Around 1 am on Saturday, 32-year-old Somwati was sleeping on a cot inside a shanty with her three children when she felt something cold touch her feet. She woke up and found herself in the middle of a pool of water. Outside, she heard people shouting ‘Jaldi chalo, Hindon ka pani aa raha hai (Get out quickly, water from the Hindon river has inundated the area).’
Somwati, who lives on the river’s floodplain near Karhera village in Ghaziabad, gathered her children, picked up a shawl and waited for help to arrive. “We waited all night… All our belongings slowly got washed away. This evening, a tractor came and got us out. Our situation is such that we can’t even change our clothes because we couldn’t bring any,” said the woman, who is taking shelter at a government school in Ghaziabad’s Mohan Nagar.
Hailing from UP’s Badaun, Somwati works as a vegetable farmer on rented land near the village — among the worst flood-hit areas.
Among the most prominent sites that bore the brunt of the recent Delhi floods is Nigambodh Ghat, one of the oldest crematoriums in the capital.
Located on the banks of the Yamuna behind the Red Fort, the ghat consists of a series of bathing and ceremonial-stepped piers leading to the waters of the river. It also has an electric crematorium built in the 1950s and a CNG-run crematorium that was later added, around the early 2000s. While there is no recorded history of when this crematorium was established, legend goes that it has been blessed by the presence of revered Hindu gods.
The ghat suffered extensive damage in the recent floods. Avdhesh Sharma (42), a supervisor who has been working at Nigambodh Ghat since 2003, said, “The flooding in the Yamuna on July 13 submerged the ghat. Our office, ambulance and all the wood and other equipment got washed away. We are still removing the water and silt and cleaning the premises.”
