Mumbai: 70-year-old woman saved five from drowning in Vile Parle
Radha Gupta Radha Gupta, 70, saved daughter-in-law Saroj and some other women from the neighbourhood; the 30-foot-deep well whose slab collapsed along with an iron grill atop it; some of the local teens who rescued the women before official help arrived; (inset) three-year-old Divya Yadav didn’t survive
Senior citizen Radha Gupta, all of 70, inadvertently turned out to be a saviour for at least five women when a slab over a deep well in Vile Parle East collapsed during a religious ceremony on Tuesday. Three people including a three-year-old were killed.
The Jiutiya Puja, observed among North Indian communities like the Yadavs and Guptas, takes place near a water body after a 36-hour-long fast undertaken by women for the health and well-being of their children.
The well, inside the compound of Ruia Bungalow on Dixit Road, is the nearest clean water body for the neighbourhood. Every year for the past three decades, they conduct the puja here.
When the women stepped on the covering of the well to accept prasad, the rusted iron grill which supported the tiles gave way. Gupta, the most elder woman present, was standing on top of the well serving the prasad.
"I had raised my hands to do namaskar, and I went down just like that, with my hands above my head. Instinctively I flapped my hands and paddled with my feet and raised my head above the water to cry for help," she said. Gupta had picked up swimming in her childhood, which was spent in Uttar Pradesh. She would often go to bathe in a river or a well. But it had been a long while since she entered a water body to swim. "Other women including my own daughter-in-law clung to me lightly, catching hold of my sari, or my elbows. One even held me by my hair. They are bred in a city. They don't know how to swim," she said.
"Somehow I and those who held on to me managed to move to the side of the well and grasped the stones. When I looked up some men lowered a pipe. I was the first one to be pulled out," she said.
Apart from bruises on her arms, Gupta escaped unhurt.
Her daughter-in-law, Saroj, 48, said, "I clung on to her after seeing she was not drowning like us. Had she not moved us to the wall, I would have drowned."
Gupta's granddaughter Aarti, "She had vomited twice after being pulled out. We are afraid internal injuries might show up later. No one thought the slab might be so weak."
