| Shaukat Banu, Infant, Dhamarka
”I was sure she had died.”
This is a story Shaukat’s mother, Roshan, has to tell; Shaukat is 18 months old, too young to relate tales.
That morning, Roshan, a 23-year-old block
printer of saris in Dhamarka village near Bhuj, was home with three relatives and Shaukat; her husband Kasam was away. When tremors began, they rushed to the street. So far, so good. Then, houses started collapsing all around. They managed to steer clear – without a scratch. Except Shaukat who disappeared under the debris. A frantic Roshan clawed at it. Villagers tried clearing the rubble – for three days. ” I was convinced Shaukat had died,” Roshan recalls. ”How could anyone survive that?”
Shaukat did. Rescuers finally managed to haul her out, with the fingers of her right hand crushed. At a makeshift army hospital, Shaukat didn’t flinch as doctors, applying local anaesthetic, snipped away her useless fingers. Later, hand heavily bandaged, in the lap of her mother, she smiled. Maybe later, she will say something, tell her mother in babytalk about what happened in her private hell. ”But I hope she forgets it,” says Roshan. ”I hope we all forget.”
Uday Mahurkar / India Today, February 12, 2001 | 
Photo: Pramod Pushkaria / India Today
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Marriages are made in the epicentre….
On returning to Umed Nagar I learnt that my uncle and his family were safe, too, and had shifted to Madhapur; but he had lost his only son. I had no words to console him.
The sights in the city were disturbing. At Durbargadh, I saw a person preparing food. He introduced himself as Raghuraj Singh, the prince of Bhuj. He offered me a cup of tea. ”Sorry, I can serve only black tea. There is no milk.”
I moved on to my sister’s place at Vaida Delo. The main gate was covered by
debris. How could they come out safely? I wondered. I saw several carcasses on the street. At our community hall where the Trivikramrai’s temple is situated, lay the bodies of three women who had come to offer prayers. |
That night I couldn’t sleep. The sights I had seen during the day rocked my mind. Around 2.30 a.m. came a real tremor. The next one, at 4 a.m., was a terror.
On January 29, we got ready for the
marriage. We placed two chairs in the open, plucked flowers from the neighbour’s flower pot to make garlands. The auspicious time was 12.15 p.m. The deadline was ticking away but Kantilal, who had gone to fetch a pundit, was not to be seen even at noon. Finally, my brother asked for a paper on which he wrote:” We, the bride and the groom, are taking an oath that we will be together in any situation.” Neelu and Kumar signed it and exchanged garlands. Now they were husband and wife.
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Photo: Jayant Pithadia / The Week
Just then, Kantilal came rushing in with the pundit who himself lost some of his relatives. The bride’s grandmother was in tears. Before they
could dry, Kantilal was off again to lend a helping hand to his less fortunate townfolk.
he Week, February 11, 2001 |
Birth of hope
Amid the pain and despair, there are moments of joy and celebration
Keyur and Murtaza may never realise the magnitude of the tragedy they have survived. Keyur is 14 months old and Murtaza only eight months.
Keyur was under the debris of the
multi-story Mangalam Apartments in Juna Dhor Bazaar area of Ahmedabad for nearly 100 hours. His mother Nalini Kumbare, 32, lay nearby helpless. A tiny hole was the only hope for the customs and excise inspector. But her screams were lost in the rumbling of bulldozers and trucks.
Within hours of the quake Nalini’s husband Arun, 37, and daughter Bhargavi,6, were extricated from the rubble. Bhargavi was dead and Arun had multiple fractures.
Four days passed with no news of Nalini
and Keyur and Arun slipped into mental depression at the L.J. Hospital. On January 30, using state-of-the-art Dutch hydraulic equipment the Army personnel cut a hole through the debris and pulled out the mother and son alive. ”Nalini was jubilant,” recalled an army jawan. Both were rushed to L.J. Hospital.
