Where once stood houses

Nearly six years ago now, I travelled through Tamil Nadu immediately after the tsunami of 2004. There was tragedy and reconstruction, the spirit of volunteers and the often haphazard nature of relief: but my abiding memory from those days is of disconnect..The tsunami caused fierce destruction – there is no other word for it – on the coast of Tamil Nadu: lives snuffed out, houses destroyed, boats splintered. It was hard to look at and stomach. Yet if I went inland from the coast, in most cases no more than 100 metres, it was as if nothing had happened. 'Meals ready' boards tempted you into little eating houses, electricity flowed fine, Internet cafes let me blog about my experiences, people went about their lives exactly as usual. It was nearly surreal to sit down for dinner in this normalcy and recall the horrific sights of the day just past – sights that were often only a few minutes' walk away..That kind of disconnect. Six years later, I feel it again, visiting Ladakh after the deadly flood of 5 August. The destruction I come across is extraordinary, horrific, as if a sudden small war has blown through. And yet, in places unaffected by the flood, there is utter normalcy. Memories of Tamil Nadu, in this spot all the way at the other end of the country..Take Leh. There is essentially one main road that snakes through the city, from the peaceful northern reaches of Changspa through the bustle of the market and main tourist hangouts, where there are plenty of folks milling around visiting eateries or arranging tours or selling apricots. Less bustle than in normal times, I can sense, but bustle nevertheless. From there, the road follows a gentle downward slope, curves under an ornate welcome arch and round a sharp right turn still going downhill. And suddenly, the surroundings turn into what looks like a war zone, all the way to the airport..New riverbed carved through ChoglamsarAll photos by Dilip D´S. Not a sign of the flood before that turn; catastrophe after.. This sharp divide is because this turn is precisely where the water and all it brought tore into Leh. You can see it, a now-dry brown streambed stretching from the bare hills, which feeds onto the road where it bends. That disastrous night, water roared out of the hills right here. It careened down the road like a drunken sailor, sloshing from right to left and back again, slapping brutally at buildings on both sides.. Bus station, gone. Two-storey building, damaged beyond repair, now looking for all the world as if made of wet cardboard. Three-storey building, gone. No, that one is not quite gone. Its roof lies some 50 metres away, collapsed onto its top floor. I have to wonder, what does the top of a building look like as it flies 50 metres through the air? And as to whether there were people inside, nobody now knows for sure, because nobody has attempted to lift the roof, or to break it apart, since the building fell.. The morning I pass, I see a thick book lying on this roof – at waist level for me, this roof, itself a surreal thought – and the book is called The Aim of Life, some Auroville publication. I think: in a disaster, there is meaning and irony everywhere.. Yet the normalcy elsewhere is the reason for a great deal of the anguish I ran across in Leh. Why did the media portray us as 'flattened', people asked me, evidently assuming I could speak for the 'media'. The result is a serious drop-off in tourism, the pillar of the local economy. Losing a month or two of the four- or five-month season only compounds the disaster, and then there is the worry about the longer-term impact on tourist minds around the globe. Why, when so much of Leh is pretty much normal, did the media paint this picture? And how can it be corrected?. I had no answer.. Mud like concrete One sunny afternoon, I drove past the bus station and further, some 20 km along the Srinagar highway before turning off to Phyang. Again, a cloudburst above the hills sent water, rocks and mud flooding down the hillsides into this village. Fortunately, this is not as built-up a place as Leh, or Choglamsar where I would later go. So the physical damage is not as obvious. Yes, a school was completely razed, leaving only bits of paper blowing in the breeze, a warped cupboard and a scattering of Nutri Nuggets, the soy-based food used for midday meals. Yes, too, the road was torn up in several places, itself an indication that the flood came down in different parallel streams. But apart from that, not a lot to see.. Except that what I did see reminded me, vividly, of Orissa.. The 'supercyclone' of 1999 brought calamity to Orissa's Erasama district. In particular, it flooded rice field after rice field, and not just with rainwater. The real tragedy was that it brought in a deluge of seawater as well. The salty stuff covered the fields, destroying the crops – I have a vivid memory of squatting to examine the rotting paddy up close – and killing the soil. Retrieving those fertile fields was perhaps the greatest challenge Orissa had to face after the cyclone.. This is something like what happened in Phyang. This is fertile farmland as well, barley fields terracing down gentle slopes, fed in normal times by snowmelt from the glaciers. The cloudburst did not just flood these fields, which would have been bad enough. It also laid a carpet of mud on them; mud that quickly dried and hardened to nearly the consistency of concrete. Everywhere you look in Phyang, you see the great quandary – some fields spared the mud, others coated with it like someone used a paintbrush. Some un-muddied crops can be saved; none of the muddied ones can be.. What is more, the carpet of mud, feet thick in places, renders those fields unusable. As in Orissa, retrieving them will now be among Ladakh's greatest challenges.. And there is Choglamsar, about five km east of Leh, a village next to the Manali highway that took the full force of another