A year later

“We were looking for them for months, but now there is no hope. The government has even issued their death certificates,” says Ravi Kumar Goud, 38, from Kondapur, Hyderabad. Goud and 20 of his relatives, including his mother Uma Rani, had gone to Kedarnath on June 4, 2013. Only 10 returned.

“My mother didn’t make it. But some of us managed to get on to the second floor of a lodge near Kedarnath and somehow we held on. We remained there for two days till the army came to rescue us,” he recounts. Now back in Hyderabad, Goud has resumed his job as a medical representative but struggles to regain a semblance of normalcy. “It’s not easy without my mother. I think, maybe not this year but the next… we’re definitely going back to the shrines to pay homage, this time for my mother as well.”

We are at Kund on the Kedarnath road, a highway stopover not more than 30km out of Rudraprayag, when we run into Narasimha Ras just as he’s lighting his first chillum of the day. “It was because of what they did to the Dhari devi,” he says. “It was only hours after they moved devi ma that the glacier fell into the lake, causing such devastation. Our god wouldn’t let a slight like this pass. Our god is a vengeful god.”

A native of Vijayawada, Ras is a mechanical engineer by training and a Shaivite sadhu by renunciation for the last 19 years. Together with two other sadhus, he has been trekking from Rishikesh for the last 10 days. Their plan was to arrive in Kedarnath exactly a year after the flash floods struck on June 16, 2013. Ras was referring to the relocation of the Dhari devi shrine at Srinagar, Uttarakhand, to allow water to flow uninterrupted from a dam constructed by the GVK group. That very day, a spectacular cloudburst saw the rivers overflowing with a wrath quite unlike anything this disaster-prone area had ever witnessed. Towns went under water, villages were wiped out and, by the time the waters subsided, more than 900 were confirmed dead and nearly 6,000 listed as missing and largely presumed dead. And these were just the conservative estimates.

The runaway river

In Srinagar, the erstwhile capital of the Garhwal kingdom, the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) had just built a gigantic auditorium at its campus when the raging Alaknanda swept away the still-unused edifice. While SSB appears to have found its feet again, a tiny hamlet adjoining its campus — Shakti Vihar — is still clawing its way up from the muck engulfing it.

We are travelling on the National Highway 58, the arterial road that connects the four holy sites or Char Dhams — Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri — to the rest of the country. Built by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), from Rishikesh all the way up to Mana Pass, it is also a strategic highway for the Indian Army, connecting India to Tibet.

At Shakti Vihar, a mere cluster of houses outside Srinagar, 74-year-old HR Kotnala, a retired government horticulturist, offers to show us around. His house is still mired in the mud deposits left by the floods. “The water came up to the second floor in some of the houses here,” he says. Located 560 metres above sea level, the region suffered great damage to property, as much from the flood as from the silt left behind. Using his walking stick, Kotnala points to where the floodwaters rose, inundating his house. “I got one lakh rupees as compensation, but that’s hardly enough. My family has been renting a floor at a relative’s house till we fix ours, but we need a few lakh more and at least another year.” As we leave the village, we notice at least six other houses and a primary school partially dug out from the mud.

We then head towards Rudraprayag, the worst-affected district, where thousands went missing and were eventually declared dead. The roads are abysmal and appear in some parts to be another catastrophe-in-waiting. As we climb higher, the highway improves drastically in sections that, we learnt later, were rebuilt on a ‘war footing’. The towns lining it, however, be it Tilwara, Vijay Nagar or Silli, still bear the scars of last year’s floods. Several buildings hang precariously from a narrow ledge; locals point to places where their shops, roads or houses once stood effaced by a now calmly flowing river.

Salvation-seeking army

“Jai baba Kedarnath ji ki...” the occupants of our jeep roar as we drive towards Gauri Kund from Sonprayag, located more than 1,800 metres above sea level. Barring the photographer and I, the jeep has seven yatris (pilgrims) — six from Bhind district in Madhya Pradesh and one from Rae Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh — and a couple of SSB personnel heading towards Bhimbali, one of the rescue points set up on the alternative route to the Kedarnath shrine after the last one was washed away during the floods. The jeep is a free-of-cost service among a plethora of others offered by the State for yatris this year. The services — many of them introduced for the first time — include mandatory issue of biometric cards for all yatris, a basic health check-up before they are allowed to ascend, rest points along the route and emergency response teams.

Sexagenarian Ram Bahadur, the yatri from Rae Bareilly, tells us, “There used to be vans full of people from every tehsil in our area. This year there was only one van from three tehsils, with only 40 deciding to come.”

The stark decrease in the number of pilgrims was evident all along the route. Hotels in many towns were either locked up or charging a fraction of their usual rates. “Our hotel has 80 rooms, of which 77 are empty,” says Rahul Semwal, the manager of Shivalik Valley Resorts near Sonprayag. “Rooms priced at ₹3,300 are going for ₹800-1,000. Frankly, we don’t expect the situation to get any better this year. People are still scared.” This sentiment was echoed by the district administration too.

“From May 4 to June 4, only 15,700 pilgrims signed up to visit the Kedarnath shrine,” says Raghav Langer, the 32-year-old district magistrate of Rudraprayag, who took up the posting a month after the floods. “During peak season, the number of pilgrims is usually around 12,000 a day. Regardless, we have all the facilities in place; and even though the length of the route to the shrine has increased from 14km to 17.5km from Gauri Kund, it has been made much safer.”

