The Great Downpour

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XVIII

“I definitely heard a human scream,” said Bhairavi to Muhammad.

The two of them had met up with each other just half an hour ago. Both of them had discovered that they were in good shape. They had each come to their senses about 50 feet away from each other. Muhammad quickly checked to see if he was hurt, and found that he wasn’t hurt at all. Must have rolled about like I do at water parks! He found Bhairavi almost within a few minutes. She had been lying just inside a small cluster of bamboo grass. She too was practically unhurt.



Now they both decided to move upstream and try and locate the source of the scream.

Turning around a gentle leftward bend on the bank, they came face to face with the huge crocodile who had already taken two hits on the head from Sandesh. It looked menacingly at the two new-comers and threateningly opened and closed its jaws.

Bhairavi sprinted away from the crocodile with Muhammad following suit. Just a few metres ahead, they came upon Sandesh and Yash.

“Oh, wow!” said Bhairavi.

“Wow yourself, Bhairu! Hi Mummy! How are you both?” asked Sandesh.

“Fine, thanks,” said Muhammad. He looked at Yash and added, “What’s wrong with him though?”

“He’s broken his leg, yaar!”

Bhairavi and Muhammad sat next to Yash on their haunches and spoke to him.

“Have you both eaten anything?” asked Sandesh.

“No, nothing since yesterday’s breakfast, Sandy!” answered Muhammad.

“Well, we’ll have to improvise our food in the jungle, at least until someone comes to rescue us later in the day,” said Sandesh.

“I vote that we first try and locate the others,” said Bhairavi.

“What do you say we do?” asked Sandesh to Yash.

“I think I am not going to be able to move so soon, so why don’t we first see if we can get something to eat?”

Sandesh and Muhammad set out to get something that could be eaten without cooking. They found a guava tree from which they were able to pluck four or five partially ripened fruit. They took these to where Yash and Bhairavi were waiting. The four of them ate a fruit each in silence. Finally, they were done with the eating. They each took a drink of water from the river; Yash received it from Sandesh as before. He turned pensive over the next few minutes.

“What is the matter?” asked Muhammad.

“Nothing … I feel so … so useless like this …” began Yash. He continued, “I say that you all leave me here and proceed further till you meet with some of the others or with a search party.”

“Don’t be silly, Yash! We’re in it together, and we stick together, understand?” admonished Sandesh.

Yash kept quiet after that.

In the meantime, Sandesh and Muhammad dug a shallow pit in the ground under a large deodar tree. They used large sticks and their bare hands to open up a six foot long and two foot wide hole that reached barely one and a half feet underground. They paid their respects and finally buried their principal Fr. Anthony Mascarenhas.

This task accomplished, they heaved a sigh of relief and joined Yash and Bhairavi again. The four of them moved into the shade of the teak trees and rested till sundown.

***

There was a long, roundabout way of entering Pench National Park from the Chhindwara sector. As the bridge had completely broken down at the Seoni end, there was no option but to take this roundabout way to enter the Park. The SAR team from Seoni and the police jeep from Jabalpur met over there at 4:30 p.m. in the evening. It had been a long and worrisome ride for all the civilians who were accompanying the professionals in the SAR.

Sundeep was in conversation with Sandesh’s mother and Nazima’s parents.

“I just held on to that wooden slat in the floor of the bridge and managed to clamber out!”

“What do you think about Naaz and the others?” asked Nazima’s worried mother.

“Ammijaan, your guess is as good as mine. We all pray that they are all safe and unhurt!” replied Sundeep. Thoughts of his sister Seeta coming to harm swam in his mind as he sent up yet another silent prayer to Almighty God above.

Other parents, staff members of the St. Aloysius College and teachers were all subdued as they neared the Park. The policeman who was in charge of the safety of the civilians was Inspector Jamal Khan. He had already explained the difficulties that the team might encounter on the rescue mission. Briefly, these included the following:

- The fact that as they were to enter from the Chhindwara sector, the children might be hundreds of kilometres away on the Seoni side;
- The fact that when they were in the forest, they would be living inside the buses most of the time;
- The point that there were wild animals in the Park, many of them carnivorous and at least one man-eating tiger and
- The fact that while he, the policeman, would take all possible steps to ensure their safety, they all had to share responsibility in remaining together and not venturing outside their boundaries.

