On July 26, last Friday, a schoolteacher randomly recorded a 10-second video from the picturesque Vellarmala Government Vocational Higher Secondary School (GVHSS) located in the Chooralmala village of Kerala’s Wayanad. The heavy downpour that day had triggered a sudden, forceful rush of water through the stream adjacent to the school. The video displayed the torrent of water, before it panned across the school, landing on a group of children in pink and red uniforms. As they ran amok, seeking shelter from the rain, one of them waved excitedly at the teacher’s phone camera as the video ended.

A week since, the devastating landslides that hit the village in the early hours of July 30 have engulfed the school in its entirety. The landslide happened after midnight, when the school was not functional. All that is now left in the compound are floating ruins of buildings, hundreds of giant boulders that thundered down the hill a few days ago, and several large uprooted trees.

The landslides — the biggest disaster to hit Kerala since the catastrophic floods of 2018 — have claimed at least 199 lives so far, with more than 100 people remaining missing. 

“At least 20 of those who died were confirmed to have been students of our school,” Unnikrishnan, headmaster of the GVHSS, told TNM. “We have been keeping track of our students. Around 32 of them are untraceable.” When the disaster first struck, the teachers at the school relentlessly worked their phones to contact the students and ascertain they were safe.

Most of the school’s students were now in different relief camps, the headmaster said and added, “We are following up with them. Teachers are visiting them. Some are at their relatives’ houses.”

Unnikrishnan, who had been working at the GVHSS since 2006, is yet to visit the school compound and witness what had become of it. “I can’t bear to see it like this. I couldn’t go.”

A teacher who visited the school after it was destroyed told TNM that the building had in fact helped reduce the intensity of the disaster, by acting as a barrier of sorts to the rushing floodwater. “There are a lot of big trees on the compound, which along with the school buildings helped block a lot of water. So the water didn’t rush into other areas at the same speed,” he said. 

Standing on the school compound now, one can see swathes of land lying up to three to four kilometres away, the teacher said. “Earlier, we couldn’t see much of the village from the school because the houses and other buildings blocked the way. But now everything in between has been swept away.”

He added that the situation was much worse than what was being reported in the news. “Thousands of huge rocks and boulders have tumbled down with the water. It’s not a rescue effort that is underway, it is a search operation. The time for ‘rescue’ has passed.” 

Unnikrishnan said he would describe Vellarmala as a land of friendship and warmth. He knew all of his students and their families at a personal level, he said. “They are like our own family. We live as one, with no formalities between us. They are all innocent and straightforward people. That is how this place is.”

The school had a total of 497 students and 31 employees including the non-teaching staff. “Some of the students live a little farther away from the school. But since the GVHSS is the only high school in a 14-km radius, almost all children in the region study there,” he said.

When children’s bodies were recovered from under the rubble, the rescue workers now called the school’s teachers to identify them. “We feel helpless and numb, seeing body after body of these young children,” another GVHSS teacher, Aadhil, told TNM. “These are all people who lived here together as a family. We had no differences between us. But now we have lost them.”

A day after the disaster struck, Kerala Infrastructure & Technology For Education CEO K Anvar Sadath took to social media to share screenshots from a digital magazine named ‘Vellaram Kallukal’ (Pebbles), prepared by the students of Vellarmala GVHSS. In the magazine that featured poems, essays, and stories — many of which described the scenic beauty of their quaint village — a short story ominously quoted a bird as saying, “You should escape from here, children. A tragedy is bound to happen. If you want to get away, you have to run quickly.”