Holding on to her eight-year-old son with her right hand, she tried to cling on to her one-year-old daughter with her left, but couldn't. As she lies in the emergency ward of the Army Hospital, badly injured with multiple rib fractures but still tightly clutching her son, Sanju, all that 40-year-old Santra Bai, a casual labourer from Chattisgarh, can think of is her daughter who is still missing after flood waters swept away her hut on Thursday night.

"I held her with my left hand but the water was too strong. She was screaming and all I could do was look at her flowing away in the water," she says, tears flowing down her cheeks.

Santra Bai was one of the scores of migrant labourers housed in makeshift huts that were amongst the worst affected. She does not know that her daughter and two elder sons are missing and presumed dead in the floods, but takes solace from the fact that she could hold on to Sanju. The boy, who has also been severely bruised, has not let go of his mother since being rescued.

While the body of one unidentified foreign tourist has been recovered, almost all those who were killed were locals and migrant labourers who were fast asleep when the torrential rain struck.

Many who survived have lost most of their family members in the tragedy. "I woke up when water started entering the second floor of the house where I was sleeping. I somehow managed to jump out of the balcony onto dry land but the entire house was swept away," Stanza Punchok, a local trader, says from his hospital bed. His house in Leh town was swept away and his father, mother and elder brother are still missing.

For vegetable seller Imtiaz Ahmed, a decision to sleep inside his shop almost proved fatal. After he got swept away in the floods, he was stuck in waist-deep mud for nearly five hours. "I was pinned against a vehicle that had rolled down the ridge. After four hours, I was discovered by locals," he recalls.

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