Remnants in the rubble

The building collapsed and we were at the site where I couldn't just walk away from the rubble. Leftovers from lives can tell one so much about people who once owned these. An edited version was published in the Indian Express on November 17, 2010.


Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 16, 2010

A red saree, or what remained of it, fluttered in the breeze. An Amul milk packet, torn, peeped from the chinks in the pile. Too much of everyday life that was consumed in seconds was there. A clock that stopped at the hour when the tragedy struck was among the objects that were slavaged, not by choice, but because they were part of the debris.

Between the tragedy and the resurrection, a pile of rubble lies. It is a connector of sorts, a bridge between the remnants of the past and an uncertain future.

From the bricks the crane spewed on to the playground as the officials cleared the debris on the site of the collapse, emerged details of lives that had been uprooted, lost or left in a limbo. They fell with the bricks just like the five-floor building in the corner did Monday evening.

The pink pillars, measuring only the size of an index finger, had been struck off. But the figurines in the wedding snow ball were intact. The crystal globe with its pink and black hero and heroine dancing lay on a pile of bricks, illuminating the loss. The broken pillars reminded of the immediate event, the tragedy that sent reverberations across the neighborhood.

In the juxtaposition of the joy that was when the snow ball may have occupied a place of pride in the dinghy rooms where men and women slept in dozens, and the present moment where it was a part of the ruins, summed the human tragedy that left more than 65 people dead, and displaced hundreds of others. The tension between what remained, and what was lost played out in the rubble.

In the shattered, mangled remnants, lives had been trapped.

A kettle, lopsided in its tragic placement, was thrown on the side. Next to it, a few plates were strewn. A gas stove, blackened and distorted, also filled the space as rescue workers and police scrambled to get to the actual site. The rubble was on the way, neglected in a corner, a space where such things collected.

A few leaves from an album was found, too. A mother and a son are shot against the backdrop of a fir tree and turquoise skies, and blossoming flowers. A studio in one of the villages they must have hailed from. They said it was Karimpur in Bengal.

The mother is sitting in a red plastic chair. The son is standing, his face tense as he gazed into the camera.

From the rubble, voices also emerged, pleas for help, they said.

The ones under the heap dialled from their cell phones. They were desperate to claim their lives, get rescued before the battery died, or before they died.

The rescue workers talked about a woman who called someone. She was buried. But that was in the morning. After that, she didn't call.

Nobody knew what happened to her. Maybe the rrubble consumed her and she became a remnant of the rubble, too.

Through the afternoon, and the evening, the rubble piled up. More stories, not a coherent whole, but scattered and thrown apart and told through notebooks, passport photos, torn clothes, and distorted kitchen utensils, emerged from the heap of bricks.

Vikram Halder's English notebook was placed on a bed of bricks. It had been arranged carefully, and juxtaposed with the snow ball, and yet another notebook of a Class 12 student of the Govt. Co-ed Senior Secondary School.

A few members of the television crew had arranged them to show the scale of the tragedy, and its toll on aspirations, dreams, opportunities.

In one of the pages, Mukesh, the Class 12 student, had written “Who told you this news? What harm did I do to you?”

A child's innocent drawings, his jibes at his classmates and teachers were now a public spectacle, a photo-op, part of material that could tell a story of someone who either had come out alive, or had perished or maybe was still waiting under debris to be rescued.

On the same page, a lined notebook, oblong, Mukesh wrote “Memoirs of a childhood.”

Under it, he wrote “agony” and then in Hindi, he wrote “Afsos.”

On yet another page, he scribbled “Today when I am not there, then everybody want me.”

Towards evening, nobody had come to claim the notebooks. A passport photo of a young boy was in the pages. But in the confusion of who was and who wasn't, the name and the photo were separate identities, and existed without the other.

He had sketched portraits, pigeons, dogs. He had meticulously translated sentences in Hindi into English. He even had a teacher write “good” on a few pages.

He must have been fumbling for words when he wrote “There are some strangers that cross that river.”

What he was meant to write instead of “strangers” was “fishermen.”

But in that moment, in that confusion of loss, many strangers had crossed the river. Nobody could tell if Mukesh and Vikram were among them, or they had been cast on the shore.