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STATES:
GUJARAT
BHARAT SHAH,
ANJAR
City
Light
A local
businessman-politician overcomes personal tragedy to turn saviour for
a shattered town
Bharat
Shah has a 7 a.m.-to-eternity job, and it doesn't seem to get any less
trying. When you are the vice-president of Anjar Municipality, it comes
with the turf. Then again, maybe not. Shah has simply chosen it to be
this way.
A local BJP
leader and prosperous cloth merchant, Shah was attending a Republic Day
function when he saw the world collapse. Rushing home, he climbed huge
piles of debris to see what was a two-storey house brought to ground.
Scrabbling wildly, he clawed at the ruins with his hands, only to come
across his nine-year-old daughter Anjali, crushed. He laid her down at
a tiny clearing, dove back to find his wife but not making any headway,
simply joined in the rescue effort, saving a dozen lives before he found
time to cremate his daughter at 6 p.m. Shilpa, his wife, would surface
on the eighth day, dead, but by then Shah, tormented at 32, had already
become a legend.
His shop
a mess, life torn, assets worth Rs 70 lakh wiped out, Shah has sent Darshan,
his four-year-old son saved by being with him, to his relatives in Mandvi,
a coastal town in the southwest. This gives him space in his lonely tent
in a relief camp, and time to work in a makeshift municipality office;
he is tasked with bringing Anjar, reeling from 4,000 dead, back to life.
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"I
will leave this place only after my public responsibilities are
over."
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It's happening,
and he's personally supervising it. Seeing a man steal shoes from a shop,
he slaps him, and points to the devastation around. "Even this hasn't
taught you a lesson?" Handing him over to an accompanying posse of
policemen, he moves on. A man approaches him with a desperate plea: "I
still haven't found my brother's body. Can we do something?" Shah
can; he barks an order on a walkie-talkie for excavators to head to the
spot.
By 1 p.m.
he is in the tehsildar's office for another role assigned to him by Sanjay
Gupta, the IAS officer in charge of relief operations in Anjar. Shah has
to help revive the stalled business. A group of eager businessmen is waiting
for him. They aren't disappointed. "We have arranged for galvanised
metal sheets to make sheds," he tells them. "You can start operating
your shops from there from tomorrow." He says business would largely
be restored in a few days. By 7 p.m. he's back in the municipality office.
And by 9.30 p.m. he's with Gupta again, planning the next day. Says Gupta:
"Shah is a crucial link in the command and control chain we have
established in Anjar."
Some day
that link will break. When his "public responsibilities are over",
says Shah, he will move to Mumbai. Otherwise, his memories will continue
to haunt him. "My daughter was my secretary," he recounts, almost
breaking down for an instant before imposing control. "Every day
when I came back home she would give me a list of names of the people
who had called in my absence. And my wife..."
Shah will
move on, but Anjar will remember him.
-Uday
Mahurkar
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