By IANS,
New Delhi : Pellets pierced their bodies. One, a 60-year-old, had to let his leg be amputated but hasn’t shed a tear. Another, much younger and with shrapnel still embedded, doesn’t want his family to visit him in hospital.
A week on, victims of the Sep 7 Delhi High Court blast lie wounded in the body and mind, but are trying to cope.
The elderly Vipin Kumar sleeps in the emergency ward of the apex trauma centre at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) as his son Vaibhav Gautam peeps from a glass window, watching him.
“I wish I were as strong as him. I cried on hearing about his condition, but he hasn’t shed a tear since the incident. One of his legs has been amputated,” a distraught Vaibhav, 32, tells IANS.
Kumar runs a travel agency in central Delhi’s Jhandewalan. He had gone to the court for a case hearing against the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) when a powerful bomb exploded outside the Delhi High Court’s Gate No 5 where litigants had lined up for the visitor’s pass, killing 13 and wounding more than 90.
“My father talks about everything but the blast. As far as his work is concerned, he can work from home. We are more concerned about the mental trauma,” says Vaibhav, who runs a business in Karol Bagh.
The family was counselled by a prosthetic company before the leg was amputated.
“We knew he would accept the reality. He narrated to me how he dragged himself to the ambulance, all this when he is 60 years old and he has already undergone a major bypass surgery of the heart,” says the proud son.
In another part of the city, a mother has come to see her son for the first time at Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital. Savita’s 37-year-old son Nitin is a software engineer and is recovering from his surgeries.
“Nitin still has flakes of dried blood on his scalp. He had around 1,000 pellets in his body, but most of these have been removed. Surgeries have been done and he is better now,” his mother says after coming out of the orthopaedic ward of the RML trauma centre.
Nitin, a resident of south Delhi’s Friend’s Colony, has a seven-year-old son Armaan who was told by his school friends about his father’s condition. They learnt about it from media reports.
“He is agitated, shaken…He has asked me not to send Armaan anywhere outside,” Savita says.
And hurriedly adds: “Nitin did not want me to come. He said he will manage alone…”