In The Flood Lies A Tale

 Sometimes you hear a story that makes you sit up.  This is one such story.

“The water was like the sea.  Trees were floating by.  When I looked outside, my neighbour’s two-storey house was collapsing…..it fell and destroyed our house.

I heard my granddaughter, Mridula, crying as I was trying to get out.  I grabbed hold of her little finger, covered her with a cloth and began swimming through the flooding water.  My son pulled each one of us - my daughter-in-law, my grandson and the two of us - through the water and my back and my grandson’s chest were badly injured.  I cried for help while swimming but no one could hear me.  

When we finally reached the shore and moved through a coffee plantation, a wild elephant appeared in our path. 

I told him, ‘We are coming from a great tragedy, don’t do anything to us.  We are afraid.  There is no light and water is everywhere.  We have just survived death.  Don’t do anything to us.’

And then, his eyes welled up with tears…..

My granddaughter and I sat at his feet and he stood there motionless until dawn when,eventually, we were rescued.  Two other wild elephants stood nearby.”

Isn't this a breathless story?

And, just so that we know, until the 1950s, 85% of Wayanad was under forest cover; 62% of those forests disappeared between 1950 and 2018, while the area under plantations - tea, coffee, rubber, ginger - went up by 1800 percent. A thousand eight hundred percent.   

This, then, is another story, a tale of Wayanad.

These two stories aren’t disparate, for at the hip they remain bonded by a common bind.  Listen to the storyteller.  His eyes - and those tears that Sujata saw in them - tell the