Vilas Jhanjre (34) frantically searches for his parents among the dead at the Arivare Primary Healthcare Centre. He has not found them yet. But deep in his heart, he knows the bitter truth.
As nature took a pause after venting its fury, an ominous silence hung over the verdant hills of Bhimashankar on Friday as villagers struggled to come to terms with the catastrophe that wiped Malin village off the map on Wednesday.
Shell-shocked Jhanjre, who works at the ordnance factory at Khadki in Pune, is an intermittent visitor to his birthplace that he left in the early 2000s in search of better opportunities. “I’m shell-shocked…,” he said. “Our roots [at Malin] have been wiped out in an instant. Life ceases to have meaning without one’s parents.”
“The ones who moved out to the cities in search of jobs in the 1980s survived. The ones who stayed behind, bound to the land, are no more,” grieves Dilip Virnar, looking at the bodies of his relatives at the Primary Healthcare Centre at Arivare, a village near Malin.
Prashant More has been able to identify only the body of his niece, Manisha Dangat. He lost four relatives on Wednesday.
“She studied in class 10…,” he says about Manisha. “She was a bright child… we had high hopes. They hadn’t a chance when the mountain caved in. In daylight, perhaps, the disaster could have been avoided.”
Fear of recurrence Fear of recurrence has accompanied the trauma of Malin. It has gripped the surrounding villages of Kondre and Panchale, as the Mahadev Koli community considers evacuating the land they have traditionally inhabited for centuries.
“The same can happen here,” remarks Navnath Dangat of Kondre village. Like Malin, Kondre, too is situated on a steep incline.
For some, the pain of being severed from their roots is intense. “We may be city-dwelling Kolis who left Malin for greener pastures. But our heart dwells here,” says Mr. Virnar, who is employed with the Pune Municipal Corporation.
