This unnatural procession of death

Once again our citizens have perished in unnatural circumstances. The death of 45 people in a fire at Bailey Road brings home to us the misery we have perennially been subject to. 

These newly dead people belonged to loving families. Children and parents and others have lost their futures because their present, those final moments when they were trapped in the flames, did not give them the chance to live.

The image of an individual imploring people for an air ambulance to have his wife, trapped in the fire, taken out for treatment broke multiple hearts in all of us. He did not know that his wife and his son lived no more. And then there is the tragedy of the man who lost his two daughters and a niece in the fire. We have no words to comfort these aggrieved families. We offer them our condolences, but is that enough?

Over the years, fires have claimed the lives of hundreds, of more than hundreds, in slums in the nation's capital and beyond. We have been witness to the destitution that the already destitute have been reduced to when their ramshackle huts were burnt to ashes, through human predatory instincts or through sheer accidents. 

We wept for them. And then we went back to life as it ought to be lived. We have not asked ourselves how the survivors of the slum fires have gone about rebuilding their poverty-battered lives.

The cycle of death in unnatural circumstances has gone on. Boat capsizes have cruelly pulled our fellow citizens into the fearsome depths of our riotous rivers. Many of the dead have been retrieved from the waters, but with life having gone out of them. 

We have watched helplessly as innocent people, men and women and children, were burned to cinders when criminals hurled explosives into train compartments. We watched. The authorities promised to net the killers. But that was of little comfort to the families of the dead.

This time, one can imagine the sounds of tears, of wailing at Bailey Road and at the hospitals in town. There is something more, in the form of questions. Why is it that fires break out so often in buildings and huts and factories? And why do people have to perish in the flames, with no easy route of escape? Why are there no measures in such situations for fires to be quickly extinguished? Why must people, to save themselves, be forced to leap from a building engulfed in flames to hold on to dear life?

It is misery that seeps into the heart, drop by quick drop, as we try making sense of how this tragedy at Bailey Road has come to pass. It is once more that procession of death which suddenly descends on us, compelling us into stupefied silence, silence that is as unnatural as the swift death of so many people in a fire which simply leapt from flat to flat, from floor to floor, to crush the lives and dreams of those caught in its web into ashes.

We weep. And we weep because we feel diminished by the passing of these fellow citizens. How do we console their families, their clans, their friends? And can we console ourselves? Can we make the promise that such tragedy will not be again? We have become impervious to tragedy. And yet every new tragedy leaves us broken in spirit. 

Today, the tears flow in all of us.