Wails of friends keep resonating in my mind

CHENNAI: It was all over in a fraction of a second. For the next five hours, Chennai student Moses Vasantharaj helplessly watched as his classmates who fell into Nepal’s river Trishuli from a height of about 50 ft while taking a rickety bridge, were being rescued. One of them died and another’s body was washed away. A few others were dangling precariously from the collapsed bridge. Vasantharaj, 25, couldn’t offer assistance as he had already crossed to the other side of the bridge.He was part of a 43-member Master of Social Work students’ group from Mar Gregorious College, Mogappair, which was on a study tour to Nepal. According to him, the group finished their project work and decided to go sightseeing to Pokhara on October 22. They started from Kathmandu at 7 am and around 11 am, reached a bridge on Trishuli river. “Our bus driver stopped the vehicle and told us that if we wanted, we could cross the bridge in batches of 10,” he recalls.Classmate Florence Angel, who was killed in the tragedy, and Vasantharaj were among the first batch to take the bridge. “Made of iron rope and wooden planks, I felt it was a weak bridge as from the moment I stepped on to it, the bridge started to swing. I ran over to the other side because I was scared that if I stopped in between, my friends would also stop and the bridge would collapse. I saw a local man carrying a load trying to cross the bridge. As soon as I reached the other end, I heard a noise. When I turned around, saw the rope on my side of the bridge had snapped. Florence had fallen into the dry end of the river bed,” he says. Cut off from his friends, it was a long five-hour wait for Moses before he and others on the other side of the river could be brought back using helicopters and boats. The scar of tragedy is way too deep for 25-year-old Srijaya Nair, another classmate of Vasantharaj. She was among those who were bang in the middle of the bridge when it collapsed. “The wails of my friends crying in pain keep resonating in my mind. Even the sound of crackers fail to drown them,” says Srijaya. “Florence and I shared the same room during the trip. We had become close to each other. She was about to cross the bridge when it collapsed. When Florence fell, her head hit a stone causing instant death... I cannot forget her face,” she says.Another girl, Hamida G Momin, was washed away and is still missing. Her other friends Williams Carey and Christopher, who also fell into the river, managed to rescue Sindhuja J, as the boys knew swimming. “Meanwhile, I was hanging on the bridge. Some locals came and pulled me and classmate Reema Mathew to safety,” she recounts. Srijaya said, the students rescued their injured friends from the river with the help of local people and took them to a nearby hospital by stopping vehicles. The grievously hurt were shifted to another hospital.