The Russian attack has predictably induced a deep sense of panic and uncertainty in Malayali medical students in Kharkiv, one of the first eastern cities in Ukraine to be bombed by Russia in the wee hours of Thursday.
By evening these students were asked to take enough food and water and rush down apartment bunkers or underground stations where they could remain protected from air raids.
Now, almost fully cut off from the outside world, anxiety has worsened into desperation.
"Please do something to get us out of here," is the first thing that Jancy, third year medical student of Kharkiv International University, tells Onmanorama when we call her. It was in a hush trembling voice that she spoke as if she was a kidnap victim seeking help without attracting the attention of her captors.
Jancy is in the Naukova Metro Station with her collegemates and a huge crowd of local Kharkiv residents. These bunkers and underground railway stations seem to have become crowded dungeons where a seemingly odd noise could set off a wild collective panic.
Not even a minute into our call, we heard loud screams in the station. Jancy started to cry. We kept asking her what happened and she had no idea. "People are rushing inside," she said. By inside she meant the service rooms in the metro station.
Then we heard a girl saying in animated Malayalam that there was shelling outside.
As it turned out, the sound was the result of one person slipping and taking many others down with him on the balcony above. The underground metro has two floors, each having a 12-ft wide walkway with round columns lined on either side. The walls are marble.
"Some of our friends who had taken refuge in Peremoha Metro (another metro nearby, but larger) said they could hear shelling outside," Jancy said. "Since bombing is the only thing in our minds, any sound we hear seems to sound like some artillery explosion," Jancy said.
She had reached the metro only an hour ago. It was 6 p.m. in Kharkiv when we called her. "Our apartment has a bunker but we thought we would be safe in the underground station," Jancy said. We could hear one of Jancy's friends yelling at someone, angrily asking the person to be consistent. "Why do you want to give a different version every second," the female is heard saying.
Jancy explains: "Here the mood changes every five minutes. One moment we hear that things are fine and that Putin has agreed to call back his troops. After a while, we will have another person saying what we heard before was just bull***t and that Putin was getting stronger."
Jancy said that the first-year students were safe in the university hostel. "But we had moved out of the hostel after our first year," Jancy said. She and her friends had just enough time to take water and some food to the metro station.
"We don't know for how long we would be stuck here. We were just told to come here," she said. A voice can be heard near her: "I heard a Ukranian here saying we will have to stay here for at least two days." Jancy started crying. "We don't have food or water to last us even today. Somehow get us out of here," Jancy was telling us.
We passed her all the official information we could. Like the general mood inside the station, Jancy's mood too changed quickly. She said the Indian embassy representative of the University offers constant updates on Facebook and Telegram."Wi-Fi signals are weak inside the station but still, the updates, though a struggle to access, are a big relief."
When we were about to end the call, we heard one of her friends say: “Jancy, tell these media persons to pray for us.”
