to feed that I will have to forget the faces of my sons,sooner or later,” he says.

While relief material is being airdropped in some villages,at others,villagers,many of whom have lost their earning members,are expected to walk down kaccha roads or make their way through jungles to where the trucks stand,to get their share of aid. In places,there are no kaccha roads,only boulders.

At Kalimath,Jal and Chaumasi villages,the first rations were airdropped on Thursday. But people are worried how long these will last. “We have been eating potatoes from our fields. The shops are charging Rs 50-60 for a kilo of rice. Now we have got rice and dal and oil,but what do we do when this ends?” asks Suraj Lal,a farmer in Toshi,a village in the Kedar valley.

At the village,men,women and children have got together to clear the boulders and the muck with bare hands and a few shovels,to let the first relief trucks in.

At Chandrapur village,home to 200 families,five schools have been washed away and about a 1,000 children are sitting at home.

***

The 14-km route of the trek to Kedarnath shrine begins from Gaurikund,the last motorable point of the yatra route,with Rambada being the midway halt. Now,these two towns,once bustling halts for pilgrims,have been washed away. Besides the boulders and a few smashed up sheds,what’s left are memories.

The few locals who have dared to venture up in ones and twos to inspect their lost property or to try identify their loved ones,point out exactly what stood where once.

“This was a vegetable shop. He sold potatoes and tomatoes at double the rates during the peak yatra season. We fought a lot with him…he hasn’t been found yet,” says Vijay Shankar Gairula,who ran a hotel in Gaurikund.

There… that was the shop of one of the many babas here. And that was Hotel Devbhoomi,now just smashed wood,a crumbling structure in white,with some blue tiles. The hotel had 50 rooms and they were all packed. This was a dhaba and that was a chai shop. That was a stable for the mules.

The two towns were chock-a-block with hotels—“small”,“medium” and a few resorts with “top-class facilities”—eateries and dhabas. Many of these were without registrations,mushrooming wherever there was “even an inch of space”,say locals. There were at least 4,000-5,000 mules and their stables in these towns,and lodgings for the khachhar walas who took care of them.

Now,there are only rocks,the intermittent rains,and an eerie silence. The wind stirs up a stench every now and then. Every time it rains,a few more bodies are washed down and thrown on the rocks.

As IG R S Meena says,“Sonprayag,Gaurkiund aur Rambada—in teenon ka vajood hi khatam ho gaya hai. Yahan itni raunak,itna shor sharaba tha,aura ab sirf ek sannata hai (these three towns are gone. They used to be bustling with people,now there is only silence)”.

***

A tragedy of such great magnitude brings with it fears,many seemingly irrational. So when Vagesh Ling,the head priest of Kedarnath temple,carried with him a small idol of the Lord when he was evacuated to Okhimath,the believers called it a bad omen,saying it might invite an even bigger wrath of the Lord. The idol is brought to Okhimath every year only after Diwali and this was “the first time in the 5,000-year history of the temple”,they say,that the Lord had to leave his abode during the monsoons.

But the five priests who take turns in the four temples of Kedarnath,Okhimath,Guptkashi and Madhumeshwar rubbish these claims. They say the Lord “chose his own samadhi” this year. “They say we should have stayed back at the temple,with the Lord. People say we have insulted the Lord by leaving with him. But what could we have done? Should we not have saved our lives? Besides,considering all the destruction the town has seen,leaving the Lord amidst the dead would have been a bigger insult to Him,” says Shashidhar Ling,one of the five priests,who is now in Guptkashi.

Back in Kedarnath,the temple is said to stand lonely but intact against the mountains. “What used to be a small stream of the Mandakini has now divided itself into two. And both are furious currents. The flood has changed the course of the river,” says DIG Amit Sinha.

***

Over 20 days after the floods,with electricity still to be restored,entire villages wait in darkness for news and for help. With mobile towers damaged,the cut-off is complete. There are no television cameras that the locals can speak into and talk about their plight—all that went with the pilgrims. The civil administration has only dared to venture where choppers can land. For now,they wait alone and uneasily for July 15-16,when the government will declare those still missing as ‘dead’.

“How can I go back without answers?”

Sambhal Sharma,from Uttar Pradesh,is bitter. He says he will never worship “an idol” again. With wounds on his legs,a scar on his cheek,he sits at the Sahastradhara helipad in Dehradun in a pair of shorts and shirt that someone lent him at Doon Hospital.

He was in Kedarnath in his hotel room,when the water brought down boulders and buildings around him. “We watched for a few seconds from our room before the water started trickling inside. The water took us out. I was holding my wife with one hand,my 10-year-old son with the other. I held on as tightly as I could. I don’t know if it was within a few minutes or seconds,but first my wife slipped away and then my son. I could not do anything. I was carried by the river,things kept hitting me. I tried calling out their names,but the water was in my mouth,my eyes,everywhere,” he says.

When he woke up,he was in the jungles. He walked down,calling out for his family,calling out for help,delirious with thirst. “If Lord Shiva can do this to us,on a holy day,a Monday,when we are right at his doorstep,what is the point of worshiping a stone? I didn’t want to come for the yatra,but it was my wife’s desire to complete the ‘char dham’. And look at me. Here I am,alive,but I have no idea where she is,” he says,breaking down.

It took him a while to find a chopper. He was brought down to Dehradun on June 20 and admitted for two days at Doon Hospital. Since then,he has been trying to get a helicopter to take him back to look for his wife and child. “They don’t allow you to go up after they bring you down. So I have to wait at this helipad for them to come down. How can I go back without answers?” he asks.