Sitting on the bed, 52-year-old Bharathi was smiling at her relatives, who had come to visit her at the Government General Hospital, but the trauma of being trapped under the darkness of the rubble for close to seven hours had not yet vanished.
One of the two survivors rescued after a major portion of a two-storey building collapsed at Sunguvar Lane, Triplicane, social welfare department staff Bharathi said that her family had just decided to step out of the house minutes before the floors went crashing down. Her husband, Amrithalingam, Joint Director in the same department, had gone out. “My son told me that we should also go out as we noticed sand falling from the roof and we realised something was wrong,” she recounted. She then went to the bathroom as her son Parthasarathy got ready to leave along with her. But, the building collapsed and both mother and son were locked between a huge pile up of rubble.
While Parthasarathy was lying beneath a door that actually saved him, Bharathi was stuck under a large piece of concrete slab, which presumably was the roof of the bathroom.
She was under complete darkness and could only feel a big stone pressing against her left foot. She began calling out for her son. “I kept calling ‘Narayana, Narayana’ as I used to call him. Suddenly, he replied saying he was fine and told me that fire personnel have come to rescue us,” she said. Gripped by fear and drenched in sweat, she felt drained out after calling out for her son continuosuly. “The sand on the broken stones kept falling on me as they kept removing the stones and suddenly I saw light just after my son had been rescued,” she said with widened eyes. She could hear fire personnel calling out for her and in response she raised her hand through a tiny gap and began waving. When she was finally pulled out, her ordeal had lasted for close to seven hours.
“I survived only because of God’s blessings,” she said with a smile as she massaged her left foot that showed blood clots.
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