Cold Mountain

But soon her husband, Mushtaq Ahmad, will be placed beneath mounds of wet earth. And the above scene will be replayed again and again with different actors. For almost all the 95 villages across Uri along the Line of Control are burying or mourning the loved ones who perished when the earth shook on October 8.

The last journey
AHMAD8217;S last journey began 24 hours earlier from a little bend where the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road takes a final turn towards Aman Setu to pierce through the LoC. Along with 65 labourers, he was travelling in a Beacon truck when the earth heaved, burying all of them alive.

Nineteen km away, the same jolt turned Ahmad8217;s home into rubble. Emerging from the debris, coping with the immediate horror of destruction, his family also had to reconcile themselves to the inevitability of the news from the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road.

Finally, it was his brother Mohammad Aslam, accompanied by a few local youth, who set out on the journey in search of the body. Carrying a stretcher and several metres of white cloth, they trekked for five hours along the ridge overlooking the Jhelum8212;the road lay in ruins8212;to reach the spot where the Beacon lay in ruins.

Hungry and exhausted, they dug through the mounds of earth for hours before finding the body. And then, it was time for another tortuous trek back home on a dangerous, zigzagging footpath, ducking stones that still rolled down the hills.

8216;8216;I didn8217;t feel any pain. Perhaps it was beyond pain,8217;8217; says Aslam. 8216;8216;Within seconds, we lost everything. We don8217;t know how we will live. I feel numb. Why did it happen to us?8217;8217;

As Aslam talks, a lone wail echoes through the mountains: 8216;8216;He didn8217;t even say goodbye. How can I leave him here?8217;8217;

A shot at life
BY all counts, Ahmad was lucky: he was administered the last rites and given a decent burial. Most of the people killed by the devastating earthquake didn8217;t even get a cursory wash before they were buried.

The destruction wrought by the quake appears especially tragic as this remote area was fast recovering from a decade of living in a war-like situation. Because of its location along the LoC, the villagers lived in constant fear, spending most of their time in underground bunkers to avoid the Pakistani shells that would land up unannounced, taking lives and destroying homes.

If the 2002 ceasefire between India and Pakistan gave them the licence to live, the inauguration of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road in April this year brought back the smiles. For the first time in half a century, reunions with family members on the other side of the LoC became feasible, meetings were planned, there was something to look forward to.

Nobody expected that after six months and 12 buses, Uri would turn into a valley of death.

Reaching out
THEN there is Tangdhar and Teetwal, where the Neelam doubles up as the LoC till it enters PoK and merges with the Jhelum in Muzaffarabad. The landscape here, impossibly perfect with gushing streams, sprawling meadows, snowy peaks, can eclipse any tourist destination inside the main Kashmir Valley.

For decades, these breathtaking valleys at the extreme edge of Kupwara district were physically inaccessible to outsiders. The isolation deepened with the emergence of militancy, as the Tangdhar-Teetwal region became a theatre of the Indo-Pak war and thousands of troops moved in to protect the LoC and prevent infiltration.

Today, when the entry points lie open to allow hundreds of volunteers to carry relief into the devastated areas, the beauty of the valley lies pockmarked with heaps of rubble and bodies of its inhabitants. More than 350 villagers perished in this region last Saturday.

When J038;K Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed gave the first comprehensive estimate of the loss to life and property, the toll in the Uri and Tangdhar sector had already touched 1,195, while 5,796 people were listed as injured; hundreds more were8212;are8212;missing.

Mufti said that 42,720 houses were fully destroyed while 73,450 were too damaged to allow shelter. The survey also revealed that 1.2 lakh villagers in 95 villages of Uri were severely affected, besides 25,000 in Tangdhar8217;s 42 quake-hit villages.

Although it took several days for the J038;K government to respond to the crisis, the army and the population across Kashmir came to the immediate rescue of the quake-hit. Despite loss of lives and destruction to their infrastructure across the LoC, the army deployed its choppers and men to rescue the injured and take them for medical attention at Srinagar.

And within a day of the quake, hundreds of volunteers from across Kashmir rushed food, drinking water, clothes and blankets to Uri and Tangdhar. Groups of young men even trekked to inaccessible villages to provide relief.

The next chapter
BUT now, as the official emergency passes, the need is to immediately rush stockpiles of rations to these regions, especially Tangdhar and the upper reaches of Uri, which get inaccessible during the winters.

The reconstruction process, too, needs to speed up as these areas will be snowbound within a month. Tents can only be a temporary solution; they are certainly no defence against a harsh winter.

Fast-track reconstruction, in fact, can be feasible only if the work is not monopolised by a single government agency. Several quake-hit villages have already been adopted by various NGOs, government bodies like NHPC or security forces like BSF and CRPF. This needs to be encouraged.

Because, whenever life resumes its normal pace here, the fear of the zalzala earthquake will never quite fade away. And the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road, already dotted with memorials of war and peace, will have one more epitaph for Ahmad and his co-labourers8212;right at the end of the peace highway they built with their bare hands.

Mail the author at muzamiljaleelyahoo.com

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