Eye of the storm

Having lived most of my life in a town (now officially designated a City with the Mayoral elections to be held today) on the coastline, especially living in a house that is just 4 kilometers from the beach I have seen the raging cyclones many times over. It so happened that most of the time they struck the coast in the evenings - The torrential rains and gales all passed away in the dead of the night. No power. No telephone. No light. The scariest of all - No sound apart from the howling of the wind and pounding of rain on the roof. Occasional flashes of lightning reveal the dangerously swaying coconut trees in the neighbors' yard. The pinkish white glow that comes in the background makes it eerie. The thunder that follows a few seconds later is defeaning. It is the one time where I feel my large bed room window should never have been that large! All I could wish for during those hours was for the rapid approach of dawn. The ghoulish images of roof tops getting blown away, rising tides, drowning in water all pass through my mind when the fierce winds pass right by my window, making their eerie "whoosh" sound while I lie silently in my bed praying deep inside my heart that the concrete roof above my head has enough strength left in it to with stand the gale! Somewhere in the night my tired mind and eyes take rest.

I wake up at dawn to the few sun rays that manage to make it to earth cutting through the dense cloud cover and pass through my window. It is morning. Not the usual one because there is no work to do today. The All India Radio is the only thing that keeps you updated. No hurry on either mom's or dad's part as like always their workplaces will be submerged in knee-deep water. I have nothing much to do either apart from waiting for the newspaper to usher in news of the destruction or silently running through my favorite books in the collection. It never ceases to amaze me how these newspaper boys manage to brave all the rain, gale and submerged roads to throw in the paper at around 10 AM.

It has been a long time since I have witnessed the fury of nature first hand. Like I said it was always in the night most of the time. The last time I remember seeing a cyclone hitting the coast in broad daylight was in class 10. The second time happened to be this Monday (19-09-05). All the images I only imagined but never saw because of the darkness unveiled right in front of me in the field of view of my bed room window. The rain that started trickling down late on Sunday evening matured into a torrential fall the next morning and continued to haunt the skyline until late in the afternoon of Tuesday. When the skies cleared it left a trail of destruction. People say that this cyclone was our very own "Katrina". But I would dare to disagree because I think I have seen worse than this. I would prefer rating the one I have seen in class 10 (Nov '96) on par with "Katrina". To those of you who fancy comparing this present one to Katrina, I give you this: I cannot forget the haunting images of dead bodies both human and animal, floating around in the water at the place where river Godavari meets the sea. I still remember the image of a hungry street dog picking at the rotten flesh of a cadaver on the beach. The things that I heard on the news - that the relief workers are still entangling bodies from the mangrove forests (Point where Godavari meets the sea in the Kakinada coastline which is dotted with woods - The same type which you find in "Sunder bans" in Bengal) even days after the storm passed. That was the only time in my life probably when I have spent my time with out power in the house for more than 5 days. It is also the only time when our school remained closed for 10 straight days expecting the life to return to normalcy. That my friends would have been the havoc a Katrina would have wreaked. But we were lucky this time. By the grace of God life returned to normalcy in the city in just 3 days! Yet power did not return until late in the evening of Wednesday. After making 3 trips to the power sub-station that supplies us and filing a complaint that power was not restored - To my relief, They did it. I cannot blame them because they were short on man-power and equipment and power cables were dangling all over the place! They had to race against time before people got hurt.

In the absence of communication, road and rail links, my mobile phone was my only source of contact with Hyderabad. Since I couldn't recharge the battery, I had to conserve its charge. I was convinced that I had exceptionally good battery pack installed on my mobile when it sustained with out recharge for 3 days (I last recharged it Sunday morning). It became a ritual of sorts for me going to the station every morning from Tuesday on and canceling the previous days tickets and reserving anew for the next day's train in hope that services might be restored.

The remarkable thing this time around was that apart from my books, radio, coffee and bed to keep me company I had one more - Sudoku puzzles. Call it the dance of destruction, Misery for the poor, Call me incompassionate: The fact remains that those few days (Which is probably about once in 2-3 years) where I spend my time sans the conveniences of modern life like TV, Electricity, Internet and Music are the ones that I savor the most. They demonstrate how simply life can be led. I revel that time probably because I have so much time to brood and pursue my most favorite hobby - Book reading with unrestricted freedom and without the distractions of modern life.