National

Heart-rending scenes in Mumbai hospitals

By Kalpana Sharma

A blast victim being treated at the J.J. Hospital in Mumbai on Monday. — PTI

MUMBAI Aug. 25. Sikander Kumar Tiwari used to be one of dozens of photographers who wait around Mumbai's Gateway of India. His daily routine consisted of seeking to persuade tourists to let him photograph them with his Polaroid camera that produces a picture in about a minutes' time. Today, he is laying in a daze in a Government hospital, not fully aware of what struck him and destroyed his means of livelihood — his camera.

This 20-year-old photographer typifies the kind of people who have been injured, or killed, in the blasts. Most of the injured, in the wards of south Mumbai's three government-run hospitals, the 157-year old J.J. Hospital, the St. George's Hospital and the G.T. Hospital, were relatively poor people. People like Kamal Pawar, who sells flowers near the Gateway of India; Haider Ali, who works in a fruit juice shop located a few feet away from the site of the blast in the crowded Mumbadevi area; and Rajkumar, a rotund milkman who owns a cow and lives near the Mumbadevi temple, whose deity gives the city its name. Between them they represent the diversity of people who work on the streets of Mumbai every day, and who principally fall victim to disasters such as the one that struck it today.

According to doctors, most of the injured came in with shrapnel wounds and heavy loss of blood, or in a state of shock. At the J.J. Hospital, a woman died on the operating table as surgeons struggled to remove a spanner that had pierced her body. Another patient died in the busy emergency ward where doctors and nurses were attending to dozens of injured. In the matter of a few minutes, the number of dead had gone up to 29 in just that hospital.

Outside the wards, the relatives of the dead and wounded waited anxiously. While Haider Ali, the fruit juice shop employee who was in the J.J. Hospital, did not know whether his brother Tariq, who works in the same shop, had survived, Fazal Ali waited outside for news of his 19-year-old nephew, Mohammad Afzal, who lay wounded in the ward. At St. George's, a blackboard displayed a list of the dead and injured - 14 dead and 37 injured at last count. By early evening, at all three hospitals an information counters had been established to help people looking for their relatives.

Some of the bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. Many people lost their limbs. Several others were comatose. The scenes were heart-rending.

Despite the steady arrival of the bodies and the influx of the wounded into the three public hospitals, there was little panic. A fairly high level of organisation was evident. G. B. Daver, dean of the J.J. Hospital, said that the 1,400-bed hospital was geared for such mass casualties. At any given time over a hundred doctors and nurses could be summoned to deal with an emergency, he said. The other two hospitals, which are also under the same Dean, have 500 beds each. The hospitals had a sufficient supply of blood, he said.

Yet, hundreds of people lined up to donate blood as news of the blasts reached different parts of the city. In the J.J. Hospital alone, some 150 staff members donated blood.

You could not find a more crowded place in Mumbai to place a bomb. The area around the Mumbadevi temple, at the junction of what is called the Dagina Bazar and the Yusuf Meherally Road, has as many people on the road as in the packed buildings that line the area. This is the old section of south Mumbai, an area that combines a variety of trades and residence types. It is an area where Hindu and Muslim trader and daily wage earner, jeweller and cobbler all ply their trade.

Except during the dead of the night, the roads here are impassable as handcarts, taxis, cars, scooters, cows, bicycles and people jostle for space. Women walk around with tethered cows, selling grass; others sell flowers to those going to the Mumbadevi temple. And even diamond merchants conduct business on the street, sitting on parked scooters as they open small paper packets containing quantities of the precious rock.

The blast today occurred at a time when many people step out of the buildings for lunch. It destroyed cars, taxis, scooters parked in the vicinity, created a crater in the road, shattered windows in the surrounding buildings, and brought down much of the facade of the already dilapidated Navnidhan Bhavan, the building that took the force of the blast. Fortunately, for the over 60 goldsmiths from West Bengal, who make gold jewellery in rooms in that building, the staircase did not collapse. All of them managed to escape.

Anand Rai, whose paan shop has flourished at the foot of the Navnidhan Bhavan for the last 20 years, thanks his lucky stars that he had not reached his shop when the blast occurred. His shop is a wreck but his nephew who was in the shop sustained only a minor injury.

Others in the area were not so lucky. Most of the 51 injured and 29 dead at the JJ Hospital, and the 47 injured and three dead at the GT Hospital were in this area. The street is strewn with shattered glass and with footwear. And by early afternoon, all the shops in the vicinity had closed, including those off the busy Nakhuda market of readymade garments that usually remains open until late at night.

When asked who people thought was responsible for the blast, Rai spoke up for the others. "How can we common people know about why these things happen?" he said. "But I can tell you this. This is not human. It is poor people who die when these things happen."

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