The points were very clearly explained by Inspector Khan and understood by all the listeners.

The decision to take the SAR vehicles inside a protected National Park was taken after careful deliberation. This was the only way since on foot; the rescuers would take over two or three days to simply reach the approximate area where the students were suspected to have been marooned.

Accordingly, at around forty minutes past four p.m., the SAR team-mates sounded the “let’s go in folks!” The buses, cars, jeeps and ambulances were finally in the Park.

The road from the Chhindwara to the Seoni sectors of the park was tortuous. It went over two small hills, a wide valley and by the side of a small lake; it bypassed the most dense territory of the Park and petered out somewhere in the centre of the Park. There was no road after that. This was known to the SAR team. They had decided to play it by ear and see what they could come up with.

In fact, at one point, the chief of the SAR, Commander Pradeep Mehra had raised this as the main objection to sending the SAR from the Chhindwara side; he had been in favour of mounting a helicopter rescue – something that the State Government of M.P. did not have ready; the Chief Minister did, however, promise to keep in touch with the SAR and to take help from neighbouring states or from the army if needed and arrange to deploy the helicopters within 24 hours.

Commander Pradeep Mehra traveled in the first of the four jeeps that led the SAR. All the four jeeps had policemen who were armed. Following the jeeps were the four ambulances, the three cars and the two buses that carried the medical persons, the technical persons and the civilians respectively.

***

Some distance further downstream from Bhairavi and Muhammad, the remaining two student survivors had met up with each other and were wondering about where Sandesh, Yash, Bhairavi, Muhammad, Rati, Chand, Seeta and Nanda were.

“I think they should all be alright,” said Farhad.

“I am not so sure, Farhad, they might or might not be okay,” said Nazima.

When they met up with each other, Nazima had a completely torn top, and sat huddled behind some grass not knowing how to cover her modesty. Farhad had lent her his shirt, which she wore over her torn top before emerging from her hiding place. As a result of this, Farhad was in his vest, which he wore over steel grey trousers. Farhad was an athletically built individual and hoped to be able to bear the inclement weather in Pench.

Soon after they met, they scrounged around for food, but were unable to come up with anything other than berries. They weren’t sure if these were edible, but Farhad took a small bite out of one, and it tasted good, so he finished it off; they waited for a few minutes to see if there was any ill-effect, but there was none, so they plucked more of the same variety of berries, washed them in the river water and ate them one by one. They began walking upstream. As they were on the far-side of the river, they could not spot Bhairavi and the three others with her; as a result, they passed them by and continued to move ahead.

A little distance ahead, they saw what seemed to be a human hand clutching some reeds in the water. Suspecting the worst, they rushed to the spot to find that this was, in fact, a hand that was attached to a body that wore the brown bush-shirt and pants that peons in St. Aloysius College wore!

“Oh my God! Looks like either Gangadin or Mahadev!” said Farhad with excitement and trepidation. They bent down to examine the body, but found that the head and face were mangled and crushed beyond recognition. One interesting feature that was seen was that the hair was quite white: this made them suspect this to be Mahadev’s body as he was the older of the two peons and also the one with almost fully white hair.

It was obvious that the peon had died yesterday night itself. Either he had smashed his head against rocks or had been trampled over by an elephant – or so Nazima surmised, looking away from the dead man’s face and retching on the ground.

“We must remove him from there and …” began Farhad, but Nazima cut him short and said, “I know what you mean, but Farhad, mind you, this is a jungle. Even if you take him out, you won’t be able to bury him without assistance.”

“You know something, Naaz, you are right about this, but at least let us take him out of the reeds and put him on one side so that our conscience is clear.”

Nazima helped Farhad lift the peon’s body out of the reeds. They tugged it under a copse of Neem trees that grew near the bank. There was nothing with them to cover the body and they simply left it there and began moving in an upstream direction.