"Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force." - Salman Rushdie
It was the winter of 2000-2001. I was studying architecture at Surat and my parents were living in Ahmadabad at the time. Republic Day, 2001 fell on a Friday and I made use of the long weekend to visit with my parents. Visits home typically consisted of lazing around and being a couch potato, and that Friday was no different. Morning raced past eight as I snoozed in bed, wrapping myself more tightly into the comfort of the thick blanket. My high school going younger brother was already in the school grounds forming lines for the assembly before the hoisting of the national flag. Father was at the community lawn where the people of our small neighborhood, including the younger children who were not at school, readied themselves for an intimate flag hoisting ceremony. Breakfast was ready and mother called out to me for the umpteenth time that morning. She said she was leaving for the flag hoisting and asked me to at least wake myself enough to bolt the door behind her.
Complaining groggily in my head about why I wasn't allowed to sleep in properly on a holiday, I sat up trying to brush away the cobwebs of sleep. As I put my foot down on the ground to get of bed, it happened. The ground pushed back! Violently!
And before I could realize what was happening the bed started to shake, and then, the furniture around and the doors and the windows were shaking in their frames. Mother was frantically shouting somewhere, urging me to run out of the house with her and suddenly, some tiny voice of reason inside found me, and told me we were experiencing an earthquake. I ran, well not actually, I moved as quickly as I could to find my mother grabbing the jangling house keys from the jangling key holder and I pulled her to the nearest door and held her in the doorway. Somewhere in some book at some point of a playfully forgotten childhood, I had read that that was the thing to do in an earthquake. We waited out as the violent tremors shook the house around us, threatening to bring it down with us inside. It was only when the crazed shaking finally subsided that we dared step out. The whole thing had lasted barely half a minute, and yet it every moment seemed to last for an hour. To this day, I vividly remember, the shaking of the windows, the dining table literally bouncing in its place and the clock on the wall swinging wildly.
The Gujarat Earthquake or Bhuj Earthquake as it is known struck at 8:46 a.m on the 26th of January, 2001, as India was celebrating its 52nd Republic Day. It lasted for around 2 minutes and measured 7.7 on the Richter Scale. The quake took the lives of between thirteen and twenty thousand people, and left more than a lakh and a half injured. The damage to property was enormous, the town of Bhuj was virtually flattened and in Ahmadabad, some two hundred and fifty kilometers away, more than fifty buildings collapsed and several hundred people died.
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, we did not yet know the damage caused. Cellular phones were very rare in those days, and we did not know of anyone who owned one yet. Even if there was a cellular network, it is hard to say how many towers would have been left standing after the quake. The wired 'landline' phone connections were disrupted by the quake and it wasn't until late in the evening that some of the STD phone booths (STD stands for Subscriber Trunk Dialing, which is used to call across State boundaries within India) were revived. By evening, we had already heard scattered news of some buildings having collapsed, both nearby and at a further distance within the city itself. But it is only when we called our near and dear ones in faraway Bangalore in the evening, that we got to know the actual extent of the quake. In the days to come, the horror and the devastation caused by nature's fury would come to light.
For the next few days after the quake, the area was struck by aftershocks and tremors. Day or night, people would rush outside the building at the slightest jolt or jerk, and hold impromptu discussions on where they were and what they were doing at that fateful 8:46. The tremors died out slowly, and for weeks, a plate or bowl would shake ever so slightly on the table, or the water would ripple or a painting on the wall would shudder for a second. We got used to it as well and our tales of the 52nd Republic Day grew more exaggerated with time, until we moved on. One year later, Gujarat would be hit by another disaster, man made this time with the riots starting in Godhra. But that is a story for another day.
Today, on 26th January, 2020, we remember the loss of the people who perished nineteen years ago in Mother Earth's furious upheaval.
Wishing Indians around the world a Happy Republic Day and a thanks to the founding fathers of our nation for the Constitution of India!
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