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Trapped victim offered Rs 100,000 reward: PTI

"Pull me out of the debris and I will award you Rs 100,000 in cash," a bank manager in Bhuj screamed amidst the din and heaps of rubble as he stood half covered in three-feet tall piles of heavy concrete blocks after the devastating quake hit Gujarat on January 26.

"He kept screaming for help and promising money but we could do nothing to help him immediately," 45-year-old Manish, a quake survivor admitted to J J hospital in Bombay, told PTI Thursday.

"It was only late in the evening when we could finally extricate him but it was too late," he added.

Manish, who had gone to witness a Republic Day function at his children's school, escaped death as did his two school-going children who were out in the open ground.

However, his wife suffered a leg fracture when their tiled-roofed house came crumbling down. His 14-year-old son had a miraculous escape as he held on to his mother tightly after the roof crumbled. "Not a scratch," he says pointing out to his son's unblemished skin.

"However, my friend had an even greater miraculous escape," he said recounting how his friend was caught inside the debris of a temple. "He could not move out of the temple since the outer portion was blocked by rubble."

Manish said four others, besides the manager perished, while his friend lived on the water supplied through some gaps in the rubble. He even managed to listen to his pocket radio inside the shelter. "The ultimate miracle was when an aftershock dislodged the rubble making way for his exit," he said.

Deepa Thakar, whose right hand is lifelessly after a concrete slab fell on her, has a faraway look in her eyes.

"Everything has been reduced to dust. Not even the nightgown I am wearing is my own. I was having a bath when the house crashed and was lifted out of the debris in scanty clothes. My neighbours covered me," she says.

Ten-year-old Savita, a student of standard four, groans as her fractured leg aches. Savita was on her way to school with three other classmates when the wall of a house on the street fell on her. "I could not trace her the entire morning," says her brother, an RSS worker, who tried to save those around, forgetting his own anxiety.

The 40-plus Punji Ben gets up with a startle, her bald just-operated head and deep red eyes communicate the unspoken tragedy that has befallen her. As she mutters incoherently, her farmer husband, dressed in a mud-covered Kathiwari dress, shrugs his head as he recounts those moments when the earth shook but time stood still.

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