Army personnel trying to dig out bodies in Saddal village, Jammu.
It was as if Saddal village in Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir never existed. It is no longer in the map. The 40-odd houses or the people who lived in them too don't exist anymore.
The mountain - on which it nestled for hundreds of years - came crashing down and in way gobbled it up all last Saturday. Looking at the mountain now and the landslide you could say after five days of incessant rain, it was on "self destruct" mode.
All that is left is rubble, mangled pieces of tin, parts of a child's slate with illegible scrawls and a piece of door frame still sticking out or standing firm in the rubble. Clothes discoloured by mud, shoes, and few body parts - like a portion of a hand or toes. Today, the disfigured, mutilated body parts don't look like they belonged a person but more like parts of the earth in which they are firmly entrenched.
The only way to reach what is left of Saddal is long trek through the mountains charting new roads because the roads that led to the village too don't exist anymore. My camera person Darshan Kumar and I trekked for about three hours to reach Saddal. Roads have been opened by army bulldozers but you only reach the vicinity. Rest of the way, you balance your self across sharp and slushy cliff like formations and slippery stones. Darshan, a local boy from Jammu, was as sure footed as a mountain goat. I too did admirably, albeit there were a few falls, and slips down slushy slopes.
By all available accounts it started at about quarter to noon on Saturday morning. It ended in five minutes later.
"I got a call at about 11.45 am from my brother. He said the house had developed cracks and was sinking," Ganesh Singh told us adding, "Three to four minutes later when I called him back to ask to leave immediately and take everyone with him, the phone wasn't ringing". Like us, Ganesh too had made his way back to the landslide spot today. He pointed us towards a huge bolder and said, "That is where my house used to be." Of a family of eight, two are alive today. Ganesh was away in Jammu about 170 odd km away, and his father was in the field then. They survived.
We met Ganesh at the spot where his home stood once, about 300 metres away from rubble that his left of his home, the 19 Gharwal Rifles were hard at work. Colonel Nitin Tiwari, the Commanding Officer of the unit and his men were trying to remove a boulder as high as three stories. They all wore masks, because of the stench makes it difficult to work. And they were having a go at the pieces of the mountain that came it their way with a vengeance.
The reason: 19 Gharwal has been tasked to pull out the bodies. So far they have pulled out seven. And from the little cracks in the debris and rubble they have seen hands of a child. For them whatever effort it takes they want to pull out the baby and give it decent burial.
As I spoke to Colonel Tiwari trying to understand what kept them going, a jawan pulled out a dead table clock from rubble. It had stopped at 50 minutes past 11. The class casing had been shattered but the clock hands were intact.
As I was connecting what Ganesh had narrated to us earlier and what the dead clock revealed about what would have happened that Saturday, Darshan jolted me out, "We have to walk all the way back, think you can make it back through the mountains after after sun down," he said.
As we turned back, we started wading back through the slush and negotiated the sharp cliff like falls again. I kept wondering did that child even for once realise that the mountain have had enough of the rains and was giving way after protecting the village for so long.