When the earth trembled

Just before mid-day on Saturday, April 25^th, I was listening to an old boy making a presentation of a scientific paper (preparatory to a scholarship interview) when the earth shook. I do not lightly use words like ‘eerie’, but this was one eerie feeling if ever there was one. There was no noise save the boy’s soft drone and something sizzling in the kitchen when my feet started tingling first, and then my head began to swim. I actually thought I was having a stroke. I got up alarmed (probably to check if I still could) and then noticed that both computer monitors were swaying, and a glass tinkling against a teacup on my table, not just the floor below my feet. The young man was so engrossed in his talk that he had not noticed until I told him we were experiencing an earthquake. It lasted nearly half a minute, and what I did next was to ask Mayadi in the kitchen if she was alright. She too is middle aged and suffers from high blood pressure, so she too had had exactly the same premonition as I did at first, and the poor woman had also nicked her finger on a knife. I was about to hurry both of them downstairs when I realized that the tremors had stopped, and some superstitious folk were blowing conches loudly from nearby houses.

The internet was soon flooded with spot news. It was just as I had figured: it was a fairly strong quake, measuring 7.8-7.9 on the Richter scale (anything that is 8 and above spells MAJOR devastation), and had originated close to Kathmandu in Nepal; the seismic waves had spread all over northern India, including Calcutta. Within the first day the death toll in Nepal had crossed 1800; it made me sad to think that the Dharahar Tower was no more, and the almost-grand Durbar Square was badly damaged. There had been significant casualties in Bihar, and even in north Bengal. A massive avalanche on Everest had sent several climbers to their doom. Our National Disaster Management Agency had swung into action: let us see whether it covers itself in glory or turns out to be a damp squib. The kids that afternoon were less excited and panic-stricken than I had expected them to be, though some living in multi-storeyed buildings had run out into the street, and some reported that cracks had appeared on their walls…

Last time this town experienced an earthquake, I was talking to a man outside my door, and all the kids started screaming inside the classroom, but I felt nothing! And the one I remember before that was very long ago, when my sisters were still very young and sleeping beside me; the older one laughed later and said ‘Dada is so used to scolding his classes that he scolded even in his sleep, imagining someone was playing the fool, shaking his bed!’ Durgapur has never, mercifully, had any real earthquake, and I pray fervently that it never does. I love thunderstorms, and who knows I might even watch a tsunami coming before it sweeps me away, but this takes the cake: I wouldn’t want to be caught in one. My parents lived through several minor and one really big earthquake during their sixteen year sojourn in Sikkim. I would not want my daughter to live in a place like that. Sick to think of being buried alive.