The image of her foot sticking out from under a huge rock on the Qazinag ridge came to symbolise the horror of last Saturday’s earthquake.Today, Safeena’s grave lies in the backyard of the rubble of her house in the foothills. It is a mud grave, a loose, rather flat mound of freshly dug-out soil which has not yet lost its wet-earth smell. Thorny keekar twigs have been placed over it to keep people from stepping on it. The devastation wreaked by the earthquake has ensured that Kamalkote can only be reached by a treacherous, winding road that takes very long to negotiate thanks to the slow-moving aid convoys inching their way along. It was not easy getting down Safeena’s body from under the loose, rocky face of a battered hill. Her father, Nazir Ahmad Abbasi, says: “For three days I begged everybody to help me bring her down. But nobody listened. Finally, it was the Border Security Force which sent 15 personnel with me up the hill.” He adds: “It took them four hours to lift the rock and recover her body. It was completely crushed.” A modest burial followed. “The BSF took the body to the village police station, photographed it and handed it over to me. Only four persons were present at the burial. Nobody (else) had time for the funeral,” Abbasi says. Last Saturday began like any other day for Safeena, who was fasting. “She regularly kept fast and prayed five times. She woke up in the night, ate her sehri, prayed at dawnbreak and left for hills with five goats,” her father said. But on that day Safeena promised her father she would return early. “I wanted her to come before iftaar, so she promised she would be home in the afternoon,” recalls Abbasi. Safeena’s friend Shazia remembers: “We used to go together. But that day she was already up the hill. I was watching her going up. I shouted at her to stop and join me. But soon the mountain shuddered, the rocks rained and the dust rose.” Shazia, who is still haunted by her friend’s cries as she was killed, says: “I heard her cry. I too was crying cowering near a big rock. And then fell the hush.” Across the Kamalkote, Safeena is now just a statistic — one of the many killed in the earthquake. The main concern of the survivors now is picking up the pieces of their shattered lives. The road to Kamalkote is full of trucks, mini buses and Sumos containing relief material sent by mohalla committees, NGOs, various social organisations, political parties and even separatists. Clothes and eatables litter the open spaces here with quake victims sitting by them. Station House Officer Abdul Rashid Dar has a tough time controlling the swell of quake victims demanding relief. “Relief material is sufficient. In fact, there is excess now. But it is difficult to reassure the people,” he says. Subedar Bacchu Singh of Rashtriya Rifles who has helped bring a number of people down to safety says: “I went there (to the mountain top). They had not received anything. So I got them down”. Tents have come up outside many houses but are still not enough in number. There is still no semblance of normalcy. “Just as you conclude the last of the dead has already been counted, the stink near an overturned house proves you wrong,” Dar says.