En route to Kedarnath, the safety measures Langer mentioned are visible, and yatris seem to have little to complain about. Some of them are anxious about a possible repeat of last year’s tragic events. “We always wanted to visit the holy sites here and decided to come this year. We were worried about safety, but decided to go ahead anyway,” says Chennai resident Hema Athmaram, whom we meet at Guptakashi. “The language is a bit of a problem, but apart from that all the facilities have been very good so far. Tomorrow we are taking the helicopter to Kedarnath and then travelling onward to Badrinath.”

More helipads have been built in 2014, and they are found in every settlement along the route from Guptkashi to Sonprayag, with a helicopter taking off every few minutes and charging anywhere from ₹5,500 to ₹7,000 for a round trip to the shrine. This allows yatris to wrap up the darshan within a few hours.

Local muscle

“People from everywhere had come after the floods and helped out, but most of them are now gone,” says Mukesh Samwal, a resident of Rudraprayag, the worst-affected district with 3,963 missing and 652 declared dead. We first met him quite by chance in the district capital when we were looking for people who had worked in the medical camps and trauma relief centres for flood victims. Samwal had been a volunteer at a camp in the town of Tilwara. “Here, people are used to disasters, so maybe that’s why they manage to cope with anything that is thrown at them,” he says. In Rudraprayag, 86 villages were cut off and the district registered the highest number of dead, comprising both locals and visitors.

Classified as a Zone 5 area, the district is highly prone to earthquakes and landslides. “I’ve been here four years and have already seen three disasters,” says Meera Kaintura, the district disaster management officer. “In 2010 there was heavy flooding, while in 2012 the Ukhimath tehsil witnessed major landslides and, of course, last year’s flood was the worst.”

While authorities say families that lost lives were each provided ₹5 lakh as compensation, there are many other losses that are unaccounted for. “I owned two mobile shops and a vegetable shop here in Gauri Kund, and all three were washed away,” says Jameel Khan, 46, who moves to Gauri Kund every ‘season’ from Bijnor in UP. He has managed to set up a lone vegetable shop this year. “For all my losses there was only a compensation of ₹20,000… They said we didn’t have proper documents, but when you’re running away from a flood, the last thing you’re thinking about is documents.”

Khan and his friend Noor Ahmad have been coming to this Hindu pilgrimage site for the past three decades, setting up a parallel life here during the six months the area remains accessible. They are here on business, of course, with Ahmad running a pony leasing business and Khan his shops. “Others from our town used to come too, but this year it’s only the two of us. If business continues to be this bad, I’ll be forced to go back to Bijnor.”

Many others like them are painfully picking up the pieces as they attempt to carry on with their lives. As in 31 different places in the district, in Chandrapuri village too the river had washed away the only bridge connecting it to the highway. “When the floods came, we all went up to the jungles because the entire village was submerged,” recalls Sonya Yadav, 23, who is the first graduate in her family. To reach the village, you have to walk a few hundred metres along the Mandakini’s riverbed and cross a bridge. The 70 families on this side of the river had on their own built a temporary bridge, which served them for a few months until the district administration constructed a steel bridge, also on the riverbed. “Now, if there is a slight rise in the water level, we’ll again be completely cut off. But we’re happy that at least this bridge is available to us,” says Yadav.

Sewing all together

Further up along the Mandakini, in the twin hamlets of Deoli-Bhanigram, the NGO Sulabh Iinternational is helping villagers get back on their feet. “Our village and the gram sabha it belongs to consist of 450 families, all of which were dependent on Kedarnath for livelihood,” says Prakash Lal, 42, who is currently contesting the gram sabha elections. “When the floods came, at least 54 people from here died at Kedarnath and more than 30 women were widowed. Sulabh got to know about this, and for a year now, it has been giving all of us ₹2,000 every month, besides providing sewing machines and computers in the villages.” Lal used to run a lodging facility near the Kedarnath shrine. While he escaped the floods, two of his sons slipped and fell to their death near Rambara even as they were trying to crawl back to safety. “To lose one’s child is something one can never get over… I don’t think I can go back to Kedarnath for work, that is just not possible.”

While Lal belongs to a scheduled tribe and resides in the upper end of the Deoli gram sabha, those in the main village predominantly belong to the purohit caste and their main means of employment is as pujaris (priests) at the shrine. Kishan Tewari, a 54-year-old priest, hasn’t returned to Kedarnath since the flood but is readying to go back after the first anniversary of the tragedy. “Kedarnath is like our home. We have always been custodians of the shrine and will continue to be so. So while we haven’t visited it yet, all of us will in a few weeks’ time,” he says.

While the pujaris and other men in the village are waiting for an auspicious time to return to Kedarnath, the women are trying to make the best of their newly acquired skills. “It has just been three months since the sewing machines were set up here, so everyone is still learning,” says Savitri Tiwari, who lost her husband last year and now teaches sewing skills in Deoli. “In a few months, we are looking to make petticoats, blouses and other women’s clothing, which we will try to sell in the shops of Guptkashi and Rudraprayag.”

As we prepare to leave Rudraprayag, we cannot help but observe that while the signs of devastation are still visible, there are many signs of hope too. New pulley systems (to cross rivers) have come up at several places, a new suspension bridge was recently opened in Vijay Nagar, and houses are being rebuilt along the way. While others may spar over whether the disaster was divine retribution or a folly entirely manmade, residents in this ecologically fragile region prefer to keep calm and carry on… like they have several times before.