Four lives

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Banding together during the Pakistan floods.

The rivers have always been considered a bounty in the lands that are today Pakistan. Indeed, the country remains a heavily agriculture-dependent country. In late June 2010, however, the vast stretch of territory from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, across Punjab and Balochistan to Sindh, became a death trap – inundated by the very rivers that have fed it since times immemorial.

Photos: Nyla Daud

Balakot, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: In the picturesque Kaghan Valley, where a brisk tourist trade flourished throughout the summer of 2010 despite international speculation about security, Dost Muhammad Khan had just inaugurated his hotel near the town of Balakot when the floods hit. His hotel was on the banks of the Kunhar River, with a broad terrace in front of it. ‘I had asked the architect to make the terrace in such a way that when people sat here they would think they were in the middle of the river.’ Today, Khan’s hotel looks as though it has been chopped in half, the remains of its rustic furnishing and décor hanging listlessly.

Khan remembers going to sleep that night in late July in one of the hotel’s back rooms. ‘The sound of rain beating down on the tin roof has a melody of its own,’ he recalled recently. ‘I went to sleep happily – tomorrow, I would be receiving my first clients.’ The next day, when Khan got up to say his morning prayers, he was struck by an unusually cold breeze. ‘The wind was so strong that I almost lost my balance,’ he said. ‘The next moment, I realised that the wall to the room I had slept in was not there anymore. Right in front of me the river was raging – the front of the hotel had disappeared.’ Not one of the hotel’s 15 live-in staff answered Khan’s calls – all of them had been swept away, as they slept in the river-facing rooms. The water had risen by an amazing 20 feet in just one night, and Khan remembers watching all signs of life flash by on the high tide – jeeps, overturned like matchboxes, string cots, door frames, the remains of tin roofs, tree trunks and kitchen utensils.

Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: In Nowshera, a bustling city on the banks of the Kabul River, the riverside has been a picnic spot. The day the floods hit, Alamzeb had taken his children along with his brother, Alamdad, for a drive to the riverbank, ‘because they had been cooped up in the house all day as a result of the incessant rain.’ At the time of evening prayers, they heard loudspeakers ordering them to evaluate immediately – the river had broken its banks five miles upstream.

Over the years, Alamzeb’s house had grown vertically, as his father would add a room each time a son got married. Now the family was spread over three floors, with his widowed, diabetic mother occupying the ground floor. On returning home, their electricity went off, but initially they assume this was just routine load-shedding. His brother went downstairs to give a torch to his mother, but in the short amount of time it took to go down two flights of stairs, he could hear his mother shouting for help. ‘Those cries will always haunt me,’ he said. In the semi-darkness, he heard his brother shout that he was waist-deep in water. Then there was a loud splash and he heard no more.

The military rescue teams who evacuated the rest of them from the rooftop the next morning warned them not to look for the dead. By this time, the water was up to the ceiling on the ground floor, and the family car had somehow turned upside down in the street outside. Alamzeb is a fortunate man, as the bodies of Alamdad and his mother were retrieved the following week, when the water began to recede. There are others in Nowshera, however, who today are forced to make do with little more than memories.

Bumka, Punjab: With a wide flourish of his arm, Hafeez Baksh points at the desolation in Bumka qasbah (settlement), near Mithan Kot city, once a flourishing group of mud hutments and green fields. Now, the cotton crop has dissolved into the ground, trees have been uprooted, houses have collapsed with only a door or window still left standing. ‘We have lost everything,’ Baksh says. ‘There was simply no time to pack. Those of us who did manage to carry away some beddings and utensils had to throw them away because it was impossible to walk in the quickly rising water. People were so eager to get away that nobody looked back.’

As residents of a catchments area between two major river beds, the Panjnad and Indus, Bumka residents say they had never seen so much water. Baksh remembers how some fifty of the villagers were forced to spend their first night clustered on the high ground along the Mithan Kot road, after having trudged three kilometres across flattened fields. ‘With each step, the water kept getting higher,’ he says. ‘The next day, we put the women and children on a tractor that was headed to the city.’ They finally found refuge in Rahim Yar Khan, after a six-hour bus ride for which they were forced to pay exorbitant rates.

Taunsa Barrage area, Punjab: ‘Who is afraid of the rains?’ asks 70-year-old Ameerzadi. ‘But this was like the heavens were baring their soul.’ The old woman lost all her possessions in the flood, save for the tattered shirt and trousers she was wearing at the time. But today, she still manages a wry smile on her weather-beaten face at the idea of being held hostage by rainwater. ‘The monsoon is the time of year when girls sing of love and life, swaying to the tunes of folk songs and the drumming of clay pots,’ she says. ‘The summer rains are a lifeline for us, our cattle and our land. Sometimes, when the river breaches its banks – and it does that every other year – we are afraid of the children going too close. But these little ones are brave, because they have grown up with the river.’ Almost six months after the flooding, scores of women like Ameerzadi – whose name translates as ‘rich woman’ – are poorer in mind and body. They have a common refrain: ‘Everything happened so quickly. We could save nothing!’

When the floods came, Ameerzadi was going about her daily chores. It had been raining intermittently for a week, so she took no notice. At that time, she lived with her son, Allah Rakha, and his six children (their mother did not live there) in a semi-pukka house amidst the cotton fields in the fertile Taunsa Barrage area. Suddenly, she recalls, her son said, ‘Amma come and look outside – the cotton is going under water!’ Then he repeated himself: ‘The water is coming! I just met Chaudry Mairajdin and he says he is taking his family to the city because the dyke has broken. We have to go!’

Allah Rakha sprung into action after he saw his neighbour’s mud hut crumbling. Ameerzadi thought they would be safer because of their concrete walls, but then she felt the water around her ankles. ‘The water had actually entered our courtyard,’ she says. Within the ten minutes that it took to round up four of the children, the water was already frothing at the entrance of the room where Ameerzadi stored the family’s grain and bedding. ‘I cried out for Allah Rakha’s two-year-old, who was girl sleeping inside, but my son dragged me out.’

Twenty yards into the fast-sinking cotton fields, Ameerzadi lost her footing. ‘All I remember is that my son let go of his two children and strung me across his shoulders. There was water all round. The children were all scattered – by then we had no sense of direction.’ Sensing that they were out of time, Allah Rakha and his eldest son pushed Ameerzadi up a tree to safety. The old woman spent the next three days ten feet above ground, among the branches of that neem tree. ‘I am a brave woman,’ she says, ‘but in those three days I could hardly look down at the angry, swirling waters below me.’ Three days later, a military helicopter looking for survivors let down a rope; Ameerzadi grabbed on, and clung to it with all her might.

-- Nyla Daud is a freelance journalist and writer in Lahore.

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Four lives March 2011