As bullets flew, he carried wounded wife out of danger

Rano

VIP
SUKMA (Chhattisgarh): Last year, when her parents married her off to a man younger and less educated than her, 24-year-old Mamta Shikari was hurt and resentful. But, today she swears by her husband. "I owe my life to him. I wouldn't have survived had he chosen to run away," she says from the hospital bed where she is recovering from injuries sustained in Monday's bus blast.

Mamta was travelling with her husband Devrat from Chingwad village to Dantewada town that morning; she had to attend a camp for teaching assistants. A graduate in biology, Mamta was recently appointed a Shiksha Karmi, a primary teaching assistant. Both Mamta and Devrat are from lower middle-class migrant families that moved to Bastar from Orissa three decades ago.

On the way back from Dantewada, their bus stopped at Bhusvaras, where a group of policemen boarded the bus. It had barely travelled a short distance, when a big explosion took place, and Mamta remembers being thrown out of the bus. "I was sitting next to the window. When the explosion took place, the window got shattered and fell out." She vaguely recollects hearing some gun shots and a piercing pain in her leg before she lost consciousness.

Meanwhile, Devrat, seated next to her, was fortuitously cushioned from the direct impact of the blast. But he found he could no longer hear anything. The explosion had deafened him, but his limbs were intact. And he had no serious injuries. "I heard firing breaking out. I immediately knew we had to get away," he recalls. Picking up his unconscious wife, he quickly manoeuvred his way out of the firing. "But exhaustion overwhelmed me, and soon I could no longer carry her. So I dragged her away from the blast site. After a while she regained consciousness, and began to walk limply," he added. They walked a kilometre from the blast site, when they hailed a passing truck and took a lift to the nearest police station. From there, they were transported to the hospital.

Mamta has a leg fracture, and cuts on her arms and forehead. She winces in pain as she speaks, but manages a wan smile simultaneously, as she says, "I think my husband is very brave, very capable. Woh bahut kaabil hai. He saved my life. He could have walked away."

Devrat cuts in, "It never even occurred to me (to do that)." The woman he could not win over in one year of marriage, he did in one act of bravery.
 
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