Mother and daughter lived 13 days on a collapsed bridge in the middle of an infinite gray lake, alive on hope and two daily handfuls of rice-jaggery prasad. Then, just as a piece of dry land found its way under her tiny feet, Kajli lost her battle with hunger.

Lying flat on her back in the rescue camp at Badakurwa canal bank, Sita Kumari, 22, does not seem to realize her four-year-old daughter is no longer crying by her side. There’s a glucose drip going up her arm, and she stares at the sky with dry, wide-open eyes. “Sita has turned to stone,” says Biteshwari Devi, her neighbour.

When the water came, Sita had tried to flee. As the current swept her away, she clutched Kajli to her chest, thrashing along with the stream till she ran into the iron pillars of the bridge. Some survivors from her village who were already up on the bridge, hauled them up.

Sitting on the bridge, Sita and Kajli had begun their long vigil of hope. The little sattu that someone had could not have lasted 50 people long. As the hours turned into days, hunger rose like the water around them.

“One day, our village headman Narendra Kushwaha managed to get a sack of rice from somewhere,” says Biteshwari. “He would mix a little rice and jaggery with river water twice a day and, after offering it to the Almighty, distribute small handfuls of prasad to all of us. It didn’t kill hunger, but kept faith alive.”

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