After the Storm

by Lakshmy Ramanathan

  The goings were however different outside a hospital on Canal Bank Road in Adyar. Patients connected to drips and catheters were being wheeled out and up two ambulance vans even as volunteers waded in to deliver essential supplies to waiting nurses. It was tough work for the waters were thigh high for most. One intrepid volunteer had packed a dozen water bottles into a giant thermos box and set it afloat in front of her till both drifted towards the entrance of the hospital. Meenu tore herself from the sights to head home only when the rain picked up.

  As she neared her house, she saw people crowding by the beach leaning on what looked like hoes, the traditional ones with wooden handles.

  ‘What’s happening,’ she asked a familiar looking girl as she rode up to the beach.

  ‘The elders are thinking of digging an outlet … you know … for the water to drain from our street into the sea.’

  Meenakshi scanned the beach. It was at least 40 metres wide from where she was standing. Digging an outlet through beachy sand in the pounding rain was as easy as slurping sambhar with a fork.

  ‘Six feet should do it,’ announced an elderly man dressed in a large raincoat from which a white banian and matching veshti peeped.

  And before she knew it, Meenakshi had grabbed a hoe and started digging a six feet wide ditch alongside neighbours with whom she had never exchanged a word while growing up. At first, the exercise seemed futile. Water kept gushing down from the road the moment a reasonably deep cavity was dug but the people were driven and they struck faster and harder till they reached the shoreline. It had taken a little under four hours, a dozen sore fingers and bruised backs but at last Olcott Road was drained.

  As she pushed her cycle home, she pulled out her phone from her pocket. Nine missed calls! She opened the gate and hurried inside to find Rakesh pacing the porch like an over enthusiastic beat watchman. Even under the soft glow of the lights, she could see he looked furious.

  ‘Where were you?’ he asked as soon as she was within hearing.

  ‘Out,’ she replied hesitantly.

  ‘What do you mean out?’

  ‘I was just down the road … digging a ditch,’ she replied.

  ‘I was … we were so worried!! You weren’t picking your phone.’

  Meenu bit back the urge to laugh. If her family members were so worried, where were they? Certainly not in the porch.

  ‘I didn’t hear it ring,’ she said instead in a calm, quiet voice. She found that the dig had buried all appetite for arguing.

  ‘Next time you step out, inform one of us’, he ordered.

  Meenu crossed the porch without a word. As she climbed up the stairs she broke into a slow, knowing smile. The man cared. Even if he was being an idiot about it. A massive idiot.

  Nothing that happened in the next 48 hours was anything like what Chennai had seen in a hundred years. No one expected the monsoons to fill the city’s reservoirs, flood celebrity homes or push people to open their homes to total strangers. But on the morning of 1 December, Meenakshi was certain the day felt different. Even the air felt different. Maybe because the fan had stopped stirring it, she reasoned to herself. The power had been gone for an hour now and she rose from the bed still sore from yesterday’s dig. Downstairs, flames from candles swayed drunkenly around corners they were supposed to light up. Meenu knew Tangedco (Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation) had taken to cutting power supply in water logged areas after a couple got electrocuted nine days back and that technicians were trying to raise the height of junction boxes in such areas but no one knew when power would return to Olcott Road.

  She drew out her phone from her pocket. She had forgotten to charge it last night and there was very little left. Not that it concerned her. She was on a break from work and amidst her family. No reason why anyone would want to reach her. So it came as a surprise when she got a call from The Daily Times board line number in the afternoon.

  ‘Are you drowning Minaakshi?’ Mistry barked into the phone.

  ‘Not yet sir,’ she managed to say with a wry smile.

  ‘But your airport is.’

  ‘Didn’t know that,’ she said a small frown creeping up her forehead.

  ‘Anytime now they’ll announce it. All operations are going to be suspended.’

  ‘Okay…’ she mumbled not sure why her executive editor had called on her personal number when she was on a four-day break.

