Ningamma looked lost when she suddenly found herself surrounded by a large group of people who had just discovered that she was the wife of one of those injured in Wednesday’s building collapse in Bellandur.
She didn’t know whether to feel happier about how her five-year-old son had wandered off to take a chocolate from somebody, thus escaping coming under the rubble, or the fact that her husband, Nagaraj, was in hospital recuperating from an injury that could have been worse. “But they haven’t allowed me to speak to him yet,” she said.
Carrying little Akash around the rubble of what had been their home for the past four months, Ms. Ningamma, who is from Raichur, could only manage to shake her head when asked, “What will you do now?”
She works in a coffee shop to supplement her husband’s income as a labourer, and missed becoming a part of the list of injured by less than half an hour. “Just before I was about to go home for lunch, the coffee shop staff told me about the building collapse at 12.50 p.m. I rushed to the spot and saw the remains of the building that my husband was working in. I instantly started looking for my son and found him on the road,” she recalled. But the rest of the events of the day were a blur. She was told of her husband’s rescue but did not get to see him in the hospital.
She said two “Kannada families” and three “Telugu families” lived together in the makeshift basement house. The others lived upstairs. But she wasn’t sure if they were all alive.
She along with her son and the family members of one of the other injured have moved into a nondescript hut, the home of a family of construction labourers working on an adjacent project. “How could we let those women and children sleep on the road? We asked them to stay with us,” said Yankamma, who lives in the hut.
