GB Pant Hospital in Srinagar
A tiny slipper, a doll whose worn edges prove once-zealous attention, a half-eaten meal on a steel tray, strewn syringes - follow this trail and it ends at smashed glass windows, through which children and their care-givers rushed out as the water - endless amounts of it - poured into the GB Pant Hospital in Srinagar.
This is Kashmir's main children's medical centre. In the first 24 hours after the state was pulverized by floods, seven infants died at the hospital, most of them barely a few days old, after the electricity was knocked out, ending the crucial support offered by ventilators. The next day, another four babies died, the heart-wrenching tiny casualties of an extreme natural disaster.
Today, six days later, the hospital remains without electricity. The only way to get to it is by boat from the Army's Badami Bagh cantonment, the main base in Srinagar. The soldiers on the boat navigate submerged cars, meshes of wires, the concrete slabs that were lopped off buildings.
The journey, which takes 40 minutes, illustrates with brute, fastidious efficiency how tough it must have been for the army on Sunday and Monday to complete the evacuation of 300 children, many of them critically-ill, and an equal amount of adults. One of the earliest boat rides back to the base from the hospital took four hours.
Children who were being treated in incubators in the hospital were placed in the laps of adults. "We could not carry that sort of equipment on boats...our endeavor was just to take them as fast as possible to the base," said a soldier involved with the rescue operation.
A woman officer says, "We received a few of those babies who were not accompanied by anybody. They were just rescued. We are still holding them in our (army) hospital and we are feeding them... and we are waiting for their relatives to come and claim them."
At the hospital, several feet of water cling stubbornly to most parts of the building, rendering the usual entry points out of reach. The only way to get inside is to climb a metal grill then a steep wall.
The hundreds of empty hospital beds, stripped off sheets and blankets, some of which remain knotted to the windows that turned into emergency exits, prove how ruthlessly and swiftly the water took jurisdiction of a zone devoted to saving children.