  ‘Achha listen, Chennai is going to be declared a disaster zone by this time tomorrow,’ he said sounding very business like. ‘Guna tells me the navy is rushing INS Airavat with twenty divers and inflatables. We are told that the army and NDRF are already on stand by. Why don’t you whip something up for us?’

  Meenakshi found her temper rising. After all her warnings and pleas to cover Chennai, the man was asking her to file a story now?

  ‘Minaakshi?’ growled Mistry, waiting for a reply.

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll send you something by evening,’ she replied and disconnected.

  She went in search of her mother to tell her that she would be heading out for a story. Her mother nodded over the heaps of tomatoes she was slicing.

  Meenakshi decided to head to Kotturpuram Bridge, an area the volunteers had termed as one of the worst affected in the city. While the Adyar river flowed right beneath it, columns of housing board apartments flanked one side of the river bank. She was certain the location would provide enough fodder for a couple of hundred words but the bridge was 7 km away. Cycling through knee high water in the rain while keeping a look out for dividers and gaping manholes was going to be difficult. But there wasn’t another option. The Jeep wasn’t back from Varadharajapuram.

  At the Madhya Kailas Junction which she had to pass, a huge portion of the road had caved in and traffic had piled bumper to bumper. It took half an hour for her to turn into Gandhi Mandapam Road down which the bridge was located. When she was within 100 m of the bridge, she realised that the situation was far worse than what she had imagined.

  Hordes of homeless people flanked the left side of the road, their babies and belongings perched on staircases and tree stumps. Three lorries with super sucker machines were at work pumping out the waist high water even as the sky above continued to dump more rain. Rescue teams dragged boats through the waters and up the bridge to launch them into the river and evacuate people living by the banks.

  Meenu got off her cycle and parked it inside the Vinayaka temple situated on the left side of the road. Tightening the raincoat’s hood below her neck and securing her phone in its kangaroo pocket, she emerged from the temple and waded her way through the waters to the foot of the bridge. Once atop, she got a view of the Adyar, dragging all kinds of debris as it foamed and raged its way under the bridge. On the left side of its bank, water had entered the first floor of the low lying housing colony that had been built to rehabilitate slum dwellers. Clearly, the river had breached her banks somewhere close by and entered the neighbourhood. Residents had now moved to the roof tops and from where she was standing, she could see them cup their mouths and wave out to rescue teams plying kayaks and inflatables below.

  Scenes were equally chaotic on the bridge. Despite efforts by the police to cordon off the area, onlookers kept arriving for a stroll or a selfie against the swollen river. The national media had finally arrived, thrusting their queries and cameras on people’s faces. And when a van arrived with relief material, people raced down for the blankets and water bottles that it had brought with it.

  Meenu moved through the crowds quickly interviewing rescue personnel and the rescued, taking notes on a tiny, soggy notepad. When she was done, she inched closer to one side of the bridge and pulled her phone out. The screen drew a blank. A tall, burly man beside her leaned over and asked,

  ‘Dead?’

  Meenu looked up and nodded.

  ‘Need pictures?’

  Meenu nodded again.

  ‘Which paper are you with?’

  ‘The Daily Times.’

 
The older man seemed to consider the reply.

  ‘It doesn’t have an edition here right? he crosschecked.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Meenu scanning the man’s ID for the media house he was attached to.

  ‘How are you going to file your story?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Meenu said chewing her lip. There was no way to know if the power had returned home.

  ‘Want to come to our office? The photographer might spare you some pictures.’

  Meenakshi took the offer and followed the man down the bridge to where he had parked his Enfield Classic 500. She turned back to see the temple inside which she had parked her cycle hoping it would be there when she came to retrieve it tomorrow. Ten minutes into the ride and Meenu knew something was wrong.

  ‘Isn’t your office the other way?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes but we’ve shifted base’, the reporter shouted over the rain. ‘Our basement got flooded this morning. The systems have crashed and there is no internet either.’

