Bengaluru: Little Sanjana loses fight, succumbs to burns

BENGALURU: A pall of gloom descended on the burns ward at Victoria Hospital in KR Market on Thursday evening after the death of three-year-old Sanjana who was rescued from debris after a building collapsed on October 16. She breathed her last at 5pm on Thursday.
She had sustained 60 per cent burns after a portion of the two-storey building came crashing after an alleged LPG cylinder explosion at Ejipura, killing seven, including her parents.Her father Saravana and mother Ashwini, who was eight months pregnant, were buried alive under the debris.
The rescue teams digging through the debris spotted the little girl lying on the ground floor. She was survived because of an almirah. She would have been pushed to a corner and the almirah fell on the wall where she was lying, making a triangular space for her beneath it. Later, the roof and other walls fell on the almirah, sources had said.
James Karthik, uncle of Sanjana, said: “We had hoped that she would survive. I don’t know how to convey this news to her grand parents who are already in a state of shock after losing their son and daughter-in-law. Sanjana looked okay the day she was shifted here. Despite the doctors’ best efforts, we lost her. We’ll try to bury her at Hosur Road cemetery next to her parents.”
THE RESCUER
It was N R Markhandeya, deputy director, fire and emergency, who first spotted the baby amid the debris on October 16 when the building came crashing. The officer lifted the child and carried her in his arms to the ambulance. “After rescuing, I took the little girl in my arms and she looked at me; fear was writ large on her innocent face. For a moment, I thought I should adopt her. It’s very sad that she left all of us,” he said.