In the makeshift morgue
on recent days at the government hospital in Rajahmahendravaram in East
Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, it was hard to tell which was worse: being
dead or waiting for the dead to arrive.
The place felt
depleted of air; the stench of death pervaded the entire place. It stuck to
your nostrils, cemented at the back of throat, with a recurring sensation of
nausea and a desire to throw up. It fastened on to the policemen collecting
details and writing reports; it coated the grass and trees. The breeze carried
the stench far and wide. Rain turned it into an enveloping blanket. Everybody
had napkins or nose masks tied on, their tired eyes visible over it. In this
place even the living stank of death.
Relatives and friends
of the dead sat on plastic chairs or wandered about, waiting for the bodies to
arrive. The people followed each ambulance coming into the premises and
wondered if this one might be carrying their dead. When an ambulance stopped,
workers opened the door, and gently placed the body on a stretcher, and
transferred it to metal tables covered with palm-leaf mats arranged in the
tent, with a concern bestowed on fragile things.
No furrowed brows, no
disgust at the rotting corpses. They sliced the pockets in clothes, picked up
cell phones or cards, if they were there, and
gave them to relatives standing two, three feet away, to check if the
things belonged to their loved ones and if the body was, indeed, theirs. Once
the relatives confirmed it the wailing began.
“See what he looks
like,” a woman wailed near her husband’s body, to no one and to everyone. Her
relatives and friends held her. The body was bloated after two days in the
water, eyes bulged like tiny balls, iris and pupil bigger. The drowned usually
float on water, backs up and arms askew by the sides; on the tables, though,
workers placed them on their backs, all of their knees stuck up and hands
akimbo, dangling in the air, so that faces, whatever remained of them, were visible,
for identification.
After placing the body
on the table, the workers, wearing orange vests and gloves, waited in the gloom
and stench for the next ambulance to arrive. Ranging in age from youngsters,
the early twenties to the fifties, they were familiar with death and the
stillness that comes with it, even as motorcycles, cars, buses, lorries and
people honked, cut in front of each other, to relentlessly move ahead, to move
faster, in time or before time, to destinations of their own, on the road
outside the gate of the hospital. After post mortem and inquest, bodies are
handed over to the kith and kin.
In groups of two and
three, or five and six, people congregated under the trees, wrapped around the
trunks, stooped over ambulances and other vehicles, or strained against each
other, and mourned their loved ones, quietly or loudly. “Tell me where my son
is,” was the constant refrain of one distraught father, drained and on the
verge of collapse.
“I want his body,”
cried another, referring to his relative.
“How long does it take
to retrieve bodies,” said another from a village near Warangal. He and his
friends had been here, to carry back the bodies of people who drowned, to their
place.
In this part of the
hospital, separated by shamianas and sprinkled with bleach, life and
death are close, like a seamless continuum. The bodies on the tables and the
bodies standing near could as well, in time (usually) or any time (mostly), be
swapping places. Breathing never felt so important, the only effective thing in
life; the rest, whatever it is, is the beyond pale, beyond peripheral.
The doomed boat, Royal
Vashista, reportedly carrying 77 tourists and crew, sank in the middle of
the day, around 12.30 p.m., in the middle of the Godavari, on a Sunday, September
15, near Kachuluru Mandam. The initial toll was placed at eight. Twenty-six
people were saved that day by fishermen and youngsters in nearby villages who
converged on the spot in their boats and pulled up people who were floating
just above water with the help of life jackets. The rest were notified as
missing. According to the latest reports, searches so far have unearthed 36
bodies. The search for the remaining 15 is still on.
The vessel had an
air-conditioned dining hall below. It’s not clear how many got stuck there when
it sank. Until it is salvaged, reports say, the remainder missing won’t be
accounted for. (The exact number of people on board, including crew, however,
remains hazy, with authorities and politicians quoting different figures.) The government
has announced ₹10 lakh each to the family of the dead, from insurance.
The passengers on the
doomed Vasishta were on a cruise from from Gandi Posamma in East
Godavari district to Papikondalu.
People in the
thousands make it a point to visit and experience journeying upstream on the
river, immersing themselves in the mesmerising vista as the Godavari, which
ranges in width from a few hundred metres to much more, wraps itself around the
forested hills as it meanders across the countryside. The rush to experience it
has increased in the last few years as the Polavaram dam is nearing completion.
When construction is complete many of the areas around these hills will be
submerged.
In recent weeks and
days, the river has been in full flow, swollen by the heavy rain, flooding and
inundating many areas. On that particular day, it was said to be carrying five
cusecs of flood water. Only one or two from the Godavari districts boarded the vessel,
since they were aware of the river’s sudden rages in the monsoon. So most of
the people who boarded Vasishta were from places far away and knew
little about the Godavari’s moods. As many as 22 from Hyderabad and 14 from
Kadipikonda village in Warangal urban district, Telangana. Nine died. At the
place where the boat capsized the river is about 300 metres, which is
relatively narrow, and extremely deep, about 107 metres (350 feet). That made
the raging river still more treacherous. The place bristles with eddies,
whirlpools and crosscurrents making that stretch extremely dangerous.
Experienced pilots bank to the side of the West Godavari there, avoid the
roiling currents, and proceed upstream where they ease their boats into
smoother water. This pilot, however, had been on sea-going vessels along the
coast. He had no experience whatsoever with the river in the monsoon, knew
nothing about the currents or the riverbed, and went straight into the maw of
the roiling eddies.
