An earthquake struck Nepal at 11:56 NST on 25 April, 2015 with a moment magnitude (Mw) of 7.8 or 8.1Msand a maximum Mercalli Intensity of IX (Violent). UNICEF announced that close to 1 million children were "severely affected" by the disaster and it is feared that the total death toll will probably reach 10,000.
It led me thinking about the sheer enormity of the loss and suffering and I was imagining how it must be to be trapped under the debris and I came up with the post below. Though it is fiction (a part of me will always be buried under the debris, though) but nonetheless it won’t be far from what someone out there might have undergone.
My prayers for those who lost lives, families, households and their souls…
He was in the living room of his house waiting for his lunch to be served. It was a Saturday and he hadn’t really made any plans. He was hoping to sleep till late, have a filling brunch and then sleep some more and probably go out for an evening stroll later with his daughter. She was sitting next to him, playful and laughing heartily at the antics of her favorite cartoon character on TV.
“You see that, papa. I can jump from one building to the other too.” She was telling him as she prepared to jump from the couch to the table and then onto his lap. He often indulged her, crying out and making sounds as she jumped about and today was no different. She pretended to do her Spiderman swing and landed on him and he caught her and held her in a tight hug and they both laughed at the simplicity of the moment.
And then, there was a rumble. He saw the ground shake and the ceiling fan swing like a pendulum. An Earthquake – he got up in a flash and picked his daughter. He remembered looking at her scared face and just as he thought he would make it outside the house, the Earth below his feet caved in and he fell flat on the ground – his daughter still in his arms. The dust rose from everywhere and then there was another loud crashing noise and things began falling all around him. The last thing he remembered before being knocked unconscious was a shrill cry from his wife from somewhere close by.
It could have been minutes or hours before he gained consciousness again. He was trapped under the rubble of his own house. There is nothing as suffocating when you try to breathe in and mud fills and chokes your nostrils. Your only hope of survival then rests on a a hole somewhere in the pile that sits over you and from where little air makes its way to you. He could no longer breathe through his nose and relied on a gap in his mouth where probably a tooth or two had broken and fallen off when he hit the ground.
He kept swaying from realms of unconsciousness to reality of pitch darkness, sleep and nausea, lying crushed under the weight of his own roof. Only the other day he was talking to his wife that the EMIs on their house loan were breaking his back and he was being crushed under it. Today, he knew how it felt too. It must have been the shock and the fall that for a long time he remained in a state of mental numbness. It could have been hours or probably just a few minutes, which felt like hours, before he slowly began to realize where he was.
The crushing weight on the palm of his left hand was probably the table in front of him. Yeah, he could slightly feel the contours of the wood even as the splinters dug in deeper into his fingers. The legs were probably touching the corners of the couch he was sitting on. He didn’t know where his other hand was. Probably it was severed off his body or crushed under a boulder or probably had simply gone numb. He couldn’t tell.
And just then, he heard a faint cry and realized he wasn’t alone when he was trying to rush out of the room. There was his little girl clinging on to him. She was right there in his arms at that time. At the risk of moving the rubble and causing the only inlet of air to choke up on dust, he summoned up all his strength and tried flexing his body to feel if his daughter was still lying somewhere over him.
She wasn’t.
And then he heard the cry again – probably within the reaching distance of his fingers but so far away. He tried calling out to her but could only muster a muffled syllable. He tried moving his fingers, his hands, his legs anything – he could not. She was there, crying somewhere, unable to comprehend what had happened, scared and ‘Oh God, he realized, probably injured too. His whole body twitched. He called out again – another muffled scream, another syllable. He could tell she was close and he knew that she could not hear him.
Helplessness, agony, misery, anguish – there are no words which could describe what he felt in the minutes that followed. He kept calling, as long and as hard as he could. He could hear the cries trickle down to broken sobs and then going silent altogether. He was hapless and woeful when when he could hear the cries, he was shattered and burning when he could no longer hear them. How he wished that it was his breath that stopped before the crying did; how he wished that someone could just come in that very instant and pull her out and leave him buried there forever; how he wished he could just once more, hold her in his arms and see her laugh and ask her to jump on him as long and as hard as she wanted and could squeeze her into his chest again.. just one more time.
He slipped back into the same abyss.
They pulled him out. They said it was a miracle. He had been trapped there for two days. His head was reeling. He could barely breathe. They put him on all sorts of machines, injected all they could to make him steady. He struggled to open his eyes. He wanted to look around and hear that cry again. The sobs kept echoing in his head.
They said they had rescued him. He wished they had let him there, next to the piece of soul which they said, they didn’t find yet.
3 comments :
Dear Himanshu,
This is such a sensitive portrayal of the tragic event. You don't need to experience things physically to have empathy for human suffering. And I believe that empathy is the most important quality a person can possess. My heart aches for these people who are still dealing with aftershocks and the challenging aftermath of the disaster. I hope they are relieved from it soon.
Dear CC,
Thanks for all your kind words again. And yes, my prayers and wishes for those who are facing the disaster.
This is heartbreaking HT.
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