Vijayan woke up at around 1 or 1.30 in the night hearing a big sound and smelling something strange, he’d recount the next evening, still shaking with disbelief at having survived one of the most disastrous landslides in Kerala. Far from being relieved at having escaped, the middle-aged man sounds haunted by the images of his mother and sister getting washed away in the rain while he watched helplessly.
When multiple landslides struck Wayanad in the early hours of July 30, Vijayan’s house in Meppadi was one of the first to be hit – it was shaking, he said, when he woke up and opened the door. The family ran out into the heavy rain, watching electric posts fall in the darkness. Vijayan and a few other men in the neighbourhood began rescuing those who seemed stranded and those whose wails they heard. But when his own family’s turn came, Vijayan could do nothing but watch his mother and sister get washed away. By then they had all been trapped in a single room, holding onto windows, trying their best not to lose grip in the lashing rain. Vijayan and others held on for the whole night, his mother and sister could not.
By the evening of July 30, 93 bodies were recovered from the affected areas of Meppadi, Mundakkai, and Chooralmala in Wayanad, of which 34 have been identified. Rescue operations by multiple forces – including police, armed forces, and the fire force – are in place, while thousands of people have been shifted to relief camps.
Among those who survived in Vijayan’s family are his wife, his father and his sister’s daughter, he told Asianet News as he came in search of the missing family. He found the body of his sister, but not his mother’s yet. “I saw my mother lose her hold on the window and slip away, but I thought she would have grabbed something else. We could see nothing in the darkness. But in the morning, I could not find her anywhere,” he said.
Four years ago in the August rains of 2020, Vijayan’s house in Mundakkai was one of the three in the area to be washed away, he said. This was his second escape from a disaster.