LUCKNOW Two nights under the open sky were enough to turn loss into urgency. On Friday morning, the blackened stretch, where over 280 shanties once stood, began to stir, not with relief, but with quiet determination as hundreds of families started rebuilding their homes from ashes.
The air still carried the burning smell of smoke. Men, women and children tied bamboo poles, stretched plastic sheets, salvaging whatever little the fire had spared. Sarees became roofs, tarpaulin turned into walls, to reclaim a sense of shelter.
Relief material trickled in, plastic sheets and tarpaulin offered by volunteers — but it wasn’t enough. Many families, with nothing left to their name, pooled whatever little cash they had to buy materials and start over.
Among them was Mohd Sohail, 14, who should have been spending his holidays at ease. A Class 7 student at a madrasa in Balaganj, he is now ferrying relief material and helping rebuild his family’s hut. His mother, Parveen, a widow and domestic worker, watched quietly as her children worked. “I have no one else. My children are all I have, and today they are rebuilding our home,” she said.
A few metres away, Mahesh, 48, stared at the skeletal frame of what would soon be his family’s shelter. A daily wage labourer who cycled to Dubagga for work, lost not just his home, but his only means of earning. “My bicycle is gone. Work can wait. First, we need a roof,” he said, as his wife Poonam tied together bamboo sticks for their family of eight.
Teenagers Akshat, 17, and his sister Nandani, 16, dug into the hardened ground, fixing bamboo poles for their family’s tent. The siblings, who attend a nearby government school, had spent the previous night without any cover. “We couldn’t sleep yesterday. If we complete this today, at least our family won’t have to sleep outside again,” Akshat said, his hands caked in mud.
“There are no walls yet, no certainty of tomorrow, only fragile frames of plastic and bamboo rising from the ruins. But for these families, even the weakest shelter is stronger than another night under the open sky,” said a visitor who came for a relief work.
