Uttarakhand survivor tales: 'a woman died in my lap on the third day'

Mayali: Gopal Prajapati is a hero for the 11 people he carried, pulled and encouraged out of a deadly and horrifying predicament, saving them from certain death during the Uttarakhand deluge. On the way down from Guptkashi, he had stopped with his bus and was calmly trying to deal with another situation when locals and reporters gathered around. The bus they had hired to carry them to Rishikesh had stalled on a narrow strip of a dirt track. Inside were about 35 people, mostly men and women in their 60s. But not all of whom were part of his original group of 40 pilgrims. [caption id=“attachment_898551” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Rescue operations have been hampered by bad weather. Reuters[/caption] Only 15 from that group survived, Prajapati said. The rest they had picked up in Guptkashi, people like them who had barely managed to escape the deadly blow delivered by nature. The nightmare for Prajapati, who said his age was “48-50” years, and his fellow travellers from Shahjahanpur district in Madhya Pradesh began with the cloud burst on June 15. They were in Kedarnath when disaster struck. As the first boulders came loose from the surrounding hills, the pilgrims got divided. Some of them were with Prajapati. Literally carrying the elderly through the cascading water and rocks, he managed to take 11 of them to elevated ground. He saw two women being swept before his eyes. “A third woman we had to leave behind. She died. She could not take the ordeal. She had taken ill and died in my lap on the third day after the cloud burst,” recounts Prajapati. They left Kedarnath that day itself. That was June 18. On the way back, they found three other members of their party who had got separated. “After the cloudburst, we stayed put in the jungles surrounding Kedarnath for two days. The first day went in just trying to find a safe, dry place to take shelter in. But there was nowhere we could hide,” Prajapati said. So, they waited for more than a day, sitting on wet ground and getting constantly wet. But that was not all. “While we were waiting there at the mercy of the elements, a gang of people arrived. Not pilgrims, but goons armed with knives. “They made me give up about Rs 25,000 in cash which I had with me. They also looted the rest of the elderly persons with me. What can I say when people act with such greed? I was helpless,” Prajapati said, his voice breaking and a few drops of tears, which he had been fighting for long, streaming down his face. Prajapati said that the people who had robbed them were likely those who were employed as labourers in Kedarnath. Another survivor, a woman who returned home safely after being stranded during the Kedarnath yatra amid cloudburst and flood, recalled her ordeal of living in a bus for three days to survive the nightmare. “There were heavy rains. Roads and bridges were washed away in the flash flood and we were not aware of the situation. We lived in a bus for three days on biscuits. No contacts could be established on our mobiles too,” said Priya Bagul, a resident of RTO colony here, who returned by Amritsar Express from the horrifying Kedarnath yatra yesterday. Bagul said they were later provided shelter by the local administration. “We had to purchase drinking water bottles at higher rates. People there were also not cooperating,” she complained. A large number of people had gathered at Nashik Road railway station to receive their kin who returned from Uttarakhand last night. Bagul along with her relatives went on Kedarnath yatra on June 7 and were stranded there amid heavy rains and floods after they left the holy shrine. Meanwhile, 17 pilgrims from Nashik, who were reported missing, are safe at Joshimath while two sick pilgrims were shifted to Pimpalkothi by helicopter, district control room said. Other pilgrims from Yeola, Satana and Lasalgaon of Nashik district are safe and are likely to return within a couple of days, the control room added. PTI