For the last three days as I went around this shocked city with my trousers hitched up and a notebook in my hand speaking to desperate people whose families were trapped in the flooded parts of the city and then with those rescued from their cracking and crumbling houses, my own anxiety was rising. My grandmother, my uncle, two aunts, three young cousins including a three month old baby were in Batamaloo at my aunt's house. We had no news of them except that the house was in water and it was no one's priority to rescue people from that armpit of the city.
I chose to believe that they must be fine until last night when someone mentioned that three dead bodies were floating in the waters of Batamaloo. I immediately discarded it as a rumor, but rumors in Kashmir are never entirely untrue and at times they are the truth.
With the water levels receding across the city and my own anxiety rising, I decided to go in and find them, and joined a ragtag rescue team of young boys from the city. They had already been rescuing people over the last three days and today they were going in with a supply of essential stuff --boxes of baby milk, biscuits, diapers, candles and match boxes, and hundreds of water packets.
The dry land ended at Bypass Srinagar, a national highway, where the dividing parapet today was home to hundreds of people who had left their submerged homes behind or had been rescued over the last four days. They were huddled there in small tarpulin tents. No Government aid had reached them, they said, and they were being helped by the locals who came in trucks and and trolleys with vegetables and rice and bread. The Army yesterday brought the lentils and chappatis and though, they said, they didn't want to take food from them, the absence of help from the local government and the hunger inside their bellies made them fight for the food.
We placed the relief material on a thermacol that sailed smoothly on the dirty water through which we started to wade in. With each step it rose higher and within five meters we were hip-deep in the flood. People looked out from the second and third floors of their houses hanging out buckets and baskets tied to ropes. They were the ones off the main road and help passed by their houses often. We had to go deeper inside, and I had to go even deeper to the Rek Chowk mohalla to find my family.
My grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, his wife and their three month old baby had left their house in a hurry on Saturday evening when announcements rang out from the mosque at dusk that water was coming toward their house in Natipora area. They had thought my aunt's house in Batamaloo would be safe.
But the water was five feet high in Batamaloo today and had been around 12 feet on Sunday and Monday.
From the windows, women with babies slung over their shoulders begged for water, baby food and medicine: for infection, diaharrea, vomiting and tension. No relief had come there either.
As we kept getting closer to my aunt's home I grew more silent, afraid that bad news awaited me.
Finally I saw a familiar lane. It took me a while to recognize the house. It looked unfamiliar with its broken walls and windows, the flower pots floating sideways. It looked empty at first and then they rushed out suspecting someone had come.
“No one came here from the government. No one brought us any water or food or anything at all,” my aunt cried. “We felt so far from the world and believed that we were going to die.”
The Army had airdropped packets of chips and biscuits. “They are all past expiry date,” my uncle shouted. “We waited for them to float to us for an hour and then everything was expired.”
I was too happy to see them alive to care about the expiry dates on the packets. The walk back to the dry land was shorter, easier and waters were less cold.