One survivor said the
boat tilted rightwards and toppled over. People, whoever was able, scrambled to
the bottom of the overturned boat. Then it arced about 180 degrees sideways,
came back up—deck up and keel down—and went down in moments.
Local newspapers
dredged up several causes for the tragedy: allowing the boat journey in the
first place at the time of flood, poor licensing mechanisms, regulation and
oversight; worthiness of boats plying in these areas; persistent lack of life
jackets; lack of coordination among the government departments, police,
tourism, and water; dearth of information about weather; utter lack of safety,
and a host of others.
None of that means a
thing to Rajendra Prasad, at times sitting and other times wandering restlessly
in the morgue. He is from Hyderabad. His nephew Pavan Kumar and his wife,
Vasundhara Bhavani, a government teacher of mathematics, and their son Sushil
Gokul, Pavan’s youngest sister, Jyothirmayi and her husband, Janaki Ram, were
on that boat. Janaki Ram, a retired Railway employee, is the only survivor, his
left shoulder fractured. Jyothirmayi’s body was traced on September 16. The
rest were listed missing.
Prasad is a retiree
from the mechanical engineering department, 66, about six feet tall, stooping
under the weight of his grief, eyes bloodshot, in lalchi and pyjamas, a
towel on his shoulder.
“I don’t know what to
do here,” he says, dazed. He came to know from the TV news that the boat sank.
Pavan and his family were on it. His parents are sick and bed-ridden—both above
80, father drifting in and out, wavering, mother suffering from cancer. They
were in no position to move. Moreover, Prasad raised Pavan as his own, had him
educated, got him a job, and married him off. Both uncle and nephew were close
and friendly.
“I cradled him in
these arms,” he says.
The party of five came
to Rajahmahendravaram on September 14, after visiting some places nearby. They
had booked tickets on the boat earlier. They got a message that the journey had
been cancelled due to floods in the river. In the evening, however, a middleman
appeared and said the journey was on and gave them five tickets. Pavan’s son
Sushil Gokul had completed his B.Tech, passed the GRE, and was preparing to go
to the US for his MS in October.
I want to die,” he says. “Our children have gone before us.
Amid these little bits
of future impinging on the present, they thought they should take this journey
for they knew not when their son might return from the US, when they might all
get a chance to make the same trip, or perhaps it would not be possible if the
landscape changed after the dam was completed. Moreover, the Godavari forever
beckons, whether it is to float or take someone to her depths.
The family, with a
number of people knit together, would often go on similar trips. Recently,
Pavan and family had been to Nashik and Shirdi. They returned to Hyderabad, and
ten days later came here. On September 16, Jyothirmayi’s body was found. Prasad
and his family let their parents, sick as they were, know only dribbles. That
she had sustained injuries. That doctors are treating her. As the body was being
taken to Hyderabad, they told her parents that she fell seriously ill and was
in hospital. Doctors were saying there was no hope and that she eventually
died.
As for Pavan and his
wife and his son, Prasad held out some hope until Monday, September 16. Pavan,
52, was a joyous person, finding happiness in the happiness of others. He
graduated from the polytechnic, and after that he went into repairing and
servicing TVs and machines. As the work took him around Hyderabad, he developed
spondylitis and had to give it up. Instead, he started a stationery shop at
home, which became an adda for his numerous friends. He would distribute
milk for sick persons in his colony. He would assist the elderly and sick. He
was good at interpersonal skills, taking in all others along. Recently, Prasad
says, his college alumni met at Mahabubnagar. Pavan and his friends gathered
their former classmates, collected money and gave it to the college to provide
more amenities for students, especially toilets for girls.
Pavan was a good
swimmer. Prasad felt that might save him. On September 16, Prasad felt some
hope that they were alive, adrift on water, thrashing to keep their heads above
it, or might have latched on to some rock, wet and cold and scared, surviving
nonetheless, or pushed up by a tree near the river, or somewhere onto a
sandbar, where villagers may find them and tend to them.
As Prasad watched the
ambulances coming in bearing bodies picked up from the river channels in
different places, he said, “Now I have no hope.”
“I want to die,” he
says. “Our children have gone before us.” His eyes fill. His lips quiver. He is
not dying, though. Not here, waiting for his loved ones’ bodies to arrive.
One body,
unidentified, lingered on the table. Prasad was not sure if it was Pavan’s or
Gokul’s. He asked for a DNA test, which the collector granted. He felt
distraught that it was not being carried out, he tried to harm himself next day
by hitting his head with a bottle. The police dissuaded him. Prasad could not
ever remember being like this. He had volunteered in cyclone rescue efforts in
Diviseema when a 20-foot wall of water hit Diviseema like a bomb in 1977,
crashing into the island and killing more than 10,000. He had picked up dozens
of bodies then, more than he could count.
For a man who had seen
so much carnage, “I am not able to bear this.”
The unidentified body
was, in fact, Gokul’s.
One man recognised a
body as that of his loved one, but would not accept the reality, saying, “No,
it’s not that. It’s somebody else’s.” Reality,
for all its physical and metaphysical accents and nuances, doesn’t register in
minds deranged by grief at this death so unexpected.
The word ”missing” throws relatives and friends off. “Dead” has a finality about it, however painful. But “missing” has no beginning or end; it is a suspension of one’s own being, of stasis and drift, one split screen inside the head showing life and movement, and another a disfigured, lifeless body at the mercy of the crosscurrents working in the river. Time stretches on forever and condenses into small moments. Death comes as the end for all those waiting for the moment of truth.
is a freelance journalist based in Andhra Pradesh.
