Snow’s barely two feet deep but shelters already turning into ‘cold storages’

Snows at the infamous Sadhna Pass, which connects Tangdhar with the rest of Kashmir, cut off over a dozen villages for around five days this week. The road was cleared today, giving a window of relief to the hamlets stranded on it. Their residents must now face as best they can the irony of having survived the quake with damage to property—but relatively little loss of life—only to grapple with a winter against which they have no defence.

‘‘You have comparatively warm weather ahead of Tangdhar, where the most deaths happened in the quake. But to its south, where some villages lost no one in the quake, there has been plenty of snowfall now. The winter is only too likely to take its toll,’’ said Najeeb Ahmad from Bodghnambal village, one of those cut off from the outside world this week.

‘‘After the snowfall, these sheds have turned into cold storages,’’ said Riyaz Ahmad, a class XI student. ‘‘It gets colder at night and we have had to put men on duty to clear the snow from the roofs lest they should collapse.

‘‘We were lucky to get these tin sheets from government and some voluntary organisations,” he said, “but they are not sufficient during winter. Cough, cold, pneumonia and typhoid have become common here. Every home has patients now.’’

Saleema Begum and her grandmother are trying to recuperate from the injuries they sustained during the quake. But healing remains a distant prospect. ‘‘Our wounds have not closed completely and the cold only adds to our pain,’’ Saleema says.

Meanwhile, the number of patients here continues to rise and each day convoys of villagers set out with them for the faraway Kralipora or Chowkibal hospitals.

And this is only the beginning. With more than two feet of snow this week already, the tough times are still to come. ‘‘Last winter, we received more than

10 feet of snow here and it was much more at Sadhna,” said Captain Avinash who heads a nearby unit. “These sheds may simply disappear.’’