Nalini was normal until the news of her daughter’s death got to her. ”She read it in the newspaper. She is in a state of shock since then and has not spoken to anybody,” said Rajesh,
Nalini’s brother.
Murtaza has lost both his parents. A BSF team found him lying on his mother’s lap after 81 hours under the rubble in Gora Noor Fali area of Bhuj. The father’s body lay nearby. Murtaza was perhaps breast-feeding when the quake struck.
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Vicky Raval, 13, was rescued by the Swiss team after 40 hours under the rubble of the Mansi Complex in Ahmedabad. Vicky was stuck with a neighbour, Mona Sanghvi. When they
were extricated, Mona was badly shaken but Vicky simply asked for water and biscuits.
When the four-story Swaminarayan Higher Secondary School in Ghodasar collapsed, Kaushik Patel, 15, and his friend Yatin Patel were the last ones to escape. ”We realised whe has lost everyone except 10 or 11 who managed to come out in time,” said Kaushik. ”We were very lucky to escape.”
Perhaps the most moving sight was what Rajubhai Mehta of Maninagar suburb in Ahmedabad saw. ”An 18-month-old
boy climbed down the rubble, dodging piercing iron rods and other dangerous objects, and tottered to where we were standing,” recounted Mehta. There was not a scratch o his body.
And life continued to bloom even in the midst of catastrophe. Sonaben Aaundhiya from Rajkot delivered twins. Sona was admitted to the labour room at about 8.30 and though tremors started, the doctor went ahead with the delivery.. The first baby, a girl, was delivered at 9.05 and the second, a boy, came at
9.14. Sonaben and her husband Bhavesh have decided to call the twins Dharti (earth) and Kampan (vibration).
Aftab Bandukwala and his wife Nasheman possess a fond reminder of the day the earthquake rocked Ahmedabad. As people battled to cope with te calamity, the couple had an added worry – Nasheman’s advanced state of pregnancy. As the quake rocked their apartment, they struggled to make their way out.
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Photo: Quaied Najmi / The Week
Nasheman, helped by Aftab and her in-laws, made her way down the stairway, pushing and jostling their way down. When the family reached the road, men, women and children were running helter-skelter to find safety in open spaces. Aftab and his parents seated Nasheman in a relatively
safe place – the footpath.
And then Nasheman felt her first contractions. There were no doctors around. Aftab bundled Nasheman and his family into his car and drove to the nursing home of Dr. Bindu Shah. The five-kilometre drive took them nearly two hours.
By late evening she went into labour and at 9.30 there was a tiny wail from the labour room. Dr. Shah brought the good news to Aftab. ”Congratulations! You have become the father of a baby boy.” For a moment there was palpable
excitement as the other patients forgot their own pain and joined in welcoming the new life amid the death and tragedy.
Quaied Najmi and Anosh Malekar, Ahmedabad
Dnyanesh Jathar, Rajkot
The Week, February 11, 2001 |
Loyal Pets warned lady about quake
A pair of dogs lived up to their loyalty by sounding an alert of the impending earthquake to their lady of the house and dragging her out to safety.
Profusely patting, caressing and kissing the dogs in gratitude 53-year-old Sulakshmi said that Sweety and Button grew restless and began behaving strangely half hour before the disastrous earthquake struck. They began barking and circling around her, repeatedly dragging her by her sari toward the main door of the flat of the ninth floor of the high rise Pushparang Apartment at the Bodakdeo locality, near the judges colony.
Sulakshmi, a Reserve Bank of India officer, who was alone at
home around that time, could not make out anything of the ”never before” strange behaviour and restlessness of her pets and only knew why when she felt the shocks of tremors even as she inched towards. She immediately rushed out of the building through the elevator and raised the alarm to others as well in the building calling them to rush out in the open for safety.
The Pushparag Apartment is safe and no damage has been caused to the building. Sweety and Button have become pets of all
of them at present, said the amazed people from the building petting affectionately on the head of the dogs.
