P. Balasubramanian
I had never seen rains like this in my life. The rain that had started the previous month, on 30 November at about midnight, continued till the midnight of 1 December.
Fear grew in me. It was about 2.30 a.m. The rain had stopped. Water had flooded the next house, there had been no electricity. Using a small torch, I watched the waters rising from the window. There was three feet of water on the street but it had not yet come into our house, which had a plinth of five feet. Sleep eluded me till about 4 a.m. when I fell into an exhausted slumber. At 6 a.m., when I awoke, I saw that water had flooded the neighbouring houses. I called out to the neighbours from my house, asked if they needed help. ‘We are fine, the upstairs is vacant, so we will move there,’ they said.
From the front door, my wife and I showed our seven-year-old daughter the water flooding the street. ‘We have never seen rain like this before,’ I said. We stayed home that day, it was impossible to go on to the street. My mother-in-law called to tell us that there was four feet of water in their ground-floor flat in Velachery. They had been forced to move to the neighbour’s house on the first floor. My brother-in-law was in Royapettah. He had electricity, his phone was working. But both the Saidapet and Adyar bridges were flooded. There was no way he could get to his parents.
By evening, our mobiles went dead. But my wife was not nervous. She knew her parents and brother were okay. There was still no power, no television, no news at all. We managed to get through 2 December with the milk and vegetables we had. That night, a thought seized me. I decided to check for myself about my parents-in-law the next day.
On the morning of 3 December, I told my wife that I wanted to go and see how things were in the city, how her parents were faring, take something for them. She told me not to go, saying there would probably be no buses, no transport of any kind. But I told her not to worry, I would be back, even if it was at midnight. But she was afraid. Our phones were still not working. There was no way of being in touch. I said bye to my wife and child, and went into the flooded street. It was still three feet under water. I somehow managed to wade through it to the main road to the bus stop.
The main road had been dug up in many places to allow the water to flow out, so no bus could come there. I kept walking for almost two kilometres to the main junction, Kumananchavadi. The usually busy road was silent, with very few people on it. Here and there, some shops were open. I went to a newspaper mart close by and asked for a paper. ‘The papers haven’t come for two days,’ the man said. I waited for some time at the bus stop. A bus that said ‘Poonamallee–T. Nagar’ came by. I was happy and got in. Inside the bus, the conductor said it was going only up to DLF Park, Ramapuram. I would have to change there. I sat down. People in the seats around me were talking about the rain. The man next to me said, ‘I work in an IT company in DLF Park. I’m going to office to get drinking water.’ He showed me three one-litre bottles that he had in his bag. ‘Our street has been flooded for two days, and there is no drinking water. I have a two-year-old child.’
As we approached Porur, there was a murmur from the road. I peered out and was shocked to see Porur Lake overflowing. Huge quantities of water were gushing out on to the road. Just a month ago, there had been so little water, the lake was at a depth of ten feet below the road, and cattle were grazing in some places.
The bus approached DLF Park. I asked the conductor if there was no way the bus could go further. He said, ‘It didn’t even come this far yesterday, Ramapuram was flooded.’
I got off at DLF. An astonishing scene presented itself. There were thousands of people, some seemingly top-level IT professionals, wandering about, looking utterly bemused. I saw a line form suddenly at a lorry containing water cans. People were begging the man for water; he was selling a thirty-rupee twenty-litre can for 150/- to 200/- rupees. Before that scene could dissolve, there was a new one: a crowd clamouring next to a private milk van. I went past it towards DLF Park and found the road barricaded. People were stopping bikers from continuing on. I saw a parked fire engine. The fireman said there was fifteen feet of water in Ramapuram, and they could not get through to their bosses. So they were staying put.
I got into a bus going back towards Kumananchavadi Junction. On the bus, the conductor was shouting at a passenger, asking him to get off. When I looked back at the man on the road from the bus, I could see he was an IT professional. ‘How can that fellow get on the bus without even twelve rupees on him,’ grumbled the conductor on and on. On the bus, we realized that the man did not have even have enough money for his bus fare! Had we known, we could have paid for his ticket.
I got off at the junction and decided to somehow get to Velachery. I climbed onto a bus that said ‘Poonamalle to Koyambedu’. On the way, we crossed Tiruverkadu. I could see the Cooum in spate, the water flowing with great force. In about an hour, I reached the main bus terminus at Koyambedu. There were a lot of young people, all seemingly professionals, southerners and north Indians, milling about, looking for buses to their towns and cities. A bus going towards Guindy seemed ready to leave. But the conductor told me it was only going up to Vadapalani. I went to the enquiry officer and said I needed to get to Guindy. He said the roads were so flooded, no buses were going there, and suggested I take the Metro to Alandur.
It was two o’clock, and I was hungry. Inside the bus terminus, there were some shops. There was a huge queue for food, and besides, the shopkeepers were charging double, so I bought myself only a bottle of water. I joined the very long queue to get a Metro ticket and finally got to the platform. There were usually only ten or twenty people waiting for the train. That day, there were hundreds of people there. After forty-five minutes, I got into a train that hardly had any standing room. From the windows I could see water flowing through the streets. Before Ekadduthangal, we crossed over the Adyar. From on top, I could see that its waters had almost reached up to just below the bridge, and were flowing with tremendous speed and force. The crowd exhaled collectively. We reached Alandur, the last station on the Metro.
There were no buses, so I walked up to Guindy, to the railway station. The streets were dry. It was three o’clock. I got into a bus that said Adyar Depot. As the bus turned towards Saidapet court, I could see that there was a huge crowd near Saidapet bridge; the police had barricaded the road, and no vehicles were being allowed on it. The turbulent waters of the Adyar were flowing just below the bridge. Only the previous day, the waters had flooded the bridge, cutting off parts of the city from each other.
