After 48 hours, hopes recede for relatives

PANIPAT: It was after an agonising 48 hours that Afaq Hussain from Farukhabad found the assorted bodies of six of his relatives at the mortuary of Bhim Sen Sachar Civil Hospital here.
"I can recognise their faces," he said, "but the hands, legs and torso seems to have been mixed up." But given the scale of the tragedy, he wasn’t complaining anymore. "At least they are my own," he said.In a bizarre rush to finish the process of last rites, burnt and dismembered pieces have been collected to "make" bodies, fitting arms of one person to the torso of another. In many cases, the skull belonged to someone else.
For most of the relatives of the Samjhauta blast victims, this is as good as it will get. And they know it. The furnace in which the people were trapped have made it impossible for proper identification. Many have given up the search altogether. Abdul Qadir from Aligarh, looking for his loved ones, has almost lost hope. Unable to recognise faces of his relatives, he said, "I am not sure whether to look up the dead ones or wait for a miracle call from Karachi. But none of my relatives have reached Karachi, where they were heading."
Nasir Khan from Rampur in UP, too, doesn’t have a clue about his sister Arra Jahan, who was on the burning train. He said, "She didn’t really want to go back to Pakistan just now. Even as she was leaving, she promised to come back to India and settle here. Of late, she used to say that she wanted to see her children settled after which she would make India her home. Now, India is graveyard." Shaqeel Ahmed from Nuh, Gurgaon, has given up.
"My brother Vakil Ahmed is missing, he’s not in Lahore, where he was going to meet our aunt, and he’s not to be found among the dead here. It is a futile search." As hope fades, a resigned Hussain clutches on to last pieces of memories left behind by relatives.