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Blast victims' relatives mourn as Diwali dawns

     New Delhi: For Satish Ochani of Delhi, Diwali forever would be darker, while the rest of India would be celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights. Anguished Ochani was standing outside a Delhi hospital on Tuesday to collect the body of his eight month old daughter Ishika, who died alongwith his mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law, in Saturday's bomb blast in the Indian capital, while his wife and elder daughter is fighting for their lives. They were caught in the blast, while out on a Diwali-eve shopping at a shopping centre in central Delhi on that fateful day.

     Like Ochani, several relatives of the victims clustered outside hospitals on Tuesday trying to find missing loved ones among charred and unidentified bodies. "My wife and my nine-year old daughter are admitted with 20 and 60 percent burns respectively. I have lost my 8-month-old daughter whose body I have come to take. There has been three more deaths in the family including that of my mother in-law, my sisters in-laws.... For me, Diwali is gone forever, it has become a no-moon day for me now...." said Ochani. For Srikant, a resident of Bangalore, festivals like Diwali will no longer have any meaning. He is in Delhi to collect the body of his relative Yashwant, another victim of the blast. "There is no importance, we are in a big grief. We have come to take the body of my brother-in law back home in Bangalore where we live. I do not think we are going to be happy for the next four-five Diwalis as such," said Srikanth. Fifty-nine people, mostly out on shopping on the eve of Hindu festival Diwali and the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, died and over 200 injured or burnt in three blasts.

     Security forces have been put on high alert for Diwali and the Muslim festival of Eid. Saturday's blasts came as Indian and Pakistani officials in Islamabad agreed to open the Kashmir frontier to help victims of this month's devastating Kashmir quake, the latest step in an unsteady peace process opposed by some Kashmiri rebels. Speculation points to Lashkar and other Kashmiri groups seen as having the skills and resources needed for such an attack. But Kashmir's largest rebel group, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, has said Islamic militants would never strike at civilians.

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