"Everything Lost" Chilling Stories Of Tragedy-Hit Wayanad (Photo @@seethakkaMLA)
Heart-wrenching stories of survival, losses, helplessness, misery, horror, sympathy, and despair are keep coming one after another from Kerala’s Wayanad. Many still hold a longing to awaken from a nightmare, praying that all this could be a dream. The calamity happened at midnight while the villagers were sleeping, burying many of them alive under the mud.
While the huge rock, mud, and water spread across the tragedy-hit region in Mundakkai, Chooralmala, and other nearby villages were enough to measure the depth of the horror, the accounts of those who witnessed, perhaps one of the biggest tragedies in the state, leave the viewers bust in tear.
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“Everything gone” has been the most common helpless word of the survivors, leaving spectators in no way to comfort the grieved. “I am the only one left; every other is safe,” wails a shattered survivor whose whole family was washed away by the massive landslide.
A woman survivor explains how she and her family escaped at midnight while crying for her neighbors, noting that all of them perished as she could not inform them amid the rush with no phone in hand.
Speaking to the new agency ANI, an elderly woman, Jyothimani, says she lost her son and grandchildren. “The river swept them away; I don’t have a life anymore; everything is gone; the body of my son has been recovered,” she weeps.
An overwhelmed father, stating his throat is ailing, says his daughter, who used to assuages him saying, “Don’t worry, I will go to the US” has been missing for three days,” he shivers.
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Speaking to Asianet News, an elderly woman describes the narrow escape she and her family had during the disaster, adding that it was in front of a tusker that they reached, escaping the landslides. The woman says that as they appealed to the elephant not to attack them, the elephant was seen weeping, the woman recalls, adding that they stayed near the tusker till dawn and the tusker appeared to understand their plight. Another survivor looks back they heard the sound of a group of elephants before the landslides, which she says helped them awaken and escape shortly before the tragedy took their home.
Another woman sheds tear, saying she lost her daughter and did not get her body. No one else but I lost my dearest daughter; no one can feel that pain. If I got even a portion of her dress, it could have sufficed to crunch my anguish, She broke before the media.
Recollecting the scenario, a survivor remembers the fear she felt when the heavy downpours were hitting the hilly region, with what she says being a smell of trees crashing each other, a sign of landslides, as per an anecdote she was told earlier. As she could not get to sleep, she heard a massive sound and then a jerk in her house. Awaking children, the family climbed up the hill, and soon their house was dismantled with mud covering it, she recalls.
A man says he lost his mother and other family members. My mother’s body is yet to be received. Each time a vehicle comes carrying dead bodies from Nilambur, Chaliyar River – where the bodies were swept away from Wayanad – he rushes to see if his mother was among them. However, most of the bodies are torn apart, defaced, and cannot even be recognised; I don’t know what to do,” he laments.
