Teacher’s delay saves 80 children in cloudburst-hit J&K village | India News

CHASOTI: A teacher’s hesitation spared 80 children from certain death. Minutes before a wall of water and boulders tore through Chasoti village in J&K’s Kishtwar district, Hukum Chand kept his students back from a langar lunch. At 11.40am, the mountain barrelled down. The school stood. The children lived.Chand teaches at the village’s lone primary school. He recalled how volunteers from the langar had invited the children to eat early on Aug 14. “They were insisting on going around 11am. But since we were busy with Independence Day preparations, we held them back,” he said Sunday.When the roar grew louder and the ground shook, Chand saw the mountain collapsing into Rajai Nalla, the local stream. “We directed older students to run toward higher ground. I held the younger ones back,” he said. Once the flood subsided, every child was safe. Chand then ran to the langar site. “I saw bodies floating. I pulled out at least 30 injured from the debris.” His relief was cut with grief — his brother was among the dead.The deluge left no family untouched in Chasoti. Three priests — Budh Raj, Dina Nath, and Thakur Chand — perished along with villagers. The bodies of Nath and Chand were found, but Raj is still missing. “We cremated 10 bodies together on Aug 15,” said Joginder Singh, 28, who lost his mother Gayatri Devi that day. “There are 13 family trees in this village and every single one has been affected.”Singh’s memory of his final words to his mother haunts him. He had gone with her to grind barley at a watermill, a routine task. “She looked at me and said ‘ok’,” he said. “That was my last conversation. Moments later, everything was gone. The temples — Kali Mata Mandir, Meynnag Mandir, Thein Mandir — the sacred tree near them too.” Later that day, he and other villagers found her body under the rubble.The devastation has shaken the community’s faith. Some villagers said the gods are “not happy”. Yet Singh believes divine forces spared them. “A boulder was stopped by Ma Kali temple that pushed the water toward the stream and saved the village,” he said.At priest Raj’s home, women wept inconsolably. The respected priest had warned for days something was coming. “For the past 10 days, he had been saying something big was going to happen,” said Ram Krishan Khajuria, president of Sanathan Mandal Paddar Tehsil. “On the very day, he stopped a woman from going to the fields.”Now, Chasoti’s lanes echo with mourning. Relief camps shelter survivors. Chand’s school houses Army and NDRF teams combing through debris. Amid loss and ruin, his choice — a delay over lunch — stands as the line that kept 80 children alive.