Flooded with memories

The river, which normally flowed several meters below the road was now almost touching the embankment walls, and the usually low-lying boats towered above like double-storeyed bungalows. If the river were just one foot higher, I thought, the city walls would be breached.

It was around 1 pm the next day that I heard a slight commotion in the neighbourhood. A few people came frantically running around towards the South Bailey Road. 8220;The waters are coming8221;, they shouted, distraught. 8220;There has been a breach8221; There was fear in their faces.The phone rang. It was my father. 8220;I am on my way home. Can you please start packing up things? The flood-waters are spreading fast. Hurry!8221;

The waters flowed in a thin film first, navigating the blind turn on the road with finesse. We began to hurriedly pack household goods, aware that ours was a large bungalow with no first floor or terrace, no escape routes whatsoever. So even as land records and bank paper were put in steel trunks, there was an urgent issue at hand; where were we to go? Using a complex system which included chairs, water-pipes, a small ladder, mattresses and latching on to railings we reached the parapets above. Before long, the water had reached 7 feet. The green lawns were now a wave of flowing dark brown waters, still rising.

In times of natural disaster, human beings are hit with two radically opposed emotions; the sanguine one that says this will be only a momentary trauma that will pass soon, and the other that portends a never-ending nightmare and the apprehension that it could only get worse. As we sat and watched the Ganga rise in our backyard, we genuinely believed that the water would find its own course into some magical black hole and evaporate. But what if it continued to rise relentlessly, and we drowned, with nowhere to go?

Around 5 pm, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. The water level that we had been measuring in a horizontal line on the courtyard walls had stabilised. But how long would it take for the waters to recede? As it happened, it was to take five days. We slept under the stars, our spacious rooms down below a watery grave. As night descended, there was an eerie stillness in the air. The fight to survive had given away to abject helplessness, and electric stoves and fires were visible on most rooftops even as an air of darkening gloom was palpable. Dogs wailed, but nobody cursed, because a sign of life was still a sign of life.

I remember the one sight that still sends a shiver down my spine. Our olive-colored Ambassador car was totally submerged and I had begun to play games, guessing at water-levels by the visibility of its parts. One morning, we heard a sudden movement 8212; a black slithering snake which moved gingerly looking for dry space, before resting on the car8217;s windshield. An hour later, it was still there.

On the third day, helicopters whirled above, and though almost everything they tossed fell into the water, it was reassuring that help was near, that we were in the radar screens of the rest of the world.

But once the water levels receded somewhat, a huge surge of optimism replaced the fear. And one was determined to fight it out. We shivered. We prayed. We helped each other. We cried. But we hung in. By the sixth day with water levels less than one foot high, we descended in batches. It was our ground zero. There was a lot of work to be done, damage to be assessed, things to be rebuilt. But we were just happy to be alive, to feel the ground beneath our feet. And the sun was shining.

As the Kosi ravages Bihar, let us reach out the two boys whose parents could not climb a higher roof. Because they are two among too many.

The writer is executive director, Dale Carnegie Training India