Only a few days ago, Kawas village here was a booming real estate market. Thirty-six hours of non-stop rains have converted it into the biggest mortuary in the Thar Desert.

At least 250 people are feared missing, most of them presumed dead, in the village, on the fringe of the Mangala oil field, following unexpected floods that have wreaked havoc on hundreds of villages in the Desert, leaving behind a trail of death and unimaginable destruction.

Ironically, the disaster began with a celebration. When it began raining in Kawas, home to nearly 5,000 people, on Saturday, wild celebrations welcomed the rains. “We were seeing good rains after a six-year drought in the area. When it rained through the night, everybody thought of it as a good sign,” says Rajendra Kumawat, who survived a 36-hour ordeal by sitting atop a dune while water swept away people around him. Though it kept pouring the next day and night, not a single soul in the desert sensed the lurking disaster.

But on Monday morning, while the village slept, water suddenly rose to a height of 15 feet, inundating the entire village and the areas adjoining it. “The road from the air base in Uttarlai to the village turned into a river. It engulfed the village completely,” says Kumawat. Most of the villagers clambered up their houses and government buildings, some ran towards sand dunes and trees. But many were swept away. Though the Army managed to evacuate the village after nearly 24 hours, hundreds of villagers are missing. Some of the survivors claim to have spotted hundreds of bodies floating in the water.

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