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Chisoti (Kishtwar, J&K): At around 11:40 am on August 14, a group of children were rehearsing for the Independence Day celebrations at their school in Chisoti village of Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar district when a strange and dreadful noise filled the air.

“I felt as if a VIP was coming to perform the yatra in a chopper which had crashed,” said Hukum Chand, a teacher at a government-run middle school in Chisoti.

Every year in July, this difficult village some 300 kilometres from Srinagar via NH-44 comes to life when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from different states come to undertake a nine-km hike to the temple of Machail Mata, a sacred annual pilgrimage for the Hindus deep in the Himalayas.

Chisoti serves as the final basecamp of the pilgrimage which lasts more than three months and brings a lot of festivities and immense economic opportunities for the village’s few hundred locals.

So far this year, two lakh pilgrims have participated in the arduous journey under the watchful gaze of dozens of security personnel and disaster response officials who had been deployed in the village to facilitate the pilgrimage.

Before the yatra started on July 25, a large community kitchen came up in the village square catering to more than 5000 pilgrims every day. Around the kitchen, hundreds of stalls, mostly run by local residents, had sprung up selling food, mementos, cheap bangles, chains, earrings and other items to the pilgrims.

“On the morning of the fateful day,” recalled Joginder Singh, a resident of Chaisoti who recently completed postgraduate degree in botany from a university in Uttarakhand, “a heavy but brief spell of shower lashed the village”.

Soldiers of the Indian army carrying a steel beam to make a bridge over the Bhot tributary in Chisoti village. Photo: Jehangir Ali.

Sumit Solanki, an........

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