“People started running like crazy. It was mostly women,” she said. “I slipped in a ditch and waded over what looked like a bed of dead bodies. I could see two dead women and a child below my feet. Body upon body.”
Ms. Kumari said she made it out, with bruises on her skull and all over her body, by keeping “my head down and hands outstretched to keep cutting through.”
Others weren’t so lucky.
“The bus carrying the devotees was back in the village. My mother was not on it,” said Bunty Kumar, 29, disheveled and teary-eyed after she arrived at the government hospital. “We finally found a picture of her laid on an ice slab on the internet. That’s when we realized she was dead.”
Saudan Singh, 62, a farmer, sat quietly next to the body of his only grandchild, Rehanshu, 2, who was laid out on a slab of ice, his short hair shooting out in all directions. A portion of his yellow T-shirt peeked out from below a white sheet. His father was too distraught to be able to come to identify his body.
