Guest Post by SABAH HAMID

The pilot announces we’re approaching Srinagar. I have a window seat near the right wing, and I lean forward to look down. I always do this, trying to catch a first glimpse of the city I call home despite having lived away for more than half my lifetime now. Today, for the first time, I’m afraid of what I’ll see. The entire valley was flooded two weeks ago when the river Jhelum and then the Dal Lake spilled over. This is not the first flood to hit Kashmir, but nothing of this magnitude has been experienced in living memory. As we descend, I see a lot of large muddy tracts wherever I look. The elderly gentleman sitting in the aisle seat next to me mutters something, probably a prayer, and I turn to look at him. He shrugs resignedly, and I shrug back.

There are an unusual number of Indian passengers in the plane, and at the baggage carousel I am reminded of this again. It’s odd to have tourists so soon after the floods. I cannot make sense of it. Catching sight of a pair of fashionably dressed young women I wonder if they are the relatives of armed forces personnel stationed in the Valley.  It does not matter. I collect my lone suitcase, shoulder my backpack, and head to the pre-paid taxi counter. My parents live close by, just two kilometres away, and I am hoping to hitch a ride with someone if no taxis are available.

Exactly two Sundays ago though, when my parents, sister and young cousin landed in Srinagar, those two kilometres turned out to be very long indeed.

They had been stranded in Ladakh, after the first ‘family vacation’ we had taken in 25 years. I had flown out to Delhi, but their flight to Srinagar was cancelled, an early result of unprecedented rains. They trooped to the Leh airport every morning for four days, only to troop back from it three times. On the fourth day, they were offered a flight to Delhi, and since there are multiple flights from Delhi to Srinagar every day, compared to only one flight a week from Leh, they took it. The next morning, Sunday, September 7, as they waited to get on the Srinagar flight from Delhi, they received several calls and messages to say they should consider staying back a day or so, but it seemed unnecessary to change their plans. In fact, when my parents heard that in some localities the waters were seeping into houses, they worried about the water spoiling the carpets on the ground floor, and wanted to get back even more.

It was only when they landed that the seriousness of the situation struck them. There was no car to pick them up, and no taxis were available. After a couple of hours, they managed to get into a truck along with other passengers. My aunt, my mother’s sister, called them up when they were in the truck, on a stretch of road completely submerged in water, and lost the connection midway through the conversation. That was the last we heard from them until midday Tuesday, more than forty eight hours later. All the mobile phone networks were down, and the landlines were not functional.

Today, as I walk towards the exit, it seems business as usual, except for large cartons on many luggage trolleys, most marked ‘Kashmir Relief’. This is in addition to the bulk relief arriving in the cargo holds of airlines, by all accounts arranged as much by Kashmiris living away from home, as by various NGOs. I notice a familiar face, and stop to wave to Basharat. His face doesn’t register any recognition for a few seconds, and then surprise fills it. The last time he probably saw me was when I was still in school. I only recognise him because of some recent pictures on a social networking site. His parents were neighbours with my mother’s aunt, and in Srinagar, that isn’t a distant connection. We played together a few times as children, although he was actually the friend of my older male cousins. The bank he works at is flooded, he explains. For more than ten days now he’s been going to the airport every day, sometimes with my mother, to pick up big consignments of medicines arranged by a bunch of people in Bangalore, one of whom, Mehraj, is my cousin and his friend. The medicine boxes are addressed to a couple of the airline managers, local boys, ensuring easy identification and delivery. This is one way to guard against the relief material being dumped in the general warehouse where, apparently, tonnes lie unclaimed. There is no one agency coordinating the relief efforts, not unusual for this part of the world, and the NGOs  that I’ve spoken with before flying here, Oxfam and Uday Foundation among them, seem resigned to it.

There is no consignment coming in today. Basharat is at the airport to pick up a cousin, another young man returning to check on his parents. He offers to drop me home, and I’m happy to wait until his cousin’s flight lands. There’s an older woman waiting for her husband to get the luggage, both of them here to check up on her mother-in-law. The elderly lady had not wanted to leave her home for Delhi, and has been through a traumatic night and day stuck in a house surrounded water one storey high, before being rescued by relatives. The house, in Gogjibagh, has since collapsed.

I arrive home to find my mother in the middle of cleaning the shed that stores the gardening equipment, discarded odds and ends, and most importantly, all the winter paraphernalia. Coals for the kangris, wood chips for the hamaam and pieces of cardboard to help with the kindling. All of it is soaking wet, and my mother is directing a hired labourer to spread the coals out on a polyethylene sheet in the garden. My parents look older than I remember from a few weeks back and visibly tired.  The ride home from the airport that Sunday was just the beginning of a distressing time for them. They did manage to reach home, and the water was just a foot high in the garden then. By the evening it had already crept inside the house, and through a sleepless night they watched it inch higher. When it reached the fourth step, they decided it was better to leave now rather than wait. They jumped from the terrace to the roof of the shed, then used a ladder to climb over the back wall (which is corrugated steel, not brick) onto the bund and walked three kilometres to safety. Ironically the banks of the ‘flood channel’ – the gates to which are opened when the level of water in the river Jhelum rises above the danger level – became the escape route for many. The level of water in the channel was dangerously high, but the banks held. The water travelled up to a place called Nadur, encountered illegal construction across its path, curved around and flooded nearby localities.

