'Burning train was a ghastly reminder of Partition days'

Tuesday February 20 2007 PANIPAT: Just a narrow corridor away from the 67 charred bodies lying in the mortuary, 60-year-old Kamruddin is the lone survivor in the Panipat Civil Hospital of the attack on the Attari Special, which was to take him to Multan.Several hundred kilometres away from home, Kamruddin is celebrating not only the fact that he is alive but also the death of his notion of the "religious divide" between India and Pakistan. "I come to India almost every alternate year. But this visit and the burning train was like a ghastly reminder of the Partition days. The only difference was that there was no malice anywhere this time. The people, police, doctors of your country have treated us like their own. Shame on the people who did this," a moist-eyed Kamruddin says.His legs and fingers singed, he frequently runs short of breath trying to recount those minutes on the burning train. "I started from Delhi with my brother-in-law and nephew with packets of India's betel leaves, some bangles for the women at home and other gifts. We were talking of the wonderful time we had in India when around midnight there was a loud sound like a bomb and I fell to the train floor. My brother-in-law Moinuddin and nephew Mudlah also fell down... Then suddenly there was fire all over, even as the train sped away. Bodies were burning, children shrieking..."Kamruddin remembers two young men pulling him out. "Allah ki marzi thi aur un ladkon ki insaniyat (It was the will of Allah and the kindness of those men)," he says. There was no news of Moinuddin and Mudlah till the report was filed.A dairy owner, Kamruddin had come to India in the beginning of the month to visit cousins at Mangolpuri in Delhi. "Inshallah if the people of India and the doctors keep treating me the way they have in the last few hours, I will recover well and go home," he hopes. Later in the evening, he was put on an ambulance to be shifted to Delhi.Among the ones holding fort at the Panipat Civil Hospital is Dr Rita Hajela, Senior Duty Medical Office, Railways. She was the first doctor to reach the Attari victims at Siwah at 12.30 pm with two staff members."The first two bodies they brought out were not charred but appeared to have been a result of suffocation. The rest of the bodies were badly charred, near unrecognisable, even glued together. Kamruddin had fewer burn injuries but is asthmatic and the smoke worsened his condition. He is a guest in our country and we want to send him off as well as he was before he boarded the train," says the doctor, helping Kamruddin onto the Delhi-bound ambulance.Ward Attendant Rohtas Singh has been going around trying to piece together the 67 bodies lying in the mortuary in death, and in life. From masses of flesh he has been picking out fountain pens, pieces of paper with numbers and names scribbled in Urdu, English and Hindi, congealed passports, bits of wallets, a small yellow T-shirt with the Pakistani flag imprinted, bangles, keys, a burnt pair of baby socks and passport-size photos - anything that may help in identification later."Looking at the condition of the bodies, I knew recognising and identifying them will be no easy task. So I collected whatever I could and made a list according to the order in which the bodies were placed in the mortuary and wrote against the numbers whatever I found. These I then gave to the policemen," says Singh.One of those burnt fountain pens he recovered helps Nabi Mohammed Khan identify his brother-in-law. Among those sifting through the other "recoveries" are relatives of Lalit Arora, one of the three Train Ticket Examiners on the train.Arora, whose wife and three-year-old twins are in Delhi, is untraceable.