Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 - 10:34 pm:

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KARLAPALEM (GUNTUR DT.): Gloom dawned over Marakavaripalem in Karlapalem mandal of Guntur district when the news of Army jawan Battula Siva Nageswara Rao’s death in a snow storm in Kashmir, reached the village from the authorities on Monday night.

A shanty tiled house, where the parents of this jawan along with his wife Anusha live, turned into a place with pin-drop silence after a spell of inconsolable crying from parents Battula Venkateswarlu and Seshamma.

Nageswara Rao's wife Anusha, who spoke to him only on Sunday evening was shell-shocked and refuses to believe the news.

Lone bread earner

A poor farming family, Siva Nageswara Rao was the lone bread earner and the family lived on the money he regularly sent from his various places of posting in Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu.

In his latest posting for training in Kashmir, Siva Nageswara Rao did not have an inkling of the impending danger, said his father Venkateswarlu who tills a small piece of land in the village.

The entire village has been making a beeline to the house ever since they came to know that their 'son of the soil' died on Monday morning.

The Army officials were not sure when they could recover the bodies as there was heavy snowfall in the region and it would take at least two more days before the body reached Karlapalem.

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