KANDI (Occupied Kashmir): Twenty-year-old Farooq Ahmed has never seen his baby. He never will. He doesn’t even know if he had a son or a daughter. He has just dug the body of his 18-year-old pregnant wife, crouched and still wearing her pink headscarf, from the wreckage of his home in occupied Kashmir with his bare hands.
“I just screamed and screamed. My heart is broken,” the bearded, sun-darkened grocer says. “I never saw my child.”
He looks away. “I can’t think anymore,” he adds, dressed in a dirty pink shalwar-kameez, his hands caked with dry dust from the digging.
There were only relatives to help dig Ahmed’s wife and unborn child from the debris in the village of Kandi. Days after the 7.6 magnitude quake struck, no help has come to the district, Karnah, one of the worst hit in occupied Kashmir.
At least 300 people have died in Karnah and 1,000 are injured. Many are still missing.
The people of the mountainous region are tired, hungry and thirsty, and terrified of aftershocks. They sleep outside, where night-time temperatures dive painfully low in the autumn chill.
Officials say they are doing their best but simply cannot cope with the scale of devastation in this region of about 45,000 where people live scattered in hamlets amid bare as well as pine-covered mountains.
“We are still looking for bodies in the debris. It is a calamity that is overwhelming our resources,” Karnah’s top official, Deputy Commissioner A.M. Khandy, says at the main hospital.
The wards are crowded and filthy, littered with garbage. A stream of vehicles drops of more and more injured.
Farmer Khalil-ur-Rehman, 40, lies with a fractured thigh in a bed with his six-year-old daughter, also with a broken leg.
“Look at me. I can’t look after my family anymore,” he says, as the little girl, Musharrat Bano, peeps from a blanket, eyes wide in a dirt-streaked face.
As Rehman speaks, flies buzz overhead in the chilly ward and relatives of patients argue with overworked doctors over who should be treated first.
Abdul Rashid Khan, a 32-year-old jobless man, pulled his mother from the wreckage of their stone and tin hut. His nephew was also killed and his own eight-year-old son injured.
But amid his misery, Khan finds one consolation.
“My mother was reading the holy Quran when the earthquake came,” he says, wearing borrowed loose trousers and a shirt.
“At least she went with the words of God.”—Reuters