Praising the act of the loyalty of the dogs they said:” How loyal animals are…if the building had collapsed, we would not have died due to them (translation from Gujarati),” said the residents. A couple of buildings in the locality had collapsed.
The Times of India, January 29, 2001
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They kept quiet because they were doing Vipassana!
Two young Israeli men gave us something to laugh about! They were already in Bhuj on January 25, and had emailed their families to say they were going to a village in Kutch called Mandvi to do a course in vipassana meditation. Then, the earthquake. Our headquarter got a call from their families saying they were missing! There were no more emails from Kutch, nor phone calls. The lines were dead. The silence was ominous. Israeli
newspapers had screaming headlines: ”Two Israelis feared killed in Gujarat earthquake!”
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Fearing the worst, I sent a search and rescue team in a jeep to Mandvi to look for these two Israeli men. The team located an ashram were vipassana is taught. And there were the men! Yes, they had realised an earthquake had taken place. But they did not know it was severe. How could they find out? Everybody there had taken the vow of silence! Laughing in relief, we
brought them to the field hospital and broke the news to the Israeli national radio. The radio interviewed them and during the interview, connected the men live to their parents. Everybody was so happy, they were crying on radio!
Dov Segev-Steinberg, Consul General of Israel in Mumbai / Afternoon, February 5, 2001
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Why am I alive?
Gunwant Lal Mehta is a rarity in Anjar – he’s alive.
As he recovers in an army field
hospital in the devastated town, he slowly recounts an epic tale of survival. For 76 hours after the quake brutally re-modeled his house, Mehta lay trapped under 10-ft rubble of cement and stone. Nearby lay his mother and two sons crushed, dead.
All his escape routes were cut, but a dust-choked pocket of air kept the 45-year-old grocer going. To prevent his throat from becoming parched he cupped his palms and began drinking his own urine. He says he wanted to cry very badly, but
didn’t, fearing that the tears would dehydrate him quickly.
When he heard choppers flying overhead Mehta, slipping in and out of consciousness, called out Gujarat Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel’s name repeatedly, begging for help. And then around noon on the fourth day his cries were heard by a group of soldiers from 2 Maratha Light Infantry. When they pulled him out an hour later on January 29, Mehta was delirious with pain and sorrow. The first thing he asked the army medical
supervisor, Major Max Roberts, was the classic existentialist question, ”Why am I alive?”
Tired, Mehta closes his eyes. He’s badly brushed and his head hurts terribly. And he has some thinking to do: he has no family, no home, no money. And there’s a life to rebuild.
Sayantan Chakravarty / India Today, February 12, 2001
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Photo: Bandeep Singh / India Today
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Quake victims continue to narrate tales of horror
Shantilal Dayaram Thakkar and his wife have just returned to Indore from the quake-hit Bhuj.
Shantilal owned a shop in Moolchand Market and stayed in 21 Rambagh Colony. He recalls how he had a close brush with death. ”At
the time of the earthquake at Bhuj which killed thousand and maimed thousand others, I was at the Hatkeshwar temple performing parikrama (religious ceremony). Even as the temple came crashing down since I was outside, I held on to the temple door that somehow stayed intact and I was saved.”
”I shouted for help, along with my brother-in-law who was also present and thankfully someone rescued me, although I was nearly choked with dust and had to wade through heaps of rubble,” he said.
An interesting thing the Thakkar couple pointed out, however, was that in most cases, where the temples had collapsed, the idols had not been damaged.
Speaking about their departure from Bhuj, they said relief operations were very much in place. ”Truckloads of aid were coming to Ahmedabad bus stand.”
They were all praise for the army. ”The army was out for rescue operation in an hour’s time. Besides the army, many voluntary organisations, religious organisations and the RSS
are helping quake victims,” they said.
The couple said almost 90% of the older parts of Bhuj had been destroyed, although the newer buildings had withstood the quake. In fact, the epicentre of the quake was in Anjar, which falls in Bhuj district.
