With tears in his eyes, and tending to his 10-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter with fractured legs, the man from Chinaari recalled the horrific day the world almost came to an end for him.
“There was a loud blast and then the earth opened up, the mountains tore apart and our houses just sank into the earth and collapsed...for about three hours darkness spread. We knew the end was here...it was the Day of Judgment. But then we were still alive. I got up and looked around. Everything around me was gone. The houses had collapsed and all my relatives were under the rubble. My wife was dead and my 4-year-old son was screaming for help from under the rubble. I ran for help. But soon I found most people in my village were caught under the rubble. Like a mad man I was running around for help. I then noticed that even the river in front of my house had disappeared. The school building close-by had collapsed. My own children were among the 60 students trapped in the collapsed building. By some miracle I saved my own children. I just carried the two, my son and daughter, for two miles before I got to Muzaffarabad. From there I was put in a helicopter and brought here.”
On a neighboring bed lay a virtually lifeless 3-year-old Qayyum with an angelic face and a little body all plastered. His seriously injured head was heavily bandaged and the two needles into his body were supplying him blood and glucose.
Little Qayyum was plying just inside the main door of his small hut in the mountainous area of Chinaari — a two-hour walk from Muzaffarabad. “A huge blast brought the house down. I lost two children who were at school and my wife has broken her legs. Qayyum couldn’t run out and the house collapsed on him,” explained Qayyum’s father. Almost numbed by pain he narrated how he traveled for two days on a bus from Karachi to Muzaffarabad when he heard about the earthquake.
A laborer in Karachi, he paid 2200 rupees for a journey that would normally cost him 1000 rupees. He walked from Muzaffarabad for two days and arrived in his completely destroyed hometown on the fourth day. He could do nothing, he had nothing and no aid had arrived in this remote village. The injured were lying in the open waiting for help. He just picked up his injured son and walked back to Muzaffarabad and was transported in a helicopter to Islamabad. Now he sits by his little son praying for his survival.
Everyone has a heart-rending story to tell. Over a hundred little girls and boys with amputated and seriously fractured joints occupy the beds in the packed children’s ward of the Islamabad Poly Clinic. Their father, mother, uncle or aunt has a horrifying account to narrate. They talk of the black day and after.
Nature’s fury spared no one. The utterly helpless parents were unable to pull their little ones out of the collapsed school buildings. “They called out to us, they screamed, they cried, they shouted, for hours and even days...they wanted to live,” was the common refrain. And they could do very little. In most cases they could not do anything but walk away leaving their dying children behind.
A few yards away from the children’s ward is the postnatal ward where eight women were admitted on the third day. Four lay motionless with broken spines, three with serious head injuries and fractured limbs. Eight-month pregnant Khadeeja who was brought unaccompanied in the army helicopter is torn between thinking about the new arrival miraculously saved and the two children she lost under the rubble.
New words for suffering will have to be coined. To lose so much, so suddenly and altogether, to face death, destruction, burials, callousness, injury, devastation, to be torn apart so brutally from those you live for, you live through, is another league of suffering.
And for those of us who are alive, well and with our loved ones it’s testing times. Painful too. Mercifully the critical requirement for humane collective existence, compassion does live on in Pakistan. The people of Pakistan have shown that the spirit of 1947 lives on. In times of national calamities it will always get activated. That some black marketers will always also surface is no surprise. The good and the evil will always coexist. The scale tilts heavily toward the good, that’s the silver lining.
Now Pakistan gears up for a task the likes of which it has never known. While partnership between state and the people is central to the effort of relief and rehabilitation the onus of making this relationship work is on the state.
Meanwhile Pakistanis owe a special thanks to the global community that has risen to the occasion and come to help them in their hour of need.
