Counting the living: Bhuj full of dead bodies, Volunteers

Once there was Bhuj. But the town seems more like a morgue as bodies of victims pileup in the military hospital. All that stands in Bhuj now is its past. Counting bodies is not a priority anymore. Counting the living is.

But as the struggle continues to find the living among the dead, Bhuj has ended up as a loser. On Monday, the military hospital was full of survivors from the towns of Anjar and Bhachao. And none from Bhuj itself.Brigadier I. Gill, commanding officer of the Sikh Light Infantry and incharge of the relief and rescue operations, said: "It’s more than 72 hours after the quake. The cries have stopped. Some bodies are clearly visible within the debris of the two high-rises Kalpataru Apartments and Gokul Apartments that collapsed. We have lost this battle."The story of Bhuj can only be told in little snapshots. The bigger picture is still blurred.

A young widow, who screamed when asked what her name was, sat outside what was once the Kalpataru building — a posh address in the town of Bhuj.

On Friday morning, she went down to buy vegetables, leaving her five-year-old son in the flat. Before she could pay for vegetables, the earth shook and the apartment building came crashing down.

The cranes only got to work on Monday morning, picking up debris bit by bit. Only one wall of the Kalpataru Apartments is still standing. It’s her son’s bedroom wall with his photograph on it. For the past two days, the widow has been staring constantly at his photograph.

"He’s telling me he’s alive," she points to a Sikh Light Infantry jawan. The sad soldier looks the other way. Mita Soni, of Gokul Apartments, who was pulled out of the debris, is still looking for her grandmother and brother.

She told The Asian Age on Monday morning: "My grandmother shouted out this morning." We managed to persuade jawan Bhupinder Singh to climb on top of the debris and try and approach what was once the Soni flat from the other side.

After an hour of digging, the old lady’s head was visible, but it was crushed between two huge boulders. The stench was unbearable. So was the look on Mita’s face. Another battle was lost. Baby Amina survived the earthquake, die but her mother wishes that "I hoped she had died."

All fingers on Amina’s right hand were missing, she had a severe head injury and a fracture. Surgeons at the military hospital patched up her head and then began work on her hand.

As the bodied are cremated, the living barely survive. Bhuj’s recovery looks bleak. It looks like a bombed town. There is no hospital, there are no medicine shops, there are no houses and there are no schools. There is no money and no banks. And there are no people.

The highway from Jamnagar, a town at a distance of six hours from Bhuj, is clogged with vehicles of people rushing to Bhuj with hope and returning in despair. Just a bridge links the Saurashtra towns of Rajkot and Jamnagar to Bhuj and the rest of Kutch.

Major cracks have developed on this bridge so traffic is severely controlled leading to constant jams. Vishal Patel, on his way to look for his missing brother-in Bhuj, shouted at a policeman: "Those who are returning know what happened to their loved ones. We don’t. Let them stay on that side of the bridge. Just let us go." For the first time in Kutch’s recent history Bhuj does not seem to have a hope.

Republished from Asian age