The combination of an unusual amount of water roaring down from the mountains and encroaching construction in its path is what is supposed to have caused the extreme flooding. The unusual weather conditions that caused the former seem to have taken everyone by surprise – there certainly wasn’t a mass warning issued. The latter, the illegal construction, is the consequence of a growing population and a total lack of civic planning.

The government has come under severe flak for this and almost every action (or inaction) following the flood. At present, three weeks after the worst day of the flood, they are still most conspicuous by their absence. Over the next three days, as I travel with friends, cousins and strangers to various places in the city, I see signboards, mostly handmade, marking out relief camps at several places and free medical camps literally in each mohalla bordering the impacted areas. Only one of the dozen medical camps I count is set up by the government, in Rajbagh, near Presentation Convent School.

The private medical camp near the school, basically a tent with two doctors and a lot of free medicines, has been visited by more than eight hundred people in two days. We head to the storage in Sanath Nagar from where this particular camp, among a few others, is being coordinated. A motley group of people is gathered here, and together they are coordinating sending medicines, chlorine tablets for water purification and baby food to various relief camps. There are numerous impromptu coordinating units like this that have sprung up all over the city, far more quickly and effectively than the government can hope to match. Not that it’s trying to. Somebody quotes Omar Abdullah, the Twitter Chief Minister, saying that the state government has ten lakh chlorine tablets as of that day, and we laugh: Between all of us, using informal networks of people, we have flown in sixteen lakh tablets already. Before flying to Srinagar, I spent a day on the phone with airlines officials in Bhopal, trying to fly in a 220 kilogram consignment of chlorine, because Bhopal was the place the cheapest and fastest delivery was possible. The only introduction I had was through a friend’s friend, someone I haven’t even met, but it worked. It’s a tiny portion of the consignments this particular group of people has sent in. Mehraj and Shamim, one an IT professional and the other a banker, have managed to send hundreds of kilograms of medicines from Bangalore every day for two weeks. It makes you wonder at the degree of the government’s inefficacy.

The inefficacy doesn’t seem out of the usual order of things to most Kashmiris, and neither does the apathy of the Indian central government. Once electricity and internet connections have been restored though, and people have an inkling of how the Indian media has been hard selling the Army as the biggest hero in the rescue operations, there is a fair amount of resentment. Nobody denies the Army was involved, or that they helped in some areas, but the priority clearly was their own personnel, visitors and VIPs.

The pride in everyone’s voice is reserved for the youth of Kashmir. If an estimated 3.5 lakh structures were damaged, 95,000 of them residential houses, (Greater Kashmir, dated September 27) the death toll of less than 400 seems very low. The toll is expected to rise as the water is drained out and the rubble is cleared, both excruciatingly slowly, but even then the ratio of damage to deaths is surprisingly low. Most survivors I have talked to say this is because local people, especially the youth from unaffected downtown areas, swung into rescue mode quickly and spontaneously, sometimes at great risk to themselves.

They couldn’t get to everyone. A cousin of my mother’s was stranded with nine family members on the roof of their house in Jawahar Nagar for three days. There was more than twenty feet of water around them, none of it drinkable, and nowhere to go from the roof. For three days and three nights they saw and heard houses around them collapse while people were still inside. They saw both survivors and dead bodies float to the surface. And they saw Army rescue helicopters hover over them, presumably either surveying the situation or looking for someone specific. There begged the Army personnel in the boats with folded hands, my aunt says in a dead voice, for a bottle of water. They didn’t get it. On the third day, one of the boats got stuck in the electric wires, and the officer in it asked for something to cut the wires with. My relatives had had the presence of mind to carry a pair of pliers when they moved up every storey in the house, and they gave these to the officer. He gave them fifty rupees in return. They refused, and asked for the old parents to be ferried to safety. Or just a bottle of water. Something must have struck a chord with the officer, because the boat picked all of them up.

Over the next few days, I hear many stories like this one. At some point in these conversations, someone usually says, “Can we please talk about something else?” But then goes on to recount some tale related to the flood she or he has heard. It is going to be a long time before Kashmiris can talk of anything else.

The rest of the world has already moved on. The Kashmir floods might have been a small news item, but other news items have quickly replaced it. The day I reached home and stood listening to my parents describe how the water and their terror rose, we were interrupted by the doorbell. It was another relative, a doctor who works in the government hospital in Kangan, a town in the Ganderbal district of Kashmir. There were two other doctors with him, sent from Delhi by the Central Government to help out. He was supposed to take them with him to Kangan and had stopped by our place to check if my mother was home and could go with him to give them some supplies from the medical storage. I was dispatched by my mother to get apples for the two doctors, both women, and when I returned, I suddenly realised they are the same women I noticed at the baggage carousel. It turns out that there was a large team of doctors on that airplane, all ‘assigned’ to various places. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to be fully apprised of the situation or briefed; on the way to the storage facility they asked if there would be time for them to sightsee later.

Sabah Hamid’s description of herself: ‘an ex-corporate stooge who decided to explore life beyond the 9 to 9 routine. I currently spend time recommending productive unemployment to friends, and wondering why I didn’t try it sooner myself.’