Fire, Faith, Miracles Amid India’s Rubble

To Hindus, death is another step in the endless cycle of life. Throughout each day and night in a sandy lot in the middle of this ruined city, crackling funeral pyres release dozens of souls to be reborn.

The funeral site’s caretaker is Devsi Raja Mumna Patel. He is 72 years old, a drawling, illiterate man who has learned much about life during 20 years cremating the dead.

“There will be many more ghosts after this,” he said Monday. “But I won’t be afraid. I have met ghosts so many times by now that I think I’m part of them.”

Patel has been minding funeral pyres nearly around the clock, with just four hours’ sleep each night, since Friday, when a massive quake killed an estimated 20,000 people in western India’s Gujarat state. As many as half of them died here in Bhuj.

He has built funeral pyres from cut trees for 456 quake victims at the Lohana Smasham crematorium since Friday, several of them unidentified corpses brought in by police because no relatives had claimed the bodies.

Patel cremated 82 bodies on Monday alone, and with two stacks of firewood piled more than 10 feet high, it was clear he has many long days ahead of him.

Even as the death toll mounted from Friday’s quake, the rescue of 8-month-old Murtaza Ali in the rubble of a Bhuj building renewed hopes that others may still be found alive. The boy was found cradled in the lap of his dead mother.

He was one of a dwindling number of survivors pulled from the wreckage. Doctors said the warmth of the mother’s body helped protect the boy until he could be saved. He was taken to a hospital where rescuers said he was conscious and smiling.

More than 40 fires were burning in Patel’s open-air crematorium Monday night, hissing and popping as sparks spiraled up into the night. On the largest pyre, 18 people were cremated together because only pieces of their bodies were retrieved from destroyed homes and buildings.

A total of eight funeral sites are operating 24 hours a day for Hindu, Muslim and Jain victims in Bhuj, which was near the epicenter of Friday morning’s 7.9 quake, the country’s worst in half a century. It caused as much as $5 billion in damage.

At least 6,200 bodies have been recovered so far across the quake zone, but official estimates of the death toll continue to climb as rescue teams dig deeper into the rubble of thousands of ruined structures.

Keshubhai Patel, the chief minister of Gujarat, said the toll could go as high as 20,000.

The earthquake flattened all but 10% of Bhuj’s historic walled city, which was built more than 400 years ago, said Justin Christian, 32, an engineer working to restore the power supply.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee toured Gujarat state Monday to see the devastation for himself and to try to boost morale as aftershocks continued to terrify survivors.

Most still sleep in the streets each night out of fear that their homes will come crashing down on them. While aid and rescue efforts are reaching more stricken areas, many survivors still complain that their government did too little to help save lives.

Cranes, bulldozers and generators are all in short supply. Without generators to provide electricity, there was no light for nighttime rescue work.

Vajpayee said he will form a national agency to deal with catastrophes like earthquakes, floods and cyclones, which strike this country of more than 1 billion people with almost numbing regularity.

“The country is not ready to face such disasters,” Vajpayee admitted.

In Bhuj, seven relatives took turns over more than three days hammering away at a huge piece of concrete with a steel pole in order to find 80-year-old Shankar Lal.

They finally freed his body Monday and brought it to Patel. The Hindu family sat silently next to a pyre as the corpse burned along with at least eight others lined up side by side.

“His body was totally mashed between a door and a big slab of the first floor,” said Lal’s grandson, Maulik Ramakant Somha, 20. “We had to get him ourselves. . . . The military personnel were too busy digging out those who were alive. They weren’t interested in the dead.”

Lal was a retired primary-school teacher, a respected man sometimes called on to perform marriage ceremonies. Somha looked over at the flames turning his grandfather’s body to ashes and began to weep.

“We are missing him,” Somha said. “We love him. We wish that this kind of earthquake would not happen anyplace on Earth. It is the worst thing that could happen.”

And Somha cried harder: “We are missing our grandfather. We love him very much. We want his soul to be in peace.”

Somha’s faith was not enough for him to comprehend why the ground shook so violently beneath Bhuj, and why some were allowed to live when so many others had to die.

So his father offered an explanation: divine punishment for India’s growing consumerism.

“Morality is low, and sins are increasing,” he said. “There is a reason that God has caused us to suffer. Everyone wants to be rich.”

As he spoke, two police officers arrived, one with a scarf covering his nose and mouth. They came in a large truck that carried a single corpse: an unidentified man in his 40s, wrapped in blankets.

It was about two hours into Constable B. K. Maheswari’s overnight shift, and he had already brought eight unidentified bodies to Patel. No loved ones would be present to witness the man’s cremation.

“We will be his family,” Somha said.