Hindustan Times, February 1, 2001
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”I thought Pakistan had dropped a bomb…then I saw buildings crumble”
The bedside
alarm clock went off at 6.30 a.m. I promptly shut it off. It was too cold to get out of bed. My regular swim in the Hamirsar Lake was out of the question.
When my eyes opened once again, the clock showed 7.30 a.m. I jumped out of the bed since I had to take photographs of the Republic Day function at Anchorwalla School.
At the school, the children – aged between four and six years – were lined up for the function with flags in hand. The school compound was jam packed with kids
in their blue shorts and skirts and white shirts. There were some 300 of them, all smartly turned out.
I climbed on to the stage and took out my camera. The principal kicked off festivities by garlanding a picture of Bharat Mata (Mother India). A parent came up to me and whispered in my ear that he wanted a picture of his daughter taken. |
As I put my eye to the viewfinder, there was a rumbling sound. I thought it was
one of the IAF MiGs flying overhead. But the sound just got more pronounced and the earth beneath started shaking. I could not stand straight.
My first reaction was that Pakistan had dropped a bomb. Then I saw two buildings around the school collapse, raising a huge cloud of dust. It’s an earthquake, someone shouted.
By now there was utter chaos as parents tried to get hold of their children. The school building was shaking. As I rushed out, the gate of the school building
collapsed on a girl. I started my motorcycle. The two-kilometre drive to my house on New Mint Road was like a ride through hell as I made my way past crumbling buildings. People were rushing out of their homes, some limping on broken legs, others with just a towel rapped around their waste and toothbrush in hand.
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When I arrived at the narrow lane near my house, an electricity wire blocked the way. I used the cable to climb
through the debris and reached home. The house was safe.
Outside, everywhere there were scenes of death and destruction. People were trapped beneath debris crying out for help.
The Civil Hospital building had crumbled. Someone told me there were 200 patients buried inside. I returned home in the evening. The entire neighbourhood had shifted to an open space. News of the death of some of my relatives began trickling in. But there was no time for funerals. Mass pyres had been lit,
each with around 25 bodies. And the earth beneath our feet continued to tremble.
I thought of contacting my wife who was in Jamnagar and telling her I was safe, but the phones were out of order. It was the longest night of my life. All of us were just hoping for daybreak.
The next morning, I went around the city taking more photographs. Soon, I ran out of film. The second night was as agonising as the first. No one in Bhuj could sleep.
Pappu Soneji / The Times of India,
February 1, 2001
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A first-person account
Latha Venkatraman and Kripa Raman, Mumbai-based correspondents of Business Line newspaper, who were in Gujarat on holiday, found themselves not far from the epicentre of the earthquake as the ground beneath their feet shook. Herer is their first-person account:
The morning of January 26 found us at the village of Dhamdaka, 50 km east of Bhuj from where we
had set off from our hotel room at daybreak. Known for its vegetable dye work on fabric, Dhamdaka was a short detour during a day-trip to the Harappan site of Dholavira., 250 km from Bhuj. We visited the workshop of Khatri Mohamedbhai Siddikbhai & Co., which our car driver Shakur Manjothi said was run by national award-winning artisans. It was with great difficulty that we tore ourselves away from the mounds of beautiful fabric at Khatri’s in order to be able to get to Dholavira early,
for we were to return to Bhuj by nightfall.
We had not been 10 minutes down the road from Dhamdaka when our car started to veer wildly and inexplicably. The vehicle was being thrown from side to side. Our windows having been rolled up to keep away the cold, Shakur thought the reason could be strong wind. Then he wondered if a tyre had a puncture.
Suddenly clouds of dust rose up on either side. For a moment we thought it was a dust storm or a cyclone. Flocks of birds burst out of
the shrubbery and there was a stampede of cattle, other livestock and dogs from the side-lanes. Shakur grappled with the steering wheel, brought the car to a slow halt and ventured to step out. ”The earth is shaking. Come and feel it,” he told us. The car was steadily rocking. We stepped out – there was no doubt that it was an earthquake. The ground below our feet was shaking.
