His booming voice and burly persona do not betray much. Not till one asks him about the 10 days of horror that he and his elderly mother faced at Kedarnath. As Prakash Kumar, a lecturer of Hindi at Marwari College recalls the deluge and the havoc it wreaked, emotions choke his voice and his hands flutter with a barely-perceptible tremor.
A simple pilgrimage to the shrines of Badrinath and Kedarnath with his 58-year-old mother and three friends turned awry soon after they reached the Kedarnath shrine. The rain, barely a drizzle when they started their climb on the morning of June 14, turned into a heavy shower by evening when they reached the top. Apprehending further bad weather, the Nepali porters and ‘palki’ bearers accompanying the group advised them to return early next morning soon after worship at the shrine.
However, the rains were a deluge early on June 15 morning when they started their descent. “We had barely covered 700 metres of the 15-odd km track, when there was aloud rumble, and suddenly the path before us just caved into the ground, and we were left facing a yawning crevasse. Around 300 people lost their balance and fell in, while the rest of us tried to find solid ground. In the confusion, mother and I got separated from my friends. The porters asked my mother to leave her ‘palki’ and climb on foot, as the terrain had turned slippery and treacherous. With their assistance, we somehow reached a roadside tea stall somewhere above Rambara. It was stuffed full of survivors waiting for help, and we spent a sleepless night filled with fear and the wails of those who has lost their loved ones in the melee,” said Kumar, in a trembling voice.
On June 16, Kumar, his mother and some 100-odd people decided to brave the weather and terrain and try to reach Gaurikund, the starting point of the trek. “But with hardly anything left of the path, it was slow progress - scaling rocks and boulders slippery and unstable due to the unrelenting rain, in wet and tattered clothes. At one point my mother told me to go on and leave her, but we struggled on and finally reached Gaurikund on 16th evening,” he recalled.
Gaurikund was a mass of rubble and raging waters. “All hell had broken loose. Bodies littered the ground, people were screaming out to their lost ones, some were barely alive,” he said. They climbed further to a village named Gaurigaon. “We were stuck in Gaurigaon along with thousands of other pilgrims for over four days. There was barely any food available, even at the village shop. Some of us bought a bag of rice and pulses from here by pooling the money in our pockets and requested tea-shop owner to let us make ‘Khichri’. One small bowl each of this gruel fed 100-odd people for three days. I borrowed a local’s mobile and called my wife on the June 20. The call cost me Rs 1700,” remembered Kumar, eyes glazing over at the memory.
During those four days, “Many helicopters flew over us; initially trying to assess the extent of work required and then evacuations began. However, the commercial choppers took only four people at a time, so it was slow. In sheer desperation due to her failing health, I put my mother in a helicopter but couldn’t go myself. I was flown to Chamoli a day later,” he said. On searching for my mother, he learnt that she had been taken to Phata. An army bus brought her to Chamoli and then took them to Dehradun, where he learnt that his friends were safe in Hardwar. Kumar’s brother had reached Dehradun on hearing of the cataclysm, and accompanied them to Ranchi on June 24.
His wife, who cancelled her ticket at the last moment, spent the days in agony, but remained hopeful. “That phone-call returned my life to me,” she said, blinking back tears; while his sister listens silently, her face a montage of emotions.
His brush with death notwithstanding, Kumar is vocal about the Uttarakhand Government’s rescue efforts. “They were disorganised and unprepared, with no information system and hardly any doctors. The only coherent work was from the Army, ITBP and other forces,” he raged. “I request the agencies collecting donations to use the money in training common people how to act on available resources during disasters, rather than putting it in Government relief funds to gather dust. Kyoki jo khud hi kiye wohi bache,” he quipped.