Shadows they cast, holes they leave in us, all counts

Human, After All

The 9th of August changed everything. Well, 11pm to be precise. It had been an ordinary day, just like all other days until then. Dasan and his wife Rupa woke up, they went to work, got back home in the evening, called their son and daughter in Bengaluru where they were both studying.

But come to think of it, there was always something peculiar about that day. It had been raining for three days. That day, the rain was heavier.

Rupa and Dasan lived in Wayanad, Kerala. Their village has a few scattered houses. Most of it is forest, surrounded by very tall coconut, teak, banyan and areca nut trees. On a rainy day, when the clouds are dark and full and there’s lightning, it feels like the sky is about to fall on you.

Which is what happened on August 9 at 11pm. There was an air of doom, like something bad was about to happen. They prayed to god, wishing that everything would be okay when they woke up the next morning. They exchanged stories about their day -- the boss, colleagues, who had said what. The usual pillow-talk. Then they said good night. That was at 10.30pm.

At 11 o’ clock, Dasan woke up and with all his might tried to stop the bed and his wife on it, from being swept away. In the blink of an eye, even less perhaps, a landslide took Rupa away. Just like that, she was gone. Her body was found two days later, buried deep under the mud, five kilometres away from their home. Dasan was neck-deep in mud. He tried desperately with both his hands to somehow be able to breathe and to get out. Eventually he made his way out, but with broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, bruises on his body that haven’t healed three months on.

We make different choices all other things being equal. Why, we will never know. You might call it divine plan, coincidence, chance, intuition, being practical or just common sense, depending on how you look at life. Dasan’s neighbours left the village at 7pm that evening. It was a young mother with a two-year-old daughter. Her husband had left for Dubai four days earlier. That evening, she also had a sense that all was not well in the hills. She wrapped her jewellery in a handkerchief, took whatever money she had in the house and left for her cousin’s house in the neighbouring village, which she felt was safer.

Dasan is grateful today for his life being spared. He’s there for his children, especially his daughter. But being human means absence can be as strongly felt as presence. He finds himself talking at night to Rupa, who’s long gone. They’d been married 25 years. He
lives with his relatives, who are decent. The children don’t visit as much. They can’t bear not seeing their mother. The entire family can’t fathom not just what happened but why it happened.

I met Dasan by sheer chance. It wasn’t planned. We’d gone to see the devastation that landslides caused in Kerala. It had happened two years in a row, in 2018 and again in 2019. This was unusual. We were a team of photographers, videographers and journalists. As we were being shown around, he stood there -- forlorn, lost, devoid of that spark of life. He came up to us, offered us tea and biscuits. And cried. Tears of deep, unhealed, unspoken pain. It was only when I looked at his nails, jet black from trying to make his way out the door and save himself that I asked what had happened. I’ve never seen nails like that before. I hope I never will.

The person showing us around talked statistics -- how many people had died in Kerala, how many had to leave their homes, never to return. We all nodded in sympathy. Those numbers were meaningless to Dasan and, for a while, to me. In that moment, I came to understand that everybody counts, regardless of how long we knew them before they were gone. The shadows they cast, the holes they leave in us, it all counts.