A family’s journey to safety amid floods

The chopper hovering overhead almost threw us off the insufficiently wide and one-and-a-half feet high median strip of the road into the deeper water. The helicopter belonged to some wing of Indian security forces and was perhaps taking stock of the ground situation. We were already knee-deep and struggling to keep our footing as we waded carefully towards an impromptu relief camp set up in a neighbouring town by its people, who were unaffected by the floods. Thanks to the higher altitude of that place and a recently constructed railway platform that acted like a strong levee.
Ours was not the only family leaving for a safer place, the nearest being three miles away, the camp where we were headed. We were part of a large caravan comprising people from my village and those from the adjacent ones. Most of us left when all attempts at strengthening a dike, which on a normal day keeps the water of the Sukhnag River from entering a cluster of villages in Narbal, my hometown, failed. The most frightening moment came in the wee hours of that fateful day, September 7, 2014, when an unidentified weeping male voice on a local mosque’s loudspeaker announced, “We are doomed! Bhand has yielded to the ferocity of water. Run to the safer places”.
Our two-storey house is constructed right on the bank of the river. Before the announcement or the breach of the Bhand, we had been seeing the water level rise slowly during the incessant downpour for four days. The four out of five steps carved in the veranda of the house appeared all under the muddy water, yet we stayed back in the house. Even despite some reports of flooding in the main city and some other districts of Kashmir the day before, we still stayed put. It was not frightening for us, as over the years, on certain occasions, we had seen the river bulging and receding after it rained for 3 or 4 days continuously.
My mother and, sometimes, younger sisters now began to wash the dishes on the veranda, which otherwise they did either in the kitchen or the ghat used by all the village households when the water level was minimal or way below the danger mark. All the elders except my grandmother were confident that the water level will recede after it had reached a certain level, speaking from their memories. Their confidence was bolstered after the rains had stopped. But the Granny was getting different thoughts.
Rehti, my grandmother, 70, who I called Nani, on the intervening night of September 6 and 7, called me as I was reading Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes in my bed. Keeping in mind Granny’s old age and my closeness to her, my dad recently had me shifted to her room. “Tell Asgar his mother wants him in the room,” Nani told me, I could sense a feeling of unease in her voice, and this frightened me. I rushed downstairs, holding my breath at the door, and knocked with all the calmness I could gain. Dad opened the door, hiding one side of his body behind it. Before he could ask me ‘what is the matter?’ question, I stammered out what Granny had told me upstairs. As I had sensed the seriousness in Nani’s voice in her room, Dad sensed it in mine outside his.
I followed Dad into Rehti’sroom. He sat on her right and I on the left. We both tried to help Nanilie back with the backrest of the bed, but she chose to do it on her own, dispelling immediately almost all our doubts about her being ill.
“All well, Mouji?” Dad asked Granny.
“I am fine but…,” Granny paused, her eyes moving from me to Dad and vice-versa.
“But what, mother?” Dad asked, looking a bit perturbed at Granny’s so-far-unknown behaviour.
“Don’t sleep down there tonight. There isn’t any recession in the water level. I heard some men in the evening talking of rapid erosion in the Bhand nearby,” Nani stretched her right arm, first to her right and then over her body to her left where I was sitting, struggling to find her glasses which lay buried under my thigh. I quickly jumped off the bed and said sorry to her.
“We have been through this situation earlier also and, this time, the result will be the same,” Dad said to Nani, referring to our previous flood experiences which only caused us a little embarrassment by submerging the dirt road on the riverbank. The road was our only connectivity to other parts of the town. Now boats instead of cars ferried people from their homes to central market, a small market on the higher end of the road.
“Listen to your mother, tonight. You have always paid heed to what I have said,” Nanirequested, removing her glasses to rub her moist eyes.
“I will bring Shabnum upstairs. We will sleep in the bedroom next to Asiya’s and Mehreen’s,” Dad said, nodding his head as he stood up. Asiya and Mehreen are my younger sisters.
