Swathed in smoke from the nearby makeshift crematorium, Jituba Waghela stared disconsolately yesterday at the few battered belongings he had rescued from under the rubble that was once his home. We were in Bhachau, one of the worst-hit towns in western India's earthquake-ravaged Kutch region.
The acrid fumes carried the smell of burning human bodies, victims of last week's bhukamph (earthquake) that shattered not only the 35-year-old labourer's life, but flattened completely the entire township in which he had grown up.
"There is nowhere I can go now," he said, weeping uncontrollably. "All the places I was familiar with in a 100 km radius of Bhachau are no more," he added.
In the tremors which rocked Bhachau, a town of over 100,000 residents, for over 45 seconds last Friday, Wagehla lost not only his wife and two children, but also scores of people he had known since childhood.
The bodies of his family members were recovered at the weekend by soldiers from the engineer regiment. They had chipped at the mountain of rubble the entire night with crowbars and chisels.
"What will become of me now?" Waghela wailed hopelessly. "All I want is a place to live and some livelihood to put back my life. But none of that seems likely for a long, long time." Police officials said 90 per cent of Bachau's structures had collapsed while the remainder, though standing, were useless and unsafe.
In the adjoining alleyway - or what remains of it - sat Magan Behan and Prajapati, her 60-year-old husband. Having lost four children, including their breadwinning teenage son, they sat despondently on a few rescued belongings. The earthquake had left them little else. There was not even enough wood to give their children a decent cremation. They simply draped their bodies in used car tyres and old clothes before setting them alight. "The earthquake robbed our children of even the final dignity" Prajapati said.
Such abject hopelessness and tragic tales abound in Bhachau and nearby towns, like Anjar to the south-east, so far bypassed by the main rescue effort.
The smell of decomposing bodies hangs heavy in the air, throwing even trained sniffer dogs off the trail of the living.
Instead, some 25 teams of 20 soldiers moving constantly from house to house shouting out for survivors, had paid off. The army recovered five people, including two women pinned under roof beams, over 24 hours.
"It is painstaking, but it works," Col Kuldip Tikku of the Engineer Regiment said.
Heavy equipment was proving ineffective, as the already narrow streets were impassable, piled high with rubble making it impossible for bulldozers or earth-movers to function efficiently.
Soldiers were reduced to using crowbars, chisels, hammers and even their bare hands to rescue the living and recover the dead.
A 72-strong Russian rescue team too managed to save nine people from Bhachau including an octogenarian, two infants and a woman with the help of their Labrador and two sheep dogs.
Team leader Andrev Legoshin said today was the last day they were hopeful of rescuing more victims. "After that it is impossible as dehydration sets in and victims already suffering from the crash syndrome die a slow, horrible death," he declared.
Besides Russia, rescue teams from Britain, Turkey, France and Germany have joined Indian soldiers in relief work. This is the Indian army's biggest ever rescue effort, causing it to curtail important winter manoeuvres along the nearby border with Pakistan. Tales of dramatic rescue are becoming fewer as hopes began to fade of finding more people alive after three freezing nights in the desert.
Survivors complained army rescue teams lacked generators for light, making night rescue work impossible. "The authorities are overwhelmed by the disaster and it will take them some time before they can begin to function efficiently," said R.N. Jhala, a Bhachau labourer.
But by then they will only be digging out the dead, he added. "We are running late for those trapped for the last three days without food and water," Kevin Kelly of UK Fire Services said. The chances of survival start at 80 per cent, but decline to a mere 34 per cent at the end of the third day, he added.
"Once you get to four days you are stretching it," Mike Thomas of Britain's Department for International Development rescue team said.
Scores of villages in the region, levelled by the earthquake, remained without succour. Many survivors waited for treatment from overworked doctors who struggled to keep pace with the incessant flow of the injured, many carrying out nearly 200 operations daily. Scores of injured villagers lay along main highways, hoping to be taken for treatment while others begged passers-by for food and water.
"The only people who are actually helping are the army and the non-governmental organisations," Jhala said. The state administration is missing, unable to cope with its own losses. But at places where relief supplies flowed in, hundreds of people queued up before giant cauldrons and volunteers served rice and lentil curry.
Thousands, meanwhile, continued to sleep in the open despite plummeting temperatures, huddled around bonfires.