Waves of Destruction

SHABANA ZULFIKAR IS AFRAID of sleeping. She lived with her family in a house nestled among the tea plantations of Chooralmala, in Wayanad’s Meppadi panchayat. Like hundreds of others in the region, she witnessed a ferocious landslide that destroyed everything on its path on the night of 30 July. “I was hospitalised that night,” she told me. “My BP rose to 185. I also had a fever because I was so terrified.”

I met Zulfikar at a government school that serves as one of the relief camps in Meppadi. The twin landslides that hit the localities of Chooralmala and Mundakkai, in the Vellarimala hill ranges, killed over four hundred people, with several still missing. The second major landslide was so devastating that it has reduced the affected towns to rubble. Most of the bodies recovered were beyond recognition, often found as dismembered parts. The Kerala government will only be able to issue a death toll after a DNA analysis.

Zulfikar recalled how her family frantically rushed to safety. “The first landslide occurred at around 1.30 am,” she said. “We came to know around 1.45.” Her house, where she stayed with her husband and son, was located behind that of her relatives, close to the only school in Chooralmala. Since her relatives were closer to the Chaliyar River, they rushed to seek refuge at Zulfikar’s house, which was higher on the hill. “We watched as the waters took the school and the houses on its path,” Zulfikar said. Seeing the river overflow with an unknown severity, the family realised that they needed to move further upwards. They made a run for it.

“I am slightly overweight—I could not run fast like others,” Zulfikar told me, with a calm expression, now habituated to repeating the story of the catastrophic night. “I was crawling on my knees, but it was really slippery.” She believed that this was the end for her, but she managed to gradually crawl up and reach others who had run for safety: six families, including her own. They were still crawling their way to a safer road when they heard the second landslide, especially frightening in its loudness. “Do you know how high the water was rising?” she said. “It was flowing at the height of a two-storey house.”