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I never saw Bhuj before the earthquake. I don't know what it looked like without rubble lining the streets. I've seen it only with abandoned buildings with gaping holes in the walls, pieces of homes strewn across empty lots, and the base of a multi-storied apartment complex rendered useless. Strangely, I will also remember Bhuj having an uncharacteristically high number of pigs roaming the streets, wandering from lot to lot as they looked for something to eat in mixed heaps of garbage and rubble.

A relief above one of the altars in the temple complex shows a beautiful wind swept city, yet rests upon neglected sacred space.

The city was dusty and harsh winds negated the otherwise warm sun. Squinting into the sunshine and trying to avoid both wind and dust as I walked quickly wore me out. I, who live in a desert in another country, thought that I would be in a familiar climate, but this was a separate environmental category altogether. It had little to do with the temperature or wind velocity though-it was the feel of the city as a whole. This was no carefree metropolis with smooth highways and content families enjoying the pleasures of life. Here, people are concerned with daily survival, especially those in the many tents that had become their homes after the earthquake. They had become as resilient as the desert itself, but not by choice. As I helplessly watched my skin dry and crack every few hours despite layers of lotion, there were folks on the roadside in the same place they have been for the past year, impervious to the harsh moods of the desert.

I walked around the once grand lake that is now comparably a pool. The huge ancient wooden doors leading down to the ghats are still impressive as are the gates of the main fort. These gates still stand even if some of the sculpture had fallen to the ground and was swept away with the rubble. Strangely, a nearby church was made more lovely, since half of its heavy concrete dome had fallen to the ground-the now open-air space is filled with light which falls in patterns determined by the zig-zag of its cracked covering.

This graceful relief is reminiscent of animal gods depicted in the Harrapan culture.

In Bhuj, the museum is no more. It once was one of India's oldest museums, its collections housed within a lovely old building. Now a dusty signboard hangs crookedly on the rusty gate, informing visitors: "Museum Closed Today." The gate itself was a bit ajar, probably the work of the watchman who never came out of his nearby tent as I entered, or perhaps the owners of the two bicycles that sat outside the only door that hadn't been chained shut. Despite the eerie signage I was drawn in by some of the broken sculptures that had been placed in a strange line out front. A student of art history, I remembered the endless quizzes we had to take-see the slide and name the date, artist, school, etc. Now in front of me were these lonely pieces jumbled together with other ones, newly cracked from last year's shake up. The museum that had once displayed the pieces as a zoo does animals existed no more. The artwork had lost their identification tags and flaunted the systematic categorization imposed on them as they sat in a chaotic group. Nevertheless, they still hung around the place; it was home after all.

I walked to an old temple with steles hundreds of years old lying amidst rubble. Shiv lings in stone and stone imprints of holy feet were covered with tiny dry leaves of winter. Nearby, what once were intricately sculpted columns were now huge 3-D jigsaw puzzle pieces lying on the ground. Tiny scenes sculpted by hands that left this earth hundreds of years ago adamantly clung to the standing portions that had resisted the quake's force.

Steles tell the stories of deeds done hundreds of years ago

I wondered how many people had taken advantage of the disarray by taking pieces of this site as souvenirs. How many foreigners and Indians alike would have already stopped in to shake their heads, determined to "rescue" particularly priceless sculpture? I could only hope that one day it would be restored properly. But who should do this? Can the people of Bhuj worry about ruins and stones when some may still lack shelter and means to proper nutrition? Even if they are better off, their attention is for people who need it. Old rocks may not be a priority.

As a superficial observer, I can only assume that there are thousands of amazing stories of people's heroism, selflessness, and generosity that have risen out of the ruins of this quake. But even during my cursory stay there, I observed an obviously inadequate amount of help given to the Gujarati people, and I only saw the city of Bhuj-I didn't see the villages (nor ghost villages) and places even more negatively influenced by these happenings. Many people have forgotten about the major earthquake that changed Bhuj and its surroundings. Yet this place has been transformed not only by its broken buildings, but also by people somewhat broken themselves as they try to navigate between the maze of NGOs, government apathy, and their own conflicting hearts.

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