Rumble That Shakes The Cane

At Nepal’s Sirsia village, 100 km south of Kathmandu, three-year-old Erika Thapa can’t wait to get inside her house. “She hasn’t played with her dolls since we left home after the earthquake and she is really worried about their safety,” laughs her grandfather Dipak Thapa. The 56-year-old, who runs a grocery shop in the village close to the India-Nepal border at Bihar’s Raxaul, had moved his family out and spent the last six days with relatives in India. “But how long can we continue to be afraid?” He asks. “Today we have returned. I must reopen my store,” he says as his granddaughter rushes to the door and shakes the lock impatiently.

In the villages and towns stretching along the India-Nepal border, the focus, a week after the earthquake, is on “getting back to normal”. And just as all were helpless before what locals term “the wrath of nature”, many recovery plans are afoot.

The Dhungania family of Alao vil­­lage in Nepal, which had been camping out on their front yard, has decided to place their trust in god and is praying  to the family deity with renewed fervour. After the chaotic days of the immediate aftermath, Devkeli Devi and her sister-in-law Parua Devi of Sirsia village took the lead in rebuilding their crumbled mud hut and reconstructing the thatched roof which had blown away in the thunderstorm after the earthquake. Others, like 65-year-old Imam Dewan, whose son is missing since the quake, is too traumatised to start thinking of rebuilding his life just yet and is travelling from one relief camp to another in India and Nepal in his search.

Every quake-hit family is dealing with the crisis in their own way, but significantly, residents of border districts on both the Indian and Nepali sides are also thinking of ‘preventive measures’. Repeating the adage ‘prevention is better than cure’, 24-year-old Nepali activist Santosh Kumar Cho­ubey tells Outlook that their plan is to “obstruct development” in the area. “Heavy destruction is related to heavy construction,” he says, attributing the massive devastation in the Kathmandu valley and areas near the epicentre of the April 25 earthquake to the “unchecked growth in construction”.

Santosh argues that the tremor felt at Raxaul (at the border, 140 km south of Kathmandu) was as severe as it was in the Nepali capital. “We were in the epicentre too,” he claims, explaining that they were able to escape relatively unscathed because “we didn’t have tall towers which would crumble down on us or people getting tra­pped inside crammed habitation. We had mud huts developing cracks in the walls and thatched roofs caving in. Even concrete str­uctures here are not so high as to come down like a pack of cards.”

Alao homemaker Rita Dhung­ania (47) and her husband Hriday Dhungania (51) would agree. They felt their house “rock like a boat” and rushed out with their three daughters, Sweta (19), Nikita (18) and Suzita (17). Their neighbour Divyashree (22) felt that the first floor balcony on which she was standing when the earthquake struck at 11:40 am “swung like a hammock”.

As the earth trembles from aftershocks at regular intervals (even as we go to press), residents have resolved to batten the hatches and brave all hardship. “We don’t know how long the tremors will continue, nor if they ever will. But since we don’t know when it will eventually all stop we can’t put our life on hold indefinitely. So we will try to get back and live our lives as normally as we can,” Hriday says. The Dhunganias have friends and family in India but opted against leaving Nepal. “This is our country; I love it. I know India is our friendly neighbour and we respect the fact that it always has its arms open to embrace us. But it is one thing to live in your own home and another to live in your friend’s house,” Hriday says.

Yet Hriday’s family can be counted among the lucky. Many others left destitute  by the quake are stumbling along in the dark. Some are crossing the border into India in search of “safety and solidarity”. At Raxaul, a group of hollow-eyed men, women and children, fleeing the “dread of the nightmare”, tells us that they are willing to go anywhere but the haunted hell which their own land has become.

By Dola Mitra at the Indo-Nepal border at Raxaul, Bihar