A stampede victim with her injured son at a Punjab hospital on Monday. (PTI)

Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, Aug. 4: The toddler at the hospital keeps looking quizzically into the eye of every stranger.

“Mum… mum,” the one-year-old mumbles from the lap of an attendant, clutching a biscuit in her right hand.

But the flicker of recognition she is desperately searching for in every pair of eyes stays elusive. Nobody has come forward to claim her as their own since a stampede killed 151 people yesterday at the Naina Devi temple across the border in Himachal Pradesh.

No one knows what the baby’s name is, nor whether her parents are among the dead or the 300 injured now scattered around hospitals in two states.

The girl was discovered unconscious, with a minor bruise on her right eyebrow, after the stampede. A doctor called by the temple said she regained consciousness after a while and has since then been “on the lookout for her parents”.

It’s not clear if she knows what “mum” means — it seems to be the only meaningful sound she is capable of making.

Across the hospital corridor, an elderly couple from Sirhind, Punjab, are frantically searching for their two sons who had gone to the temple. They said they had been running from one ward to another but the authorities had not been able to give them any information so far.

Anxious relatives have gathered at the hospital in this Punjab town to look for familiar faces among the 70 dead and scores of injured brought here. Many others have arrived as volunteers to try and help the injured and their families, and to console the relatives of the dead.

Langars (meals) have been organised in the town’s gurdwara and morning prayers held in the memory of the dead.

Long lines of pilgrims queued up at the Naina Devi temple again today, a pile of shoes and slippers on one side of the road the only visible reminders of yesterday’s tragedy.