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DEATHQUAKE;
GROUND ZERO
Dateline
Fearscape
Even ghosts won't have enough places to haunt in the ruins of Kutch.
Text by
S. Prasannarajan Photographs
by Hemant Chawla
In
the seismology of life, sorrow cannot be measured on the Richter scale,
and loss cannot be captured in dead denominations. An implosion in the
deep recesses of earth can be explained by science, but the irrationality
of death, buried beneath shapeless mountains of stone, iron, wood and
dust, can only be explained by the heartbeats of the living, by the forlorn
hope of the abandoned, by the frozen tears of the orphaned, by the stoic
march of the displaced ... or, by the carbonised remains of the beloved.
A few minutes that shook the earth on a lazy morning have grown into an
eternity of tremorous terror.
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| OUT
OF THE RUNS: Godavari comes out of home in Bhachau |
Every terror
begins with a deception, and at this moment in the night of anticipatory
notebooks and breathless cameras, the deception stretches from the arrival
terminal of Ahmedabad airport to a downtown hotel in the city. The streets
are steeped in what journalism's post-disaster glossary calls normalcy,
and the rubble of ravaged homes, seen in the front pages and in primetime
images, are inaccessible to the eyes. In the half-sleeping city, walls
are intact and light is still filtering through high-rise windows. A video-friendly
wedding celebration in the hotel lobby further elaborates life's unscarred
rhythm, and in the third-floor room, death is still a trembling abstraction
trapped in the mind.
You are
on the outskirts of the canvas of a deathscape.
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| A lonely
survivor surveys the ruins from atop the debris in Bhuj |
It takes
a journey from Ahmedabad to Bhuj to see deception progressing into reality-an
endless wreckage from which dusty, mutilated bodies, dead and alive, continue
to be excavated, but what lie beneath it unnarrated and unphotographed
are nameless tales of life. It's a slow progression, destination death
zone, and as you reach Surajbari, the white expanse of salt fields becomes
an accidental backdrop to the first intimations of the distant terror.
The long line of dishevelled travellers, tired, hungry and hopeful of
miracles, originates from a prematurely halted train. They are coming
from Mumbai, to claim the remains of a tragedy they thought would never
happen to Kutch. "God has made Kutch beg," Kantha Behn Patel
consoles herself with this bitter judgment.
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| Husband
Ramesh performs the last rites after having single-handedly made a
bed for her on drywood |
If it's the
anger of a subterranean God, why blame the administration? Its sudden
submission is written on the ruins of what was once the Kandla checkpost
on the highway. The first alphabet of the word administration has gone
from the broken roof, now a dominating item in the debris. Maybe an unintentional
irony in advance, for, anger against the administration is accumulating
in the living. Then, irony has a way of cohabiting with horror, as in
the village of Vondh. You read this message on a van: "Unseen they
suffer, unheard they cry, in agony they linger, in silence they die, is
it nothing to you, all those who pass by?" Who are they? Animals.
The van belongs to the Gujarat Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Though this reasonably poetic message can be an epitaph for Vondh and
other horrors of Kutch, they have not died in silence and the suffering
of the living is there for everyone to see. In Vondh the most visible
forms are not that of life but of death and devastation. A dead village,
defined by rows of rubble, cranes and excavators-and flies circling over
mounds of collapsed structures. "So many bodies are still lying beneath
them," says Kharsanbhai Patel, a villager who abandoned hope the
day earth shook under his feet.
Travel a
few more kilometres, you are right in the middle of the merciless earth,
the deception disappears. The living are still shaking with the knowledge
of loss. Bhachau in the afternoon is an exaggeration of death and dispossession
of the Day After. Its most manic expression at the moment is the L&T
Komatsu earth-remover, whose long trunk is overworking to remove the debris;
and Ramesh is its most stoic and solitary expression. It goes like this,
the confluence of man, machine and rigor mortis. Suddenly the Komatsu
comes to a halt, a small crowd of volunteers, armymen, cameramen, reporters,
most of them wearing a kind of surgeon's mask, gathers around a partly
cleared spot in the ruins.
Now bare
hands are at work. The mask is too weak to hold back the stench. Some
well meaning Vishwa Hindu Parishad volunteers try in vain to control the
frenzy of cameras, notebooks, and multiplying curiosity. First to surface
is a torn red sari, then a twisted hand, then ... Godavari is coming out
of home. And Ramesh runs forward to receive her. He has to cry "it's
my wife, it's my wife" to reach her through the crowd. But Godavari
has already started her last journey on a stretcher. A few minutes later,
you see her lying there on the cold ground, a few steps away from home,
waiting for him. The crowd has gone, the Komatsu has started rolling back.
And Ramesh performs the last rites. Singlehandedly, he makes a bed for
her on dry wood. When she goes up in flames, Ramesh stands there, all
alone. He is not crying. " Who is there for me now? Me, me alone."
In Bhachau,
tears have long ago dried in the heat from roadside funeral pyres. Ramesh
is just another member of the brotherhood of the bereaved. When earth
quakes, justice migrates to some other world. Ramesh believes Godavari
may have reached there.
Contd
Pg 2
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