The Hindu : Front Page : The chatter and the bell will be heard no more

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Sunday, Jul 18, 2004

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Front Page

The chatter and the bell will be heard no more

By Ramya Kannan

KUMBAKONAM, JULY. 17. Saturday was a bad day for this temple town, 40 km from Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. The entire town mourned.

Neither was Friday any better, for that matter. The people here refer to the colossal fire accident that killed 90 children in hushed tones. And a shroud of soot seems to have settled on the ancient town.

They gather outside Sri Krishna School on Kasi Ramanathan Street to stare — and to condole; the atmosphere is funereal. Men, women and children look at the building, the façade of which bears few signs of the gruesome drama that unfolded the day before.

Open the wide gate to the school and the odour hits you — of a day-old burnt flesh, of burnt food; visions of the children's frantic scramble for safety as the fire engulfed them play themselves in a surreal montage. Blackened with soot, lying discarded, forgotten and destroyed are small personal belongings of the students — notebooks, rubber slippers, wire lunch baskets, lunch boxes split wide open, a day-old food congealed, burnt.

This then is what the town's people want to look at. They try hard to look inside, peep through the cracks in the gate, slip into the school when the policemen on guard turn their heads away, scale the walls. It is as if they have to see for themselves to believe what they watched in horror on television.

While the fire has seared some of the blackboards, sending the blackening curling upwards in layers, on some of the blackboards, the writing remains. A Tamil lesson, a few words, disjointed, but seen in context — prophetic. Some of the words are sorgam (heaven) and thapi odiayathu (escaped and ran). The coincidences are heart-rending.

The policemen then call out: "here is a finger." A burnt finger, the blackened nail intact, lies strategically in the Thanjavur section of an old map of Tamil Nadu. The police add to the gore: they had earlier removed a portion of a leg from the map. "Poor child, wonder who it was," they say. Perhaps it was R. Ramya of IV C, whose notebooks lies upturned on the soot, perhaps it was Yazhini, who lived down the road.

Close to the burnt side of the school wall is a three-storey building. On its terrace are locals, crowding over to take a look at the school. Radhika and Nisha, two 10th standard students who escaped the fire by sheer chance, are giving the onlookers a blow-by-blow account of the tragedy. "The kids screamed for help. They called, `akka, akka.' But we did not know what to do. We were asked to run for help and we did."

Nisha stays in the adjacent house and she will have to get used to the silence from the school-no-more next door; the childish chatter, the recitations and the school bell will be heard no more.

Down below, on the streets, James, a volunteer, trundles along with a cycle, dips his hand into a bowl of glue and pastes posters in condemnation of the incident. The town walls are full of them — some have slogans of sorrow, others of anger — blaming the school, the teachers and even `agni'.

It is clear that Kumbakonam, in its mourning, is together. Batches of self-help-group women march by in a silent procession in mourning. Schoolchildren follow, holding placards, looking solemn. As they pass the homes of the children who died in the fire, the mothers break out into uncontrollable wails.

While the establishments have shut down as a mark of protest, water pots are placed obligingly outside homes, offering water to the processionists and the public on a scorching day.

Nearly every sleeve wears a band of mourning. Autodrivers park their vehicles by the wayside and quietly join the procession. At the Kumbakonam General Hospital, crowds of locals have gathered to provide support to the families of the injured children and want to go inside the sterile burns ward. The Thanjavur Collector, J. Radhakrishnan, appeals to them to stay out to avoid spreading infection in the ward. The crowds listen meekly, promise to abide by his words and melt away. Some, though, surreptitiously walk by to the other side of the ward and through the grill windows reach out to the mothers and fathers inside. They cannot do much; but they hold their hands and cry with them.

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