There’s a sudden bustle at the model lost-and-found, or “Khoya-Paya centre”, in Section 4 of the Maha Kumbh in Prayagraj. At the information desk, Sunil Wadhwa from Madhya Pradesh is waving a photo and Aadhaar card of his mother, Laxmi Bai Wadhwa, missing since the stampede at the Maha Kumbh Wednesday. “We’ve just arrived to look for my mother,” he tells a staffer behind the counter. “Where else should we go, should we lodge a case?” Ever since the stampede occurred on the occasion of “Mauni Amavasya” and killed at least 30 people and injured 60, scores of people like Sunil have been making their way to the lost-and-found centre, anxiously looking for their still-missing relatives. It’s still unclear how many are missing. But at this centre — the largest of 10 lost-and-founds in the Kumbh — long queues o people continue to snake its way in, some looking for more recently lost people but most for those lost on the intervening night of January 28 and 29 — the time of the stampede. Most of those queueing up are men or young boys, looking for lost mothers, wives, daughters, and grandmothers. “I must have walked over 100 km in the last two days,” says Ram Udesh Rai from Samastipur, Bihar. Rai came to the Maha Kumbh with eight people, of which five are missing. “I had gone to the Central Hospital here and checked on every patient, they were not there. I went to District Hospital Swaroop Rani, and people asked me to check the morgue. I went to the medical college but they weren’t there. Please help,” he says. A desperate Sonu Sharma pushes Rai aside to show the photo of his missing mother and aunt. Sonu is from Ghazipur has been running from one hospital to another since Thursday after someone back home alerted him about his missing family. “I’ve checked every hospital, lost-and-found centres and mortuary but still haven’t found them,” he says desperately. Urmila Devi from Bihar sits on one of the beds inside, surrounded by open cartons. “We had just come out of taking a bath and something resembling an attack happened. I was separated from my husband and son. I’m worried about them and don’t know what happened to them,” she says. As the crowd wanes a little, a staffer tells The Indian Express, “The crowd has now receded but there were even two people in one bed.” As a result, the staff resorted to the next best measure — getting names of the missing persons’ district and village and then contacting the local gram panchayats for more details.
