Around noon, Huma Sheikh had just stepped out for work when she realised that her bike keys were missing. She called her mother, Shajida, who was at home along with Huma's 28-year-old brother Arsat Shaikh, and 10-year-old niece Kasaap, to throw the keys down from the family's first floor apartment in Kesarbhai building. "It was as if the moment the keys fell onto the ground, the entire building came down with it," said Huma, recollecting the horror she witnessed in front of her eyes when the entire building came down "in matter of seconds". At about 4.30pm, as she stood weeping outside the cordoned-off area in the company of relatives and neighbours, she clenched her fists tightly in the hope that somebody will bring her the news of her people.
"They haven't even found them yet. I don't know whether they will even be alive for all this while. Being on the first floor means so much of the rubble has to be pulled out before the rescuers even reach my family members. They have been an integral part of me. I don't know what will I ever do without them," she says, wiping away her tears with one end of her hijab. Four hours into the tragedy, a sea of humanity crowded the area surrounding the site of collapse. That made it even more difficult for the rescue operation to be carried out.
Families from the neighborhood pooled in hundreds of bedsheets to help rescuers, including jawans from the National Disaster Relief Force, transport the rubble, especially as the earth-moving equipment near the debris could not be taken to the site because of constricted space inside the bylane that led to the ill-fated five-storey building. "This was always meant to a three-storey building. But, the landlord, 60-year-old Sattar Bhai who himself died in the tragedy along with his young daughter-in-law had greedily added two more floors to it," said Safina, a resident from the area. Milind Deora, ex-Mumbai Congress president and Sena leader Ravindra Waikar made their visits around the same time, about three hours after the devastation had occurred.
"Things are dangerously unsafe. The government and the authorities screwed up. Every year, before the monsoons especially, the chief minister calls a review meeting with MHADA, BMC and other agencies for an audit of the buildings that are dangerously unsafe. This year, no such review meeting took place. The CM should urgently call for such a meeting today itself because there are many such buildings in Mumbai and South Mumbai that can collapse anytime now," said Deora. Minister of State for Housing Ravindra Waikar, brushed off the question on the compensation to be given to the victims, saying, "That will come later. The authorities will see what they can do."
