Anjar’s poor search for elusive gold

While cash and gold comes the way of only those who are lucky, the rest have to be content with wood, iron, scrap and odd assortment like purses. Such is the frenzied search that the police had to intervene and cane people to keep them away from moving vehicles. In the end the police gave up, leaving the entire ground to the poor who live on its edges.

The rush for gold started here a couple of days ago, when the authorities started offloading the debris at various sites. All over the vast expanse of the Octroi ground mounds of rubble have been dumped.

‘‘We are not afraid anymore because we have seen and removed enough corpses,’’ says Devrajbhai Gadhvi.

‘‘She must have been a Muslim woman,’’ 20-year-old Manekdan Gadhvi wonders as he picks up an orange salwar. He has not got any gold or cash as yet but says many others have. He smiles as his neighbour desperately tries to open a lady’s purse. ‘‘There is nothing inside.’’ The slum-dwellers have little else to do; they get their food from relief vehicles, and have no work because their employers in Anjar are either dead or have fled. Ever since the heaps of rubble arrived in the ground few poor have slept, says Shailesh Goswami. ‘‘In any case it is scrap, if they get valuables well and good. It is a kind of job,’’ he reasons.

‘‘We begin early in the day and continue till the evening falls,’’ Zubiben Shaikh admits showing her fingers, wounded from handling concrete rubble for hours.When asked whether they came across any corpse, they laugh, saying ‘‘gamama jaon game tetli malshe’’ (go to the town you will get as many bodies as you want).

‘‘I am not looking for anything. Came here only to show my children around,’’ a visibly embarrassed Mangalbhai Vankar says, and later sheepishly admits he got only a gas tube.

The slum-dwellers claim some of them got as much as Rs 51,000 in cash and half a kilogram of gold.

They admit that stories like these bring more and more people looking for that elusive pot of gold and cash.

Valjibhai Sutar is one such person. Just a day before he was engaged in removing the dead from the debris. Having seen the occupants of flattened structures trying to salvage valuables from the rubble, he has now moved to the ground.

Some house owners were successful in removing the valuables in the first few days. But most who lost family members made no such attempt. The poor are eyeing such mounds of rubble knowing it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other.

‘‘We are hardworking people. We will continue to toil till lady luck favours us,’’ an elderly man says.