My name is Devi, Devi Tamang and I am a survivor of the perilous mayhem of Sunkoshi Landslide. I lost my family, my home and my everything at once that malevolent night. Buried underneath the Earth, deprived of the slightest of vision, I struggled for 3 whole days and nights with an almost-deadened possibility of my escape. In light of the fact, I enwrote about the asphyxial trauma I went through in that dungeonlike pit.
Surviving the catastrophe !!!
"Did you know? Fissures and cracks are seen all over. Boulders have started falling off and mud has begun rolling down the cliff since morning," uncle Nar Bahadur, a local of Itini village, was whispering to my dad. "We talked about the ongoings with the VDC secretariat and he claims he has already talked about it with the CDO. I hope the stakeholders won't sit still, snoring, until a tumultingly disastrous knock gives them a wake up call," he continued. All I knew that moment was that Kanle was not being able to bear the weight of its soil, and that it had started loosing its hold.
" Hurry up! We don't have time. First, we need to shift the cattles to Parajuli village. Still a lot of valuables are yet to be worked with." Uncle Hari was yelling at his wife down the narrow road below the cliff. "Bishnu, believe me. The cliff won't spare you. You've got to think wisely. You can't just risk your or your family's lives." He was making a pleading appeal with my dad.
"Cowards, Itini locals." Those were just the words spitted off my dad's mouth.
Bang! The door closes.
Around 11 in the dark, leaves were rustling clamorously. Strange outcries were heard ever and anon. I remember how that insanely whirry wind blew that night like it's impetuous enough to bisect the meridians of Earth in the fury of vengeance for some anonymous misdeed of the Itini's or the Jure's, whatsoever it was. It was all so strange, completely different because we were used to the gentle breeze that used to sing accounts of amours and a lot many anecdotes of amiability between Itini and Jure but that night was sinister, lurkingly sinister.
"Something's trampling the leaves much severely. Footsteps? Approaching nearer.."
(Dad rushes to open the door and in a flash, we are all in our unmown lawn.)
Gosh! A flock of Itini villagers were treading the path. They were portering their valuables and dragging their livestocks wearily, yet in haste.
"We can't wait for death to come and take us away. Have you felt the terror in the savage wilderness of this wind? It's just born, yet is fierce enough to detach these boulders off the cliff. We can't stay put anymore to make tally of forboded casualties. So, we're heading towards Parajuli village," said Prakash uncle to my dad and the flock marched away.
What still knocks me today is my dad's impudence. Why didn't he listen to uncle Prakash? What made him so reluctant to admit to his head, what uncle Hari had told him in the noon? Why was he jumping down their throats? Nonetheless, in a jiffy, all of us were on our own beds. After finishing up the due Maths assignments, I slid to my bed, but laid there, a wide awake me, who was just thinking around the bend about what had just happened a couple of hours ago. "God forbid! What if the Itini's happen to be true?"
The night was silent in the terror of 2 am. The benumbed dark was lamed by the luminiscent moon and I was safe under the infinity of sky that harboured the ethereal starshine, darting its impeccable share upon me, UNTIL this happened..
Suddenly some enormously heavy thing fell upon me. It struck me right on my chest, making me dyspneic. Hue and cry everywhere inside me but not a single syllable was let out of my throat. The squall from the inside was deafening but I was mute on the outside. I was sinking down in terror- deeper and deeper, hurtful,... more hurtful. The hurry-skurry dread drilled into me, squeezed my gut, clasped my throat and deafened me slowly, but all in once. How-be-it, I tried to struggle despite that enervative thing thrashed upon me. Phew! all my petty efforts petered out and I relapsed back into my phrenetic outcries, no one to hear, none to respond to, just the helpless me with my maimed voice.
" Mommy........Baba........ Debu..............."
"Mommy.........Baba..........Debu.............."
