Jafrabad: “Allah please send back my abbu.” Five-year-old Rabhya Basra kept repeating this prayer umpteen times in the last four days. “I have faith in God… my husband will be found alive,” her mother Alarakhi, kept assuring herself and her three daughters, of whom Rabhya is the youngest. They all were desperately hoping to get some news about Kadar Sorathiya (40), the man of the house. He was missing from Jafrabad harbour in Amreli district since Tuesday morning. When TOI team visited the Sorathiya home, the family members were hopeful that Kadar will be back soon. Nobody from their community had the heart to tell them that they were hoping against hope. Local community leader Umar Natupali too advised the TOI team not to express doubt about Kadar’s survival. “The family would not be able to tolerate the pain,” Natupali said. “I have three daughters but the youngest one is very close to her father. She is refusing to have food without him. I have nobody to earn in the family,” Alarakhi told TOI. But within an hour of that meeting Alarakhi’s world came crashing down around her. Reports came that three bodies have been found some three kms away from where Kadar went missing. “Kadar’s body is badly decomposed and stinking. It’s very hard to identify him,” said the man who found the body. Early on Tuesday morning Kadar went to tie the boat at the jetty as the wind speed decreased, his family informed. The boats that are anchored during the cyclone needs to retied to protect them from drowning or colliding with other boats.“There were four persons in the boat that capsized including Kadar, who didn’t know swimming. Fellow ‘khalasis’ told us that he drowned,” Natupali said. Kadar’s other two daughters Antasha and Kashmira, both yet to cross the age of 10, study at government primary school. His father, who worked as a labourer, had died four months ago. Chetan Shiyal, a local political leader from Jafrabad, said that many fishermen are yet to be traced. “Eight fishermen have died and many more are missing. The collector office is asking us about the number of missing persons but it’s difficult to arrive at an exact figure as many boats from Shiyal Beyt operate at the Jafrabad coast. The mobile network is down since past four days and so the fishermen’s families whose members are missing are ot able to contact us,” Shiyal said. “This (Jafrabad) is a fishermen’s harbour. Before the cyclone we had requested the district administration to park these barges somewhere else but they did not listen to us and that caused a lot of damage,” Shiyal added.
5-year-old prayed for her father; cyclone merciless
