A few good men and the will to live bring them home safe

Willpower and the generosity of strangers saw the Bhimanis through nine days of hell. 

Purnima and Ashok Bhimani thought little of the halt their bus made en route to the Chardham Yatra in Gangotri owing to a landslide ahead. The Navi Mumbai residents brushed it off as a common occurrence on the mountainous terrain. It was only when the skies grew dark on June 15 that panic began to set in.

As the group of 45 pilgrims took refuge at Pilot Baba Ashram, it began to pour outside. By 1am, Bhimani woke everybody up and they all moved to a temple above the ashram. Over the next hour-and-a-half, the four ground-floor structures where they had been sleeping were swallowed up by the Bhagirathi river.

The pilgrims stayed put in the temple till the next evening, waiting for the water to recede. Nothing, however, prepared them for the devastation the Bhagirathi had left in its wake.

The furious river had devoured both made-made structures and earth alike.
Besides low-lying structures, several patches of the road had disappeared; chunks of the mountain had broken off and washed away by the river. Power supply to the area had snapped and clean water was not available since pipelines were broken.

Determined that their fates lay in their hands, the Bhimanis decided to move on.

“Many of our aged companions couldn’t come with us; they wanted to wait for help. But, we couldn’t just sit there and wait. So, a few of us left with the help of a few local boys and trekked across the mountain to Maneri village,” says Bhimani.

After 12 hours, they reached Maneri on June 18. “Most hotels which had generators turned them on between 9pm and 10pm so that people could charge their phones. There was no power supply otherwise,” explains Purnima.

After a night’s rest, they decided to leave for Uttarkashi. “The local people were very helpful, the hotels were accommodating as many people as they could, and the young village boys were using their bikes to fetch stranded women and senior citizens around Uttarkashi. No one was taking advantage of the situation by charging any money [for their services],” says a grateful Bhimani.

Luck continued to favour them in Uttarkashi, where they met a friend who dropped the group off at Dehradun. From there, the pilgrims took a train to Delhi and thereafter, one to Mumbai, which arrived on Tuesday.