  ‘So where are we headed?’

  ‘To a hotel in Guindy. My editor and a couple of reporters moved there this afternoon. We are functioning out of a conference room now.’

  By the time Meenu reached home after dashing off a story to Mistry, it was half past six. She went straight for a shower and came downstairs to an empty, deserted hall. Plonking herself on the sofa, she logged in to her twitter account through her phone which she had charged in the conference room.

  While scrolling through her feed she saw that one of her friends had retweeted actor Siddarth’s tweet on the Chennai rains. Intrigued, Meenu went to the actor’s newsfeed. From 7.01 p.m., the Rang de Basanti actor had fired a series of tweets, the first of which said, ‘House flooded. Moving to the terrace. God save Tamil Nadu.’ On his timeline was also a google spreadsheet that listed contact information of volunteers who had signed up for providing rescue boats to even cat litter!

  Meenu spent the next ninety minutes tracking online pleas while looking out for Rakesh from the hordes of volunteers who had begun to arrive home.

  ‘Someone’s worried,’ cackled Krishna emerging from the bathroom downstairs with just a towel around his waist.

  Meenakshi looked her brother up and down and frowned.

  ‘Oh come on, Meano! You’ve seen me more naked.’

  ‘Rakesh enga?’

  ‘Isn’t he here?’ he asked sounding a bit surprised.

  She nodded to the negative.

  ‘We got split up,’ he said, shrugging.

  ‘What do you mean split up?’ Meenu asked sitting up alert.

  ‘Long story,’ replied Krishna wearily.

  ‘How will he come back?’ asked Meenu.

  ‘He’s a grown man. He’ll find his way!’ replied Krishna, amused at his sister’s barely masked concern for Rakesh.

  ‘You do love him, don’t you?’ he asked grinning broadly.

  Meenu swore under her breath and went to her room. Once she shut the door, she found herself straining to hear Rakesh’s voice. Close to midnight when she went downstairs for a glass of water, she found volunteers discussing how multiplex halls had begun to offer RO-treated water to the public. No one had seen Rakesh though. She went back to her room and waited for his return but everything had gone quiet downstairs. Maybe, he had trooped in noiselessly but going by the way he had stripped out of his clothes, Meenu knew that was impossible.

  24

  By morning, it was clear that Rakesh had not returned the previous night, not to the Mushroom at least. Had he gone to his relative’s house two streets away where his mother was staying? Meenakshi decided to head downstairs and find out. Someone would have an update on him.

  In the hall, a quiet sombre air pressed against the walls even as the rain lashed and trashed outside. No one had seen Rakesh but no one appeared worried either. Volunteers rarely return on time, assured one of Krishna’s friends. What they were worried about was news of close to 30,000 cusecs of water dumped into the Adyar River. One of the city’s reservoirs – Chembarambakkam – had reached its maximum capacity and officials had opened its flood gates in the sly of the night.

  We have to scale up our operations as soon as possible said a young man with sharp, shrewd eyes. Last night’s actions are going to have unprecedented consequences, he said addressing the huddle around him. Meenu listened in, unease spilling into her like waters that had entered homes in the past few weeks.

  She drew out an empty chair and sat down trying to steady her thoughts but with the rain pounding outside, it seemed impossible. To someone who had grown up under the bone stewing summers of Chennai, it appeared as if the sky had lost control. Irrevocably.

  Twitter too seem to have lost it. By 9.46 a.m., online pleas for help had viralled and actor Siddarth in an attempt to streamline some of the chatter he had spiralled requested all tweets on food to be hashtagged with ChennaiMicro. Not to be overwhelmed by the noise online and outside, Meenakshi logged into the skymet weather app on her phone. Chennai had received 350 mm of rain in 24 hours! This in a month where the average rainfall rarely crossed 190 mm. It was official – her city was sinking.