Even as we were wondering what to do, we could hear human cries in the distance. Shortly, people were running
out from a village lane on to the road in a shocked state, apparently headed nowhere.
We entered the village, the name of which we later discovered was Kabrau, 18 km from Bhachau. (Bhachau, it turned out later, was flattened in the quake.) We first came across a few elderly men lying injured among debris. Soon women and younger men were running in from the fields around, crying out in panic. Just when we were wondering what we could possible do, there was another powerful tremor; and
people, including us, bolted in terror to the nearest open spaces.
Soon we decided to head back to Bhuj. Along the road to Bhuj, it was a horrifying sight. There was hardly any structure that was left standing. The situation was the same in the village of Dhamdaka, which we had visited barely 10 minutes before the quake. But we were yet to see Bhuj, a more densely populated, built-up area. Bhuj had been devastated, wrecked.
Everywhere there were groups of people standing around
looking shocked, or weeping; everywhere, there were bloodstained people walking about, people being taken in cars, or on vegetable vendors’ carts or being physically carried to the ‘hospital’ in Jubilee Maidan, the actual hospital having being completely ruined.
We headed straight to Shakur’s home in a semi-pucca chawl on a lane, now flanked by ruins. To his and our great relief, his family was safe. They gave us lunch. Shakur was then kind enough to allow us to use his car as our
‘home’ until we found a way out of Bhuj. He parked it in a maidan where a lot of people had settled down, too, seeking safety.
Along the way, we saw huge buildings tilted precariously, others flattened out down to their pillage or the ground floor. There was not a single built-up structure standing totally intact. Some buildings had spilled out to the road. In one case, the staircase had given way and people were trying to help down an elderly man, stuck on the second floor. He was
probably too weak to have run out in time with the rest of the occupants of the building.
We wondered what had happened with the Gangaram hotel where we had checked in. Nobody quite knew, and the approach road to it through the busy Shroff Bazaar was completely blocked by rubble, we were told.
An 18th century monument, the Royal Tombs (Chhatri), built in commemoration of a ruler and his 15 wives, had also been razed to the ground. Before going to the maidan we checked at the
airport, only to find that all the key facilities there had been destroyed.
Despite the scale of the tragedy and destruction, the citizens of Bhuj seemed to be amazingly stoic. People were grieving quietly, but there seemed to be no commotion or overt hysteria, no violence or heated arguments in the scramble for transport, petrol, food, medical aid or other facilities.
The communication network had collapsed, and for the next 48 hours there was no way survivors could send
messages anywhere. Nor could they know anything of the situation around them and elsewhere. Only the radio provided bits and pieces of information about Ahmedabad and other cities of Gujarat, but little of Bhuj itself.
By evening, there was the reassuring sight of several military aircraft circling overhead. By that night, long-distance buses were plying. People spent the night warming themselves around little fires. The temperature must have been 10
C. Only fruits were available for food. Most people slept in the open ground, with nothing overhead, no food and no toilet facilities. Much later, a relief camp distributed warm and wholesome kichdi (lentil rice soup).
In Bhuj, there was virtually nothing left in terms of infrastructure, including the hospital. Even the military establishment had suffered major damage. All that the people could do was to wait stoically until help arrived from elsewhere.
As for ourselves, by a
stroke of luck we found a taxi driver who himself wanted to return to Ahmedabad. As we drove out from Bhuj we saw the road had cracked and caved in at many places. If Bhuj was a shock, the town of Bhachau left us speechless. Forget cracked buildings – there was not a single wall left standing in that town, which was entirely a stretch of rubble.
The Surajbari bridge connecting Bhuj with Ahmedabad had not collapsed (as it was rumoured in Bhuj) but it had developed cracks at both ends
and the authorities were letting only small vehicles through, the exception being military vehicles.