The next morning, my parents’ bed on the ground floor was half submerged. The carpet, some of which was tucked underneath the bed had an-inch thick layer of freshly settled mud on it. The doormat with ‘WELCOME’ printed on it and the cushions had settled behind the door. There were a few clothes here and there, half floating and half underwater. There was the same level of water in the kitchen also, the first room you get to see when coming downstairs from the first floor. The bucket with a few unwashed dishes had capsized, leaving the dishes scattered. The spoons and the ladles were buried under the mud.
Nani, who wakes up daily for pre-dawn prayers, was the first to see this frightening scene from the top stairs of the first floor. And it was there she shouted out Asgar’s name twice or thrice. But with dad we all woke up, shrieking and shouting involuntarily. Dad turned on all the lights and brought us all to Nani’s room and said not to panic. “We can exit from the window at the back of the house. The water is still low from behind,” dad said, trying hard not to show panic on his face. On the backside of the house was our old house, now abandoned. It was built at the base of a large meadow that ran across several villages, slightly at the higher elevation than the house we were trapped inside.
Meanwhile, we could hear the voices of panic from the neighbouring houses after someone shared the news on the public address system of the mosque. First of all, my dad descended from the window and told me to follow suit. Together, we carefully brought Granny down and did the same with Mom and my two sisters, who carried two duffel bags stuffed with clothes they could get hold of. We kept walking to the higher altitude.
The helicopter crew dropped some biscuit packets and small mineral water bottles in transparent polythene bags over the large line of people. We had to hold each other and the metal cages erected around pine saplings planted by the local municipality on the median strip until the chopper flew away.
After grappling with water for around one and a half hours, we reached Kanhama, a neighbouring town where flood water had stopped owing to its higher altitude. A crowd of people already present there ushered us into a school building where some volunteers were already at work to convert it into a makeshift relief camp for displaced people like us. Our family was given a small classroom. From the charts and the pictures hanging on its walls, it looked like a kindergarten class. The chairs were replaced with carpets brought from a local mosque, a volunteering boy, who brought a couple of blankets hauled across his shoulders and tea into the room, told us.
We had tea followed by lunch. By noon the building was full of displaced people. On two occasions when I came out of the room to have a look outside, I could see some of my neighbours in the school corridor. On this side of the road that led to my hometown which was now submerged, there were a lot of people standing and talking. Those coming in boats, tractors and heavy trucks looked happy to have made it to this end and at the same time felt sad at the destruction by the floods back home. I could not stand the sight and returned to my family, where two unknown girls had joined them. The strange thing was they were sitting in front of my Granny while my two sisters had cowed in a corner, anddad had accompanied my mom to the washroom. I said SALAM but they neither turned to me nor responded. They looked at Nani and she looked at them, questioningly. Neither of them spoke anything. As my parents returned, the girls left without even greeting them. Nani wanted to say something but she did not.
The other strange thing which earlier I had not noticed was that Granny had not eaten anything since our arrival at the camp nor spoken anything. She had made herself look as though she was at ease. When I told this thing to my dad, he went over to granny and asked who these girls were and why she had not eaten since morning. Granny slid her right hand through dad’s hair and brought her mouth closer to one of his ears, and whispered something. A faint smile escaped dad’s lips as he stood up, feeling for the pocket inside his jacket. “Go and see if there is a chemist around. Get a new set of dentures that fit your Nani’s gums,” he handed me some cash, adding, “Make sure you return with one.”
Younis Ahmad Kaloo is a short story writer from Kashmir. Previously, he was a Delhi-based Correspondent at FORCE Newsmagazine, a monthly magazine on national security and aerospace, where he wrote on paramilitary forces and latest defence technologies. He was also part of Kus Bani Koshur Krorepaet season 1 (the Kashmiri version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? produced by Studio Next, Sony Pictures Networks India for Doordarshan Kashmir) where he worked as Assistant Director and Casting Producer.

Younis is the author of Jiji: the trials and tribulations of Parveena Ahangar, Hawakal Publishers, 2020. His last short story featured in the March 2024 issue of Out of Print. He specialised in Narrative Journalism with a Masters in Convergent Journalism from the Central University of Kashmir. Feedback at [email protected]

Younis Ahmad Kaloo