Surrounded by the Qazi Nag range on three sides at the LoC, Kamalkote has already counted 300 dead. And with nobody to carry the bodies to the village burial ground, each backyard here is now a little graveyard.‘‘Nobody comes to help his neighbour,’’ says Muhamad Hussain Jagwal, a retired headmaster, standing beside the graves of three of his family in the compound of what was once his home. ‘‘Each family has its own people dead. There is no time for others.’’Abdul Kabir lost seven of his family and five relatives—their graves are lined up in his backyard. ‘‘I have no complaints. Every house here is a graveyard,’’ says Kabir.Nobody knows who has suffered the most. ‘‘Everyone has suffered. This makes the pain of the death of my family so normal,’’ says Abdul Majid Hajam, who lost his two sons, Ahmad (1) and Imran (9), and brother Habibullah Hajam. The mud over their graves is still grainy and loose. ‘‘I don’t have a shovel to press it in,’’ says Hajam.Some families have been completely wiped out. Asghar Khan is dead somewhere up in the hills while his entire family got buried under the debris of their house. ‘‘He (Asghar Khan) had gone up to graze his cattle. Even the cattle did not return,’’ says Irshad Hussain, his neighbour.The other reason villagers can’t come to each other’s rescue is hunger. ‘‘Most of us have not eaten anything since disaster struck,’’ says Tanveer Ahmad Jagwal, who lost five of his family, including his wife and daughter. Huddled in the courtyard, the survivors say they are feeding raw corn to their children. ‘‘We couldn’t salvage anything from our collapsed house,’’ says Bibi Jan, Tanveer’s mother.