Back in Ahmedabad we discovered the larger contours of the earthquake and the fact that it had been felt as far away as in Chennai and in Nepal. Our unforgettable journey finally took us back to Mumbai by the morning of January 28.
Frontline, February 16, 2001
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”Life until January 26 was energetic, full of
challenges – goals to be achieved, bosses to impress. Now I believe it was like chasing your own tail.”
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Akhil Modi, Ahmedabad
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”Physically I have survived but mentally I am finished. For us those five minutes have put the clock back by 50 years.”
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Jaikrishan Meghani, nr. Bhuj
The chartered accountant lost his
daughter, sister-in-law and his house
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”We can’t bring back the dead. But we can wipe tears of survivors.”
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Farooq Abdullah, Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister
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”No amount of relief will be able to put our lives back together.”
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Mitaben Soni, Bhuj
She lost her parents and grandmother
| ”Well, my ancestry dates back to Shiva, after whom came Krishna at number 54 and I am 182nd on the list.” This comment came from a strapping six feet tall Maharo Pragmulji, the erstwhile Maharaja of Kutch. Sounds impressive, except that this descendant of Krishna is now literally a pauper.
He sits in a shamiana pitched on the lawns of the now-collapsed Ranjit Vilas palace. Two days ago, he sent word to the
Swaminarayan Mission to arrange food and essential commodities for the palace staff. ”You people are doing the job which I should have done as king,” a Swaminarayan member quoted him as saying.
Pragmulji is forthright in admitting that he is now a pauper. ”Imagine, I have been forced to borrow money for my staff, all because my bank says they still haven't started work after the earthquake, it’s all Indira Gandhi’s fault… who nationalised banks.” Just then, an attendant brings in tea.
His niece, Urvashi Devi, a Congress MLA, asks, ”where is your staff, the gardener and all?” ”Forget the staff, I have lost 50,000 people. If I had lost them in a war it would have been different, but this has broken me.”
Pragmulji, now 64, is living in a world of his own. The people who died were his ‘subjects’ and he describes himself as ”perhaps the saddest man on earth today.” Apart from the deaths, he says, what pains him most is ”having lost a part of my history, the city his
ancestors built, the loss of priceless artifacts and family heirlooms which are now in ruins.”
He looks wistfully at the imposing 22-room Ranjit Vilas and says, ”My grandfather received Acharya Kripalani here when he wanted help for the freedom movement. I have myself hosted Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Radhakrishnan here. All those pictures, all those memories are now gone.”
Pragmulji is also disturbed by the large-scale devastation of temples, mosques, and Jain derasars in Kutch.
”Even the Mata no Math, which was the presiding deity of Kutch, has been destroyed.” He has been forced to abandon the 60-year-old place in Bhuj and stays at his country palace in coastal Mandvi, which is named Vijay Vilas.
The magnificent structure of his palace has developed cracks. Non of the prized items of the palace have been recovered so far as the former ruler has not given the go ahead. The giant trophies of rhinos and wild buffaloes still adorn the entrance, but the insides
of the building have caved in.
On January 26, Pragmulji had arrived at Gandhidham station with the ashes of his brother who died of cancer a week earlier. As he got into the car, the earth shook. The first thing he noticed on approaching Bhuj was the collapsed fort on the top of Bhujia (from which Bhuj derives its name)
”When I saw the fort, I knew what to expect of Ranjit Vilas, because it had taken us 90 years and three generations to build this fort.” The first thing he
noticed at the Ranjit Vilas were the collapsed ‘chhatris’ built in memory of his ancestors. He added with considerable pride that all three films shot in Kutch recently – Refugee, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Lagaan – had extensive footages of the chhatris.
Urvashi then asks: ”And have you selected a place for your own chhatri?” Pragmulji’s face crinkles up in a smile. ”Oh, my brother who passed away has told me not to be in a hurry to join him in heaven….. he will have to line up certain
things there for my arrival.”
Bharat Desai / The Times of India, February 8, 2001 |
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