I got off at Gandhi Mandapam and crossed the road to get a bus to Velachery. I got into a bus and realized it was a cut service, going back only up to Saidapet. I got off again at the beginning of Velachery Main Road. There were a few people at the bus stop. We waited but no bus came. Just as we decided to begin walking, a bus arrived. I ran and climbed on.
I got to Vijayanagar Junction. When I got off the bus, I received a shock. I could see a sea of people walking away on Taramani Road. On the road towards the Metro station and the flyover, there was waist-deep water. People were walking through it, and there were people on the flyover just watching. Not a shop was open. There was only a medical shop with its shutters halfway down. I went there and bought a strip of Crocin for my mother-in-law. There was a small, almost invisible tea shop nearby. There were a few people drinking black tea, there had been no milk for three days, said the owner. He charged me a huge sum for a small packet each of Brittania Marie biscuits and Chaska Maska. There was nothing else available there.
I started walking towards my parents-in-laws’ house in Ram Nagar, a kilometre distant, and six streets away from the main road. There was knee-level water on the main road. A small group of people were talking to a woman selling fruit. I wanted to find out what the situation was on the inner roads. To my luck, the people talking to her had just come there using those roads. They told me where the water was deep, and which places to avoid. They said there had been almost head-level water just beyond Ram Nagar, on MGR Street, from where they’d come.
I bought an overripe banana even though the woman was charging ten rupees for it, ate it, and boldly stepped into the water. It was four o’clock. There were some people walking ahead, and this gave me courage; some of them had sticks in their hands which they were using to check the depth of the water, to see which part of the road was safe to walk on.
Far in the distance, I could see a boat on the same road. I decided not to wait for it, and kept on. As I went further along, there were fewer and fewer people. When I looked down one of the side roads, I saw to my horror two people walking in neck-deep water far away. I was at the beginning of the street I needed to get to. A tall man in a lungi with a cloth bag slung on one shoulder was ahead of me. I asked him if I could go along with him. He said, ‘No problem. I walked through neck-deep water yesterday, I know the way.’ I followed him. I could see him go to a house where people, evidently his employers, were waiting for him on the first floor. They threw down a rope and he attached the bag to it, and went away. I guessed the bag contained food.
I continued walking. No one else was on the road. The man had disappeared. The water, which had only been thigh-deep for him, was waist-deep for me. I saw many expensive-looking cars submerged up to their windows. A couple of new, pricey bikes, parked on a slant, with only their rear-view mirrors visible over the water, seemed orphaned by the floods, their owners nowhere in sight. All around me I could see partially drowned cars and bikes in the parking lots of apartment blocks.
I walked on through the water. I was afraid. No one was around. Finally, I managed to get through it, wading through three-and-a-half feet of water. I was at my parents-in-law’s house. I went up the stairs to the neighbour’s house on the first floor. My parents-in-law were stunned to see me. I handed over the rice, dal and beetroot curry my wife had sent, along with the strip of Crocin and the biscuits.
It was dark in the neighbour’s house. There was hardly any drinking water, no electricity, no mobile phones working. My parents-in-law and their neighbours had no idea what was happening in the rest of the city. I realized that they had had no connection with the outside world for three days. And that that was the situation of everyone in their area.
My mother-in-law offered me some food. I refused, not wanting to burden the neighbours any further. I drank a small glass of water. The neighbours asked me what it was like in my area, how I had come there. I told them that things were somewhat better at home.
I looked at the clock. It was 4.45 p.m. It had taken me forty-five minutes to walk down that road.
I told my in-laws that I needed to leave, saying it might even take till midnight to get home, and stepped again into the water. I had just begun walking when a private boat came past with some well-off-looking people in it. When I asked the boatman when he would return, he jokingly replied that he would be back the next day. It struck me the boatman was only interested in those he thought would pay him a lot of money. (A day later, when the power came back for a few hours, I turned on the television and learnt that other people had faced the same problem with the boats.)
I managed to wade through four streets. Suddenly, a loudspeaker came on. I wondered if the power had come back on. An old song of MGR’s was being played, maybe ‘Neenga nallaa irukkanum, nadu munnera…’ (‘You must all be contented for the land to progress’). It was coming from a van being used by some party men to distribute food. The van people began calling out to everyone. The people on the upper floors of the surrounding buildings saw the food van but no one came down. Maybe it was anger that help had taken so long.
I was so desperately hungry, having missed lunch, I was delighted to see the food van, going to it without thinking. I saw two large containers full of sambar rice inside it. The food they gave me on a large paper plate was so hot, I could barely hold it. A couple of passers-by joined me.
There I was, a steaming plate of food in my hands, standing in knee-deep water, hungry beyond understanding. I ate. The sambar rice was surprisingly tasty.
I finished eating, and started walking again towards the main road. As I got close, a boat went past, going in the other direction. In it there were only two people, a couple in their forties, clearly very well-to-do. The man was bespectacled, they were both thin, and dressed in denim shorts and t-shirts. In his arms, the man clutched a five-litre Bisleri water can, holding it as if it were that most precious thing, a child. It struck me that, in four days, the water had levelled everything. The richest people in the world, with every advantage of wealth and technology right in their very hands – the floods had wrested everything from them. In the end, all they wanted was food and water.
I got home finally at ten that night. My wife and my daughter were waiting for me. They had tears in their eyes.
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Translated by Chitra Viraraghavan with P. Balasubramanian