Wayanad landslide: Wild tusker shelters woman, family until dawn, she calls it ‘divine intervention’

“The water was like the sea. Trees were floating by. When I looked outside, my neighbour’s two-story house was collapsing. It fell and destroyed our house. I heard my granddaughter, Mridula, crying as I managed to get out. I grabbed hold of her little finger, pulled her out of the rubble eventually, covered her with a cloth, and began swimming through the flooding water,” Sujatha, now at the Meppadi Government Higher Secondary School relief camp, told mediapersons.

Her son Gigeesh, daughter-in-law Sujitha, and grandson Suraj were in a house nearby. Gigeesh dragged them one by one through the water. It was when they finally reached the shore and moved through a coffee plantation that the tusker appeared in their path.

In frame: Sujatha at the hospital. (Photo: mathrubhumi.com)

“We are coming from a great tragedy. We are afraid. There is no light, and water is all around. We somehow came swimming. Please don’t do anything to us,” Sujatha pleaded with the elephant, reported mathrubhumi.com. It also said that there were two other elephants nearby.

Sujatha said the elephant had tears rolling down its eyes. “He stood there, motionless, until dawn, and all of us by its feet,” she said in a video posted by Asianet News.

Next morning, someone managed to track Sujatha and family down, took them to a safe house, and offered them dry clothes, food and water. Sujatha and Mridula, her granddaughter, arrived at the Meppadi camp wearing those clothes. The rest of the family is at a hospital as per the mathrubhumi.com report.

Despite heavy rain and difficult terrain, 40 rescue teams are still searching for missing persons and bodies. State Revenue Minister K Rajan announced the arrival of a drone-based radar from Delhi on Saturday to help locate bodies. Six dogs are aiding the search, with four more from Tamil Nadu expected to join.