cloudburst. If visiting Leh brought back memories of Tamil Nadu, if Phyang reminded me of Orissa, visiting Choglamsar takes me back to Netaji Nagar in Bombay.. In late July 2005, a one-day deluge nearly drowned this great city. In Netaji Nagar, a hill collapsed that day, destroying several dozen flimsy houses and killing over 70 people. Further, in order to get its large excavators to the site of the landslide to clear the debris, the municipality had to carve a new road through the congested slum. To do that, it had to demolish several dozen more huts. In the still-pouring rain when I visited, it was a sight: a broad brown strip with tightly packed slum houses on either side, leading to a field of rubble up against a collapsed hillside.. In Choglamsar, it is easy to revisit that image. Because I stand on what looks like a broad rocky river bed that runs through the village, an expanse of rocks that stretches back to distant hills. On either bank are empty, badly damaged houses, many filled to shoulder height with mud. The water that rumbled down from those hills brought huge rocks that slammed into the houses, mud that nearly submerged them.. I have just been picking my way between and through those houses. A destroyed Maruti here, flung against the remains of a gate. A once-scooter there, almost unrecognisable, coated in mud and stripped of various parts. A pile of cracked televisions, an almost intact DVD player, a large and badly dented can of milk powder, wires, logs, bottles, dispirited dogs wandering aimlessly. And lying on one pile of rubble is a child's torn and soaked school notebook, in which I can just read these pencilled lines: Q: Why do we need a house? A: We need a house to live in.On the 19 September last year, a teacher marked a perky blue tick across that exchange. You are right, kid. But where are you today and do you need a house to live in?. In a tragedy, there is meaning and irony everywhere.. The mention of rain . And after picking my way like that, I am now standing on this riverbed, balanced precariously on two rocks, trying to make sense of this vista. A young soldier on leave called Tsering Sandrup stands beside me as I stare. He is here helping his brother dig his house, next to us, out of the mud. I came over to meet Tsering because, as I let my mind boggle at the destruction in Choglamsar, I saw dark brown mud fly out of an opening in a ruined house, almost at ground level. There was a man in there, using a shovel to attack the mud that had nearly inundated the house, flinging out shovelfuls through the front door. What really drew my attention was that the top of this front door was now at the level of my knee. That is how much mud the river brought, never forgetting the massive boulders too.. The shovelling man is Tsering's brother, dressed in blue and panting from his efforts. So far, he and Tsering and their wives have managed to salvage from the house an amplifier, a carpet, a TV set-top box, a couple of dented flasks and a notebook. There must be still more in the house, because the brother digs on while Tsering catches his breath.. Tsering points out the remains of the small verandah the house used to have. It projects into what I imagine is this riverbed. He tells me, where you see these stones, exactly where you are standing, there used to be houses packed tightly together. The water came down from there – he points to the hills – and took the houses away.. So yes, it is a riverbed of sorts now. Before 5 August, it was not.. Early on the evening of 5 August, says Tsering, there was light rain here. (When talking about rain in these parts on that day, I am learning, it is important to specify where it fell. Because then you get a sense of how localised these cloudbursts were.) Around midnight, much heavier rain. Fortunately for all concerned in Tsering's family, this house was empty that night: Tsering and his brother and sister-in-law had gone with their kids to another village to spend the night. No rain there. But his wife stayed behind for some reason, spending the night in a friend's house.. When the water came, he says, she ran before it, running all night until five in the morning. All through the next day, Tsering made desperate attempts to phone her, to come to Choglamsar. No luck: phones were dead, no transport because roads were damaged and drivers did not want to take risks before they knew the conditions. It was the following morning when he was finally able to get to Choglamsar to search for her himself. Someone told him she had taken shelter on top of a nearby hill. Someone else managed to get through to her on the phone. By the evening of 7 August, almost 48 frantic hours after the flood, the family had managed to reunite.. That is more than can be said for many other Choglamsar families. There were over a hundred deaths here, a figure that I have learned from residents and various news reports. As I look at the riverbed, at the remains of houses all around me, and as I remember Netaji Nagar too, I can believe that number.. So, in Choglamsar, there is this to get my mind used to, the tale that Tsering and the few other people I meet tell: where there now are just rocks, there used to be houses. There used to be lots of houses. Yet where the rocks now are strewn, carving a new riverbed through the neighbourhood, there is not even a trace of the houses. The flood simply obliterated them.. And that puts in mind yet another challenge that now faces Ladakh. The survivors of Choglamsar are housed in two nearby tent camps. Fine for now, but Ladakh's severe winter is only weeks away. Where will they be housed, who is building houses for them, will they be completed before winter comes?. Tsering tells me everyone he knows is still traumatised by the calamity. 'Baarish ke naam se bahut dar hai,' he says (We are frightened by even the mention of rain).. As if on cue, heavy drops begin to fall on my head.