The families displaced by the latest water seepage at the East-West Metro site in Bowbazar spent most of Saturday shuttling between hotel rooms and the homes they had to evacuate the day before.
Throughout the day, people were seen entering their houses and coming out with stuffed trolley bags.
The frustration and helplessness in turning homeless overnight and the scramble to sort and move belongings from one place to another is not unfamiliar to the locality.
What happened on Durga Pituri Lane in May this year was now unfolding on adjoining Madan Dutta Lane.
Nabanita Barua, one of the displaced residents, had tears rolling down her cheeks as she looked at her home on Madan Dutta Lane.
Barua, 39, lived with her 13-year-old son Raunak in a three-storey house — one of the affected buildings. Her husband passed away last month. In the house, she had four rooms.
Now, she has been put up in a room in a hotel on BB Ganguly Street. Barua had to leave the house with a handful of items on Friday morning.
Around 7.30am on Saturday, she came back to take some more things. But she was allegedly not allowed inside because a videographer — supposed to record the process — had not yet come. She finally went in around 11am and came out after a couple of hours.
“I took some clothes, my son’s books and other important documents,” said Barua, who has been living on Madan Dutta Lane since 2002, the year she got married.
Moving stuff from home to hotel was not the only challenge.
The operator of her son’s school pool car had refused to change the route and pick him up from the hotel. Raunak is in Class VIII at Kendriya Vidyalaya Ballygunge.
Barua was eventually able to persuade the operator to pick Raunak up.
Sanjay Gupta, another resident displaced by Friday’s accident, also took clothes, documents and medicines out from his home on Saturday.
“Going by the past, we might not be able to come back anytime soon. I don’t know what to do with the furniture,” said Gupta.
Most displaced residents shared his concern — whether to move the furniture or not.
Till Friday evening, as many as 136 people from at least 10 buildings on the narrow Madan Dutta Lane, which lies just above a tunnel connecting the two tunnels of East-West Metro, had to be evacuated.
The number went up on Saturday.
“Till now, the number of displaced residents has gone up to 183. Around a dozen houses have been affected,” an official of KMRC said on Saturday evening.