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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
I’ve Got the Flash Flood Blues
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| Was the deluge in Ladakh severe? Yes.
Was it exaggerated and over-reported? Perhaps. |
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Published : 1 October 2010 |
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PHOTOGRAPHED BY DILIP D’SOUZA |
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| An overall view of the new construction in Leh.
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| O |
NE THING ABOUT SCENES OF TRAGEDY AND DESTRUCTION:
you begin to see in them irony
here, paradox and conundrum
there. It happened to
me in New Orleans after Katrina,
in Orissa after the 1999
cyclone, in Tamil Nadu after
the tsunami, in Kutch after
the quake. And it happens in
Ladakh in mid-August, two weeks after the cloudburst |
and flash floods on the night of 5 August.
Some five kilometres east of Leh, on the Manali highway,
is the town of Choglamsar. The flood tore this place
apart in a way that is hard to look at, harder to comprehend.
What power unleashed turned a crowded neighbourhood
into this ghost town that resembles 1980s Beirut, or 1940s
Dresden, and did it in 15 minutes? This is just what I have
in my head as I roam through deserted Choglamsar, conscious
that it can only be a rhetorical question.
| PHOTOGRAPHED BY DILIP D’SOUZA |
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Tsering Sandrup’s wife, outside their home that
was filled with mud by the flash flood. Note the height of the
mud outside: to the level of the just-visible front door. |
Then, on a small pile of rubble, I come across a child’s
school handbook, pages flapping in the breeze. The water
ripped off the cover, so I don’t know whose it was. The first
page has “Write and Learn, Pet Show on Friday” in the kid’s
pencil scrawl. At the bottom is printed this message: “The
good man does not escape all troubles, he has them too. But
the Lord helps him in each and every one.”
Which naturally makes me wonder: exactly how did the
Lord help the good people of Choglamsar, on the night of 5
August?
Today in Choglamsar, you see badly damaged houses on
either side of a long riverbed of boulders that stretches back
to the distant hills, some of the boulders nearly the size of
a small car. You think: oh, so the water overflowed this riverbed
and damaged the houses. But you’re wrong. What I
learn for the first time from Tsering Sandrup, a young soldier
on leave whom I meet there, is an order of magnitude
worse. There was no riverbed before that night. There was
only the cluster of houses. The water brought the boulders
that simply churned through Choglamsar, obliterating the
houses in their path. I mean, there is no trace of those houses.
Nothing. So much so that I actually ask Tsering a stupid
question: Are you sure?
| PHOTOGRAPHED BY DILIP D’SOUZA |
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The Ladakh Scouts regiment of the Indian Army distributes
relief material at the Himank tent camp for Choglamsar
survivors. |
He points me to one side of the damaged house, his brother’s,
that he is helping to dig free of mud. “There was a verandah
here,” he says, and sure enough, I can see a small
section of remaining floor, tiled and patterned. He steps
onto the rocks of the riverbed, about three to five metres out
from the verandah remnant. “The verandah extended until
here. There were other houses, many houses, beyond it.”
There is no sign of this once-verandah, apart from the segment
he points out, nor of the houses beyond—a sign of the
power of the calamity that barrelled through Choglamsar.
Besides erasing houses from the face of this mountain landscape,
it killed over 100 people right here.
I really want to know what the Lord was doing to help the
good people of this town.
| V |
ARIOUS, MORE EARTHLY ORGANISATIONS did a
lot. Save the Children for one, whose relief efforts
were co-ordinated by Sharif Bhat, working tirelessly
through the days I met him. It was through
him that I got an up-close-and-personal look
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at two significant challenges Ladakh faces as the flood recedes into still
vivid memory.
The first: one afternoon, Sharif takes me on a recce of
Phyang village, some 25 kilometres west of Leh. One thing
the flood did in Phyang was destroy standing barley crops.
Bad enough because barley is a staple Ladakhi grain, but it
also left many fields covered with a thick layer of mud, now,
after several days, hardened to nearly the consistency of
concrete. Nothing grows in concrete. How will those fields
be restored to their original fertility?
The second: the next day, Sharif suggests I visit one of their
two ‘Child Friendly Spaces’ (CFS), part of the Himank relief
camp. This camp comprises 50-odd canvas tents pitched in
a large open space near an army encampment, abutting the
hills short of Choglamsar. Looming on the hillside above the
tents is ‘THE MOUNTAIN TAMERS’ in enormous yellow-on-black letters and ‘PROJECT HIMANK’ in as enormous
red-on-white: army regimental slogans. I wander around
the camp, talking to several people, conscious that an ominous
cloud is about to open up overhead. But I’m even more
conscious that Ladakh’s severe winter is only two months
away. Where will these people be housed when the cold arrives?
Everyone I speak to says they have been promised
that new homes will be built before then. But two months?
I cannot believe any housing project can move that fast; and
if it does, I’d be astounded if the houses turn out to be at all
livable.
Barley fields and housing: the basics, here in Ladakh, that
nobody thinks about much from day to day. But for several
hundred people, a flood has suddenly made them critical.
| PHOTOGRAPHED BY DILIP D’SOUZA |
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Leh residents pitch in to clean up a playground at the Lions
Club that had been covered in mud. |
Sharif says Save the Children is particularly worried
about the safety of kids after the floods, and that explains
the CFS. At Himank, the CFS is a larger tent at the far end
of the camp, where working parents can leave their kids
under adult supervision. An ‘anganwadi,’ you might call it
elsewhere.
Sitting with me outside the tent, 12-year-old Angmo
writes in my notebook the names of the kids present today
in flowing curlicue—Gigmet, Mohammed, Rigzin—then
without preamble starts telling me what happened to her
when the flood came. In her stream-of-consciousness preteen
patter, she speaks of running from the water with
family and neighbours, people were shouting loudly, it was neck-deep, some people stumbled as they ran, some people
died, some were running naked—the other kids giggle at
this and she says, sternly, “not completely naked, they were
wearing underwear!”—her family took shelter in some
house, but that flooded so they up and ran again. Finally,
she mentions her older sister, Deachen, taking my notebook
again to write the name correctly.
The water “took away” Deachen, she says, and can say
nothing else about her. She does talk for a few more seconds,
but I can’t understand her now because she only mutters.
I see tears in her bright eyes, and suddenly Angmo gets
up, runs behind the CFS and into the distance, towards
the hills. I’m in Himank another hour, but I don’t see her
again.
I think again, as fruitlessly, about good folk and their
troubles.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Dilip D'Souza
10 October 2010
02:16 AM
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Mariam, I am afraid the pity is that I am not an academic. I write like this. I cannot write any other way. Dilip
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Mariam
4 October 2010
04:12 PM
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Dilip,
I'd really like your work if it were more academic and had less of " I " in it.
Mariam
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