8-yr-old in coma, mother in same hospital has no idea; man who helped quake, riot victims killed in blast while helping injured

Jayanti Lavatrao, an attendant at the V S Hospital, thought he had seen it all. Until they wheeled in an unidentified boy...

Jayanti Lavatrao, an attendant at the V S Hospital, thought he had seen it all. Until they wheeled in an unidentified boy, blast pellets still lodged in his head. “Yeh theek nahin hua. Iska kya kasoor tha (this shouldn’t have happened, what was his fault)?” was all that Lavatrao could mumble.

The boy, later identified as eight-year-old Israr, the youngest son of Mohammed Jalil, is one of the 145 injured in the serial blasts that rocked Ahmedabad on Saturday, killing at least 45.

Israr’s mother is admitted in the same hospital. As Israr battles for life — he has slipped into coma with serious head injuries — father Jalil sits by wife Sugra Banu’s side. She is barely conscious, so each time she turns to him, Jalil repeats “Israr is fine, smiling, the doctors are taking good care of him”. He then runs to a corner and wipes his eyes. He just doesn’t have the heart to tell her the truth about their youngest.

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A barber from Ramol, Jalil spent many anxious hours after the blasts, searching for his wife and son who had gone to visit his ailing brother-in-law at Vatva. He finally traced Sugra to the V S Hospital. Once there, he also found Israr.

All that Sugra could recall is that she and Israr were trying to cross the road near Narol Circle to catch a rickshaw when they were hit by a blast. “A truck came and we stopped. I don’t remember anything else.”

Israr has been on a ventilator and doctors say his condition is critical. “The child needs to be operated upon right away to remove the pellets, but his condition does not permit an operation. We are just trying to stabilise his condition,” said a resident doctor.

At the Civil Hospital, friends have been grieving for Dinesh Kumar Jain. The 37-year-old finance consultant from Madhupura and his friends had always been in the thick of it all, whether it was helping the victims of the 2001 Gujarat quake or those caught in the riots a year later.

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Last night, Jain was having tea near the hospital when he was told of the blasts. He quickly got his friends together and they all ran to help. As they were moving the injured out of an ambulance, there was a blast. Jain lay dead and three of his friends — Ranjit Singh (30), Vishnu Thakore (38), Kamlesh Tank (30) — were seriously injured.

Raman Vyas, another friend who turned up late, said: “Six of us worked as a team during each disaster. But this time, I was caught up in something. I could not reach the hospital when they called.”

Rajesh Tiwari, who was with Vyas and the others at the time of the blast, was inconsolable: “I was the only one to be spared.” It was he who had to break the news to Jain’s wife Lalitaben and his two daughters Sonu (8) and Sweta (3).