When The Himalayas Poured

The floods in northern India have killed more than 600 pilgrims in Uttrakhand state. As rescuers comb the debris of the mountainous state, hundreds of bodies are expected to be found in the coming days.

“Over 556 bodies have been recovered in the state so far but there are reports that more could be buried under the debris,” Vijay Bahuguna, the chief minister of Uttrakhand told a television network. According to local police officials, 40 bodies were recovered on Friday from the River Ganges in Haridwar town, more than 200 kilometers downstream from the submerged holy town of Kedarnath. India’s Home Minister Mr. Sushil Kumar Shinde told the reporters that 34,000 pilgrims had been rescued but 50,000 pilgrims remain stranded. Rescue operations by Indian military and paramilitary troops are continuing, but more rain is expected on Sunday.

Our reporter Hari Kumar spoke to Arijit Shashwat, a survivor, who was in Kedarnath when the clouds burst and the pilgrim town was submerged.

On themorning of June 15, Arjit Shashwat, a 34-year-old software engineer from Patna in the northern state of Bihar, began a 14-kilometer trek from Guptkashi village in Uttrakhand to the Kedarnath temple higher up in the Himalayas. Mr. Shashwat was part of an entourage of 15 people, including his father, Ashwini Kumar Chaubey, a 61-year-old lawmaker from Bihar. Mr. Shashwat, his parents, and relatives intended to take a chopper that ferries pilgrims from the base camp at Guptkashi to the Kedarnath temple.
It was raining intensely and the chopper service had been stopped. Yet the pilgrims remained undeterred.

Mr. Shashwat and his family began the uphill trek at 10 in the morning. Several laborers carried his elderly parents and uncles up the mountain in palanquins. Twelve hours later, Shashwat and his family reached the Kedarnath temple, 11,759 feet above sea level. The rain did not stop.

They found a guesthouse adjacent to the Kedarnath shrine and checked in.! On the morning of June 16, Mr. Shashwat and his family visited the shrine and offered their prayers. The rains continued. Local authorities forbade them from moving around. The helicopter services remained suspended. Even a downhill stroll in the pilgrim town of Kedarnath could be dangerous. They spent the day between the temple and their guesthouse. Mr. Shashwat and his family returned to the Kedarnath shrine around 7.30 in the evening for the ritual prayers, which lasted for half an hour.

“After the prayers, I smeared holy ashes on the foreheads of my family members,” Mr. Shashwat recounted. He was back in his room, when around 8.20 pm, he was jolted by the earsplitting noise of cloudburst and blinding lightening. “Within moments, I saw an enormous amount of water pouring into our guest house,” he said.

Mr. Shashwat and his family ran out of the guesthouse, toward the temple complex. Water tore down their guesthouse within minutes. The ancient rock temple seemed the only place of refge.

“Water poured into the shrine. Massive rocks tumbled inside and damaged the courtyard,” he added. But the inner areas of the shrine remained intact. Mr. Shashwat, his family, and around 800 people huddled in the shrine throughout the night. They had no food, no water, and no news of several members of their entourage who had gone missing.

“We spent the night chanting praying to lord Shiva,” he recalled. Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction.

It continued raining throughout the next morning. “Children wanted food, but we had nothing. My elderly father was fading, but there was no way we could reach a doctor. We were tired, hungry and shivering,” Mr. Shashwat recalled.

Around 8.20 a.m., they heard a terrifying noise. And furious torrents of water pushing enormous boulders charged toward the Kedarnath shrine and town.

“Inside the temple, the water levels began to rise. I held my son in arms at the waist level. The water rose further, I lifted him on my sho! ulders,â€!  he said. Yet the fear of drowning came to be and the water began to recede.

The volume and velocity of the water carried away many pilgrims hiding in the temple. “When the water receded we saw the piles of dead bodies,” Mr. Shashwat said. “My aunt and uncle lay dead at the main entrance of the temple.” He stood on the temple floor surrounded by numerous dead bodies.

Water filled the lungs of his father, Mr. Chaubey. Mr. Shashwat removed some dead bodies from the temple floor and created space for his father to lie down. A few feet from him, a doctor from Gujarat, who had managed to carry an oxygen cylinder along, was trying to revive his own father. The doctor’s father died.
The doctor attached the oxygen cylinder to Mr. Chaubey and eventually revived him. The pilgrims moved the dead to a corner of the temple and spent another night consoling each other. They wanted to call their families, seek help, but their phones had stopped working.

“We ran out of phone batteries ad the floods had destroyed the phone towers,” Mr. Shashwat recalled.

Three days later, on the morning of June 18, the rain stopped. They waited for help in vain. Mr. Shashwat found a muddied packet of biscuits outside the temple and fed them to his son and nephew. Around noon, a chopper surveyed the area and flew away. A little later, a small helicopter tried hard to land but failed. A man jumped out of the chopper and walked up to Mr. Shashwat and other pilgrims in the temple. “He told us to walk uphill in a certain direction, where the rescue helicopters could collect them,” Mr. Shashwat said.

Around 400 pilgrims walked from the temple to the rescue point. The destination was around two miles from the temple, across a stream. They made a ropeway using cables, ropes, broken doors, wooden poles, and crossed the stream. And the Indian Air Force helicopters carried them away to a camp established by India’s National Disaster Response Force. “We ate after three days,” he recalled! .

A! few days later, when I met Mr. Shashwat inside a hospital in New Delhi, where his father is being treated, the television networks were playing the footage of the Kedarnath temple complex. Shashwat looked hard at the dead bodies lying beside the temple entrance,

“That corpse in the blue shirt by the gate is my uncle,” he said. “I don’t know how we can bring him back.” Six others who had trekked to the temple with him were dead.