Maha Kumbh stampede in Delhi: ‘I feel like this is the end of the world for me’

Sruchi Kumari, 12, washed her hair and got into a fresh pair of sandals as she left her makeshift shanty on the northwest peripheries of Delhi on Saturday evening to travel to the world’s largest religious gathering at the Maha Kumbh Mela.

By midnight, her cold body lay wrapped in a white cloth inside the government-run Lok Nayak Hospital, alongside at least 17 others who were killed in a deadly stampede at the New Delhi railway station.

Her father Manoj Kumar, wearing a red hoodie, sat in a corner sobbing outside the casualty ward. He had lost his mother, father, and daughter to the stampede. “My daughter promised to return with a bottle of holy water for me,” Kumar said. “She was crushed by people in a rush. I do not understand what the hell broke upon my family today.”

Nearly a dozen people from Kumar’s family, engaged in waste and scrap dealing in Delhi, were en route to the festival in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Their journey was cut short at the railway station in Delhi when last minute changes in the platform from which festival-bound trains were departing led to confusion and a surge in crowds. Among the 18 people known to be killed, three…

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