A family loses 3 generations of women in India Panic among the crowd

Vinod Kumar was not at home on Tuesday, as he usually travels for days to do masonry work, when he received the terrible call.

All the women of his family, three generations long, were dead, crushed in a stampede.

For the rest of the day, Mr. Kumar and his three sons went from hospital to hospital, searching for their loved ones among the bodies of the 121 people who had died when a large gathering of a spiritual guru erupted in deadly panic.

Around midnight, they found the bodies of his wife Raj Kumari, 42, and his daughter Bhumi, 9, at the government hospital in Hathras, stretched out on large slabs of ice among dozens of others in the corridor.

“Why did you leave me like that? Who will now scold the children and force them to go to school?” cried Mr. Kumar at his wife’s feet.

But he couldn’t afford to be completely lost in grief. His mother’s body hadn’t been found yet. He bent down to pick up his daughter for a final hug. Bhumi was wearing a yellow top and her hair was tied in a ponytail with a pink ribbon.

“Let her sleep,” Nitin, Mr. Kumar’s eldest son, told him as he pulled the girl away from his father to place her on the slab so they could continue the search.

“I don’t know when I’ll find my mother’s body,” he said, continuing the search. “I want to perform their last rites together.”

Mr. Kumar’s mother, Jaimanti, was the matriarch of the family. And she was the guru’s foremost devotee, keeping his posters in her home and attending his sermons regularly.

Suraj Pal, a former police officer turned self-styled spiritual guru known as Narayan Sakar Hari or Bhole Baba, focused on women like her and families like hers: on the fringes of India’s deep economic inequality and at the bottom of its rigid caste hierarchy.

Women from the Dalit caste, who make up a large section of Baba’s community, have long been discriminated against as ‘untouchables’ and have traditionally been denied access to temples.

When Mr. Kumar’s mother, Jaimanti Devi, heard that the guru was holding a large gathering so close by, she could not resist. She persuaded her reluctant daughter-in-law to come along.

And what about Bhumi?

“You know how children are,” Mr. Kumar said. “Our daughter had said she would not be left without her mother.”

By dawn on Wednesday, Mr. Kumar had brought the bodies of his wife and daughter home. They were zipped into dark body bags and laid on sheets of ice in the narrow alley outside their brick home. His mother’s body was found in a mortuary in the city of Agra, about two hours’ drive away. When the ambulance finally brought her home, neighbors and relatives helped carry her down and place her next to the other two.

Mr. Kumar, held by his sons, collapsed completely.

The Kumar family has lived here for at least two generations. Mr. Kumar’s father, who died a few years ago, was a mason like him. It was clear that they were hardly a sideshow in India’s development plans, left to their own devices.

Around them, the village overflowed with sewage from narrow drains. A larger drain, carrying sewage from a nearby town, was filled with large piles of garbage rotting on the banks. Dengue and typhoid are common ailments here.

But Mr. Kumar tried to give his children a better future. With the $200 a month he earned as a day laborer and mason, he made sure they went to school. Bhumi loved her studies most of all, he said. She wanted to become a police officer.

“We have always been poor. That is the story of our lives,” he said. “Now it is over with the death of my dear daughter, wife and mother — in one fell swoop.”

First it was his daughter’s turn for the last rites. According to local tradition, children are buried and adults cremated.

A stretcher made of bamboo was prepared for Bhumi. The body was to be wrapped in new clothes for the last rites. For her, Mr. Kumar had bought an unstitched piece of blue flowered cloth to cover her torso and a dark blue cloth for her legs.

Men lifted the bamboo frame from all four sides and walked a few miles to a spot in the cotton fields, next to a small pond along the highway. Some men had already dug a grave. Mr. Kumar lowered Bhumi’s body slowly into the ditch and let out a long cry.

Villagers helped cover her body by shoveling mud onto the grave.

Just then, metres away on the highway, the convoy for state Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath sped past, taking him to the scene of the stampede. Villagers were stopped from crossing the road.

Mr. Kumar walked on to the bodies of his mother and wife, and moved them on bamboo to the funeral pyres on the other side of the village. They were wrapped in brightly colored saris, pink, red and green.

Thick chunks of cow dung were used to light the fire, and then it was covered with thick logs. The sky was overcast. Politicians trickled in, one with personal bodyguards wielding guns and wearing all-black clothing. The official stood by and watched the bodies go up in flames, and then moved on to the next destination.

Some of the villagers gathered around the pyre cursed the administration for its laxity. Others cursed the guru who had been in hiding since the stampede and seemed to have little concern for the welfare of the devotees or the families they left behind.

One of Mr. Kumar’s sons was sobbing in a corner. He pulled the boy toward him and they both broke into an embrace as thick clouds of smoke rose from the pyres.

Now they were left with only each other: a family of broken men.

“Don’t cry, my son,” Mr. Kumar consoled them as they walked back to the village.

Mujib mashal contributed reporting from New Delhi.