I tried to shout. I tried to let out my wail dolefully. I screamed so many never-to-be-heard yells. But, all went in vain. I could do nothing but cry a river. I wasn't even sure whether I was alive or already delivered to the God's abode. All I could do and all I did was weaving beads of prayers -"God willing! Keep my family safe. Keep them alive." I could catch neither hide nor hair nor sight nor sound of them, or of anyone else. Somehow, I managed to fend off some load from my body and my lungs could finally let some air in and out. Was it the soot of desparity to live that I was stained with or the heftiness of the load that my bones lifted for quite a long time or both, it dragged me off to sleep and in nothing flat, everything was doomed again..
I was unapprised of any fall of night or any break of dawn because I was cloaked by darkness. How could I possibly know then that it had already been 2 days and 3 nights since I was buried down there, underneath my house. I didn't know how Jure was sacked outside. Didn't even know if she was still out there or the havoc had already gutted her and swallowed. On the other hand, I was famished, so hungry that I could devour on any comestible that's handy, which unfortunately was not. I knew if the suffocation, by an iota a chance, failed to render me death, the starvation would surely do me in, in fear of which, I crawled over the area on all my fours, foraging for food if there was any. Then my eyes laid on a small container,tight lidded, with salt inside it. When belly goes empty for days, you will barely think about the delicious eats but wish for anything to pacify your rumbling gut, and anything means ANYTHING. I hastily opened the lid and poured down a handful of salt into my mouth but couldn't swallow a gulp. I sought around for water but as luck would have it, there was hardly any drop. In its stead, I drank my own tears streaming down my cheeks, collecting them in the bowl of my palm. I guttled the salt of my tears. I guzzled the water of my tears. I survived on my tears..
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| The ravaged Kanle cliff.. |
The other day when I opened my eyes, I found myself in a hospital bed, wrapped in whitish-blue gown, sorrounded by the health personnels and their bedside manners. Uncle Hari was sitting next to the bed, looking at me with such contemptuously pitiable eyes like I was the one who had unreckoned his warning, the night before the catastrophe, instead of Baba. He held me in his arms and I couldn't resist outletting the bloods of pain and sobs out of my arrowed heart. I fell into a fit of shedding stream of water off my tear bags. I wept dolefully loud with heaving chest like I was intending to weep to death, complaining for my survival against the disaster to God that he should have let me be with my dead parents in the death-land for I would not have to be left alone to grieve alone by myself in the day today, the morrow and further days to come in my wrecked lonely life. But then, having uncle Hari pour down all his empathy on me, consoling me to rebuild my life from then for the sake of my dead parents if not for me, the fit of loud sobs slowly subsided. I recalled what mommy and Baba had told me in my dreams, wiped off my tears and tried collecting every pieces of me making myself believe to commence building my own lego.
Did I ever be able to come out of this humongous grief, I would perhaps already be in my deathbed for this is not a nightmare I happen to dream of some random night and the following morning I would forget of BUT a tormenting phase of my life with the lowest ever falls I can and shall never ever rise of, until the last whiff of my breath. I shall never have my mother embrace me tightly while I tell her about my difficulties and troubles. I shall never get to see Debu riding on back of Baba, giggling giddily and hopping friskily on his shoulders with that happy-go-lucky countenance. I shall nevermore be endeared by Madhav and shall ever so remember his stupid unhumorous jokes as a bittersweet nostalgia. I shall never have myself sleep under that roof that sheltered me for eighteen whole years and had itself trampled under the earth just alike a crumpled piece of paper. But I shall live with every ounce of pain nailed in my heart and etched into my memory for now and ever. I shall start over afresh alike the sun dawning anew. Gradually, the agitation in my head demoted and I felt an itch to once again look at the running world outside, which never procrastinated irrespective of the hundreds of lives and the hundred thousands of possessions, that the horrid disaster took away. I staggered towards the window and uncurtained it. A newborn sun with an orange bonnet on its head was peeping through the horizon beaming juvenile rays atop me. A new dawn was breaking in the yellow pallor of the morning mist...
