All hands on deck

It is late afternoon on April 27. At Machha Pokhari, Kathmandu, a team of rescuers work non-stop to find survivors buried under a collapsed building, more than 50 hours after a deadly earthquake jolted Nepal and turned it upside down. The Nepal Reserve Police personnel direct a bulldozer and mechanical jackhammer working on the unstable debris of a seven-storey hotel. As the bulldozers remove the rubble floor by floor, there are urgent shouts of ‘water’ from the thrilled rescuers who spot Siko Lakshmi, a woman trapped under the debris.

Soon a National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) team from India takes charge of the operation, forming a cordon around the spot and obtaining vital rescue equipment, which the Nepalese Police team lacked. They have an oxygen cylinder to pump air into the suffocating space, a huge electrical cutter powered by a truck-mounted generator to cut through steel bars embedded in concrete, and a large roll of wire that brings electricity to the spot. The well-trained team in their orange NDRF jackets form an inner circle while thousands of people crowd around the shifting mounds of rubble. Some bystanders ascend the mound of debris, while others on the road watch and record the scene through their eyes and on mobile phone cameras.

About 40 minutes later, multiple hands support the stretcher that carries Lakshmi out to the safety of an ambulance and the medical attention that she needs.

Sadly, she dies the next morning, at 5am.

The rescuers don’t stop, going deeper into the mire. Half an hour later, the whistles and excitement that come after a human being is found in the rubble turn to a hushed silence as the team checks for a pulse on a limp hand. A soldier then stands atop the bulldozer, giving directions as the scoop works cautiously to unearth the lifeless body of Uttam Gurung. His left hand clutches his sports shoes while a marigold garland lies next to the other. The team continues its search as his body, draped by a sheet, lies near the main road.

This area was Machha Pokhari lake in the past, and people built shops, houses and hotels on the land that was reclaimed. “The lake bed is probably unstable, [that is why] so many buildings have fallen here,” says Shambhu Prasad Gupta, from Bihar, who has lived here for decades. He owns a fruit shop close by, and describes how the earth shook and turned his world upside down. His life’s efforts lie buried under three floors. When the quake hit, Shambhu had jumped onto the railings of the collapsing building and climbed to the top floor to reach his brother's wife and three children. He saved them all.

Emergency centre

The eerie sound of ambulance sirens punctuates the silence of the empty streets of Kathmandu all through the day and night as people are rushed to hospitals. At the Bir hospital, one of the largest in Kathmandu, the staff struggles to cope with the deluge of patients. Nurse Suman Chaudhary has been working 12-hour shifts, leaving her 10-month-old daughter, Avodaya, at home. The doctors are even more stretched, working 24-hour shifts, with barely a break.

“My little baby is at home, but I am needed here,” says Chaudhary, trying to lessen the guilt of leaving her child. Foreign and local volunteers guide the injured into the building, keep records, distribute food to patients, raise their flagging spirits and even man the helpdesk counter outside the hospital. The four floors of the 200-bed hospital are packed with disaster victims. A tiny and frail Sabila Dahal, aged eight, with a skull fracture, a black eye and wounds on her hand, whimpers in pain as she clutches her teddy bear, almost the same size as her. Her grandfather sits beside her on a chair, trying to comfort her with whispered stories and rhymes.

Ordinary people in Kathmandu are helping in every way they can. Alok, who owns the Dalle (Nepali cherry-like chilli) restaurant in nearby Kamal Pokhari, is one such saviour who packs food from his restaurant and, together with his staff, carts it to the hospital to distribute among the survivors.

At Bhaktapur, the stunning World Heritage Site with its palace durbar and temples, many iconic structures are severely damaged. The half-man, half-lion statues, already defaced by shoddy restoration, watch over the collapsed buildings and temples. The narrow lanes of the city make it difficult for rescue and recovery vehicles to reach the victims.

Satya Ram Suwal had a three-storey house in one such lane. With one wall of the building devastated, his home is now reduced to the pots, pans and cupboards that are visible from a distance. On the day of the earthquake, Suwal was outside his house. “I could only think of myself when the earth was shaking. When the tremors slowed I ran to save my children. I could hear people crying out for help, but I felt that my children were more important and I stayed with them. I feel guilty now,” he says.

Looking at his wife Sapna, who stands next to him, he adds. “She is braver than me, she ran to save our children first.” Sapna, who was in a neighbour’s house 50m away, describes how she fought her friends when they tried to stop her from leaving. Goose pimples rise on her neck and hands as she describes how she ran barefoot, in panic, shouting the names of her son and daughter, even as the earth shook under her feet and dust clouds hid everything. “I thought I won’t see my children again, I was a few seconds away, but it felt like I took 15 minutes to get here,” she says.

Aerial view

As our aircraft prepares to land in Kathmandu, we see the peaks of Mount Everest and the Annapurna range towering above the clouds in the distance. As we descend below the cloud cover, many orange and neon-blue tarpaulins become visible among the apartment blocks and homes. Since the first earthquake hit Nepal with an intensity of 7.6 on the Richter scale at around noon on April 26, 40 tremors measuring more than 4.5 have followed. Terrified of the aftershocks, people today prefer the safety (and cold) of the outdoors to the uncertainty and vulnerability of their homes.

At the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, on the banks of the Bagmati river, funeral pyres burn all day and even after sunset. Shiva, a priest at the temple, points to a spot on the riverbank where a mother and child were consigned to the flames. An old priest uses a bamboo stick to adjust the logs on the pyres that continue to burn.

Many people here have lost the little they had. After 18 years of driving people around in his Maruti 800 taxi, Gyan Bahadur Tamang had built a home in Kabra, near Kathmandu. In 52 seconds, it turned to dust.

“It will take 20 years for our country to get back to where we were. The Indian government is helping its citizens, taking people home, and rescuing our people here, while our government does nothing,” says Tamang.

The resourceful and hardworking people of Nepal have given their share to the region, and also the world.

They now face the worst crisis their country has seen in three generations. Nepal needs all the help it can get.

Saurabh Yadav and Vivek Singh are an independent writer-photographer duo based out of Delhi and working on in-depth reportage projects

COMMENT NOW