I only have a hazy memory of that fateful day.
Night, rather.
It was 29th October, 1999. A monstrous wind, unseen and unheard of before, tore through coastal Odisha, at a place called Ersama near the port city of Paradip, blasting doors open, ripping roofs apart and dissolving walls. Thousands perished in that whistling darkness, unsure if they were dreaming or dying, their entire lives blown away into the Bay of Bengal. It was a tearless night of death when buckets of water pounded on homes and faces, rendering weeping meaningless. And in a while, there was no one left to cry.
In the deathly silence of the aftermath, broken only by a heart-wrenching wail somewhere, bodies were seen strewn everywhere, in ponds, ditches, under fallen walls and by the roadside along with those of the animals. All perished toys of the almighty. And in the days that followed, hundreds of bodies were gently returned by the forgetful sea, as if in abject denial of the mass murder it orchestrated along with the wind.
The Super Cyclone of 99 was horrific beyond imagination. It flattened landscapes and erased places, snuffing out the lives of more than ten thousand people and altering a million more forever.
I was away then, in the safety of the western coast, in Mumbai, far from the sight and smell of death. I was busy trying to make an impression on my bald, stoic boss, having joined my maiden job in the city of dreams, only months before. Odisha, my homeland, was suddenly a distant place, only remembered during the pricey weekly phone call. This was the time when a single landline telephone was shared among rows of houses and dainty actresses posed with their brick-sized cellphones that cost as much as a heart for a single call.
I remember being an insensitive export. The city where money blew in the winds was now the priority. So I hadn’t felt the pain of the loss and the devastation. All I had was the memory of passing through a tarry platform several weeks later on my way home and the disturbing images of scores of corpses rotting by the roadside, hands and legs up like post-puja idols consigned to water, swollen and blackened.
Even that memory was slowly fading, overwritten by the mundane details of life. But all that changed a few weeks back! When I suffered a cyclone myself.
Shivering inside the glass-concrete wrappings of my apartment in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Odisha, watching the raging Cyclone Fani hammering roofs and trees with savage force, listening to the dreadful hissing of the wind passing under my doors, as if a thousand snakes have been let loose, I lost my over-reliance on the man-made world.
The large floor-to-ceiling glass panels of my living room threatened to blow up on my face. A DTH dish, uprooted but still attached to its cable, swung wildly and banged near the window, only inches away from the glass pane. The garden I had groomed with so much attention and care was shredding outside. The balcony’s sun-shade had blown off minutes before, it’s bolts giving away one after the other, as I had watched helplessly.
Unknown to me, a portion of the boundary wall had collapsed and the car of a relative (he was the only other soul in the house, my family thankfully being away on the west coast of Odisha for a marriage) was being pushed against a wall. Water gushed in through most ‘sound-proof’ windows and the blowers of the air conditioners.
Sitting tired on the disoriented living room sofa, I felt the building sway. And then there was a deafening sound outside, as if hundreds of kilos of something just fell from the roof. In a long time, I saw fear. A brick pillar outside my window, a vestigial design element had given way, I learnt later.
As I rushed from bathroom to bedroom to living room, soaking and squeezing every towel and bed sheet I could lay my hands on, I could not help but imagine myself on that dreadful October night twenty years back, in a small, fragile house in a small, fragile village. I imagined being lifted off the bed in the dark of the night, still believing it to be only a bad dream, being thrashed around violently among things known and unknown, my nostrils and eyes filled with water, before the lights in my head switched off.
I felt so vulnerable.
For more than three hours, Fani danced an unstoppable dance. A macabre Taandav of destruction.
It was nature’s way of taking revenge, people said. That’s their belief. We will probably never establish it as a fact. We will never know if nature indeed takes revenge. But I think somewhere, in our quest for development, for material pleasure, we have taken nature for granted. We have found many ways to torture it, defy it or even tame it.
However, often the trappings of the luxury that you so painstakingly build for yourself makes you stupid. It makes you blind to the forces of nature. It makes you overestimate your own tiny life in the grand scheme of things.
The cyclone reminded me of my place.
It changed the way I saw nature and people; made me a little more empathetic. It taught me that people are more than their two-dimensional images on television; they are real and their pain is very real. And that human beings are mere specks of dust in the grand creation of the God. No matter how intelligent and capable we think ourselves to be.
Nine days of absolute darkness in the peak of summer brought me closer to that fact. As it hopefully did to many more.
As I write this article on my laptop on a dehumidified afternoon, my air conditioner singing again, my LEDs lit up, somewhere someone is burning a jungle, releasing toxic water into a river, overseeing the mechanized chopping of thousands of trees and releasing poisons into the air.
How long we can keep doing that? How long will nature tolerate us?
