"Everything Lost" Chilling Stories Of Tragedy-Hit Wayanad (Photo @@seethakkaMLA)

Heart-wrenching stories of survival, losses, helplessness, misery, horror, sympathy, and despair 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, has shattered the hearts of all.

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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,” wailed 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 neighbours, 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, said 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 wept.

An overwhelmed father, stating his throat is ailing recounting his daughter used to assuage him saying, “Don’t worry, I will go to the US.”  “She has been missing for three days,” he shivered in despair.

Speaking to Asianet News, an elderly woman described 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 recalled that when they appealed to the elephant not to attack them, the elephant was seen weeping. She added that they stayed near the tusker till dawn, and the animal appeared to understand their plight. Another survivor looks back; they heard the sound of a group of elephants before the landslides, which she said helped them awaken and escape shortly before the tragedy took their home.

Another woman shed tears and said 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 said as she broke before the media.

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Recollecting the scenario, a survivor said the fear she felt when the heavy downpours were hitting the hilly region, with what she said was the smell of trees crashing each other, a sign of landslides, as per an anecdote she was told earlier. As she could not sleep that fateful night, she heard a massive sound and then a jerk in her house. Awaking her children, the family climbed up the hill, and soon their house was destroyed with mud covering it, she recalled.

A man said he lost his mother and other family members. “My mother’s body is yet to be received,” he said. 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 lamented.