Lal Din, 45, thought it was Judgement Day. He was harvesting corn outside his house when the mountains shook. “Walls of my house came crashing down. I watched transfixed,” he says. “Only when it stopped did I come back to my senses. My house was gone and my wife, the only person inside, buried under it”. Then there was dust. “I could not see anything. All I heard were cries. It was hellish”, says Din, whose two sons were out in the village and survived.It took a while before the dust settled. A new Kamalkote emerged — a massive burial ground with mammoth graves in place of what were mud and stone shelters. “There were cries. Survivors sitting near their collapsed houses, crying, frantic with shock and grief,” Din says.It was lonely in the village. Trapped in their individual losses, few people had the urge to ask the well-being of their neighbours. As night approached and hills morphed into bristling gigantic sillhouetes closing in from every side, the villagers, many of them injured, cowered in the courtyards, near the rubble which contained their relatives.“I was alone with my terrified sons. My wife was buried there. I felt helpless,” Lal Din says. “It was scary in the dark. I can’t forget it,” says Lal Din, who spent the night walking about in the village but within the sight of his house, pleading for help to rescue his wife. No one helped, but Din says he is not hurt. “Every house was a graveyard. Every family had lost their loved ones. I was still fortunate as my sons were alive.”“We woke up at dawn and ate Sehri. It seemed so usual.”The day after the quake, the scale of the tragedy sunk in, and survivors from every household set about removing the debris and whatever household item they could retrieve.On the third day, some BSF men and fresh recruits from the Police Training School, Sheeri, 60 km away, took out the body of Din’s wife. “She was in bad state but her face was intact. Her eyes were open,” Din says grimly. “We didn’t cry.” They buried her in the backyard. One person from the village attended the funeral. In the next few days, some help arrived, with the Army, BSF and some police personnel making it to the village. A week after, Kamalkote has counted 300 dead.