  Two streets away, Mrs Usha Ramakrishnan hefted her sari and stuffed it into the band of her underskirt expertly. For a woman who had weathered many storms in her life, not receiving a call from her son hardly left her eye twitching. He was a busy man, especially now, here in Chennai. But ever since he had camped at Girish Iyer’s house, he had called every night to make sure things were fine at her end. Last night, there had been no call. She had waited till six in the morning before letting her worry lines furrow the planes of her face. By nine, she had waded through sludgy waters to make it to 56, Olcott Road to check on her only living family member.

  Back in the hall Meenakshi found it odd to not have run into any of her family members. She headed towards the kitchen and to her surprise, a rather anxious looking Usha aunty and the rest of her family looked at her expectantly.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Did he call you?’ asked Krishna.

  ‘Did he leave you a message, kanna?’ asked Usha aunty at the same time.

  Meenu nodded her head to the negative.

  A cloud of dread descended, stymying everyone into silence. Surprisingly, it was Girish Iyer who broke it.

  ‘Do you know what is surprising about the rains this year?’ he asked around.

  ‘What?’ asked Mrs Usha, twisting and turning the end of her sari in her fingers.

  ‘The areas of flooding.’

  Usha looked blank.

  ‘Every monsoon, lower reaches of the Adyar river like Kotturpuram and Saidapet get inundated,’ Girish began to explain patiently. ‘But this time we have even up stream locations like Mudichur, Perungalathur and Tambaram under water.’

  ‘It’s because they opened the flood gates, Appa,’ interrupted Krishna. ‘Word is out that close to 30,000 cusecs of water has been dumped into the Adyar.’

  ‘She’ll be carrying much more by the time she enters the city,’ his father said in a grim voice. ‘Do not forget water bodies in Chennai and the neighbouring districts of Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur are all hydrologically connected.’

  Meenu saw the colour drain out of Usha aunty’s face.

  ‘But storm water drains ilaya to share the excess outflow?’ she asked in a hopeful voice.

  Girish Iyer snorted.

  ‘I don’t think storm water drains were built when property sharks developed areas up stream. The few drains in the area now lay choked with rubbish from the new housing societies.’

  Meenakshi sat down on a stool confounded by the inaction around her. People behaved in the strangest ways when beseiged by a calamity. Here they were discussing the rains calmly as if in a newsroom when a family member had gone missing.

  She got up abruptly and announced, ‘Okay there is no time for this. Anybody’s phone have battery?’ she asked.

  ‘Mine,’ chimed her father, mother and Usha aunty.

&n
bsp; ‘Okay. Aunty, inform that relative of yours you’ll be with us till we find Rakesh. Appa, give us your phone. Krishna and I will head out to Varadharajapuram.’

  ‘N—no, no,’ floundered Mrs Usha. ‘I don’t think that it is necessary. Rakesh will find his way back’ she said more to herself than to Meenakshi.

  ‘Akka, don’t be silly,’ said Padu’ma. ‘Krishna knows where Rakesh was dropped off yesterday. The kids will find him,’ she said in a resolute voice that filled the entire kitchen with hope. Padu’ma tended to do that. It was one of the two things she could be depended upon. Not a neat house, lip smacking sambhar or phenyl scented bathrooms but a woman who could fill her home and family with hope and love.

  As Krishna and Meenakshi made their way out of Olcott road towards Adyar past the long winding Besant Avenue, rain continued to fall in great grey sleets. There was barely any visibility and they made slow progress. Once they reached the main road they saw SUVs and buses motoring along.

  ‘We’ll have to get into one of those,’ Meenakshi said pointing to a tempo that drove past them hurling waves in their direction. When a new round of garbage came their way with the waves, they inched towards the side of the road where they had spotted a flight of stairs leading to a shop. They climbed it quickly but not before scraping their calves against the pavement that had gone under water.

  Once atop, they tried to flag down every single vehicle which passed them. At last they managed to stop a white Innova, the outside broadcasting van of IBC 24x7 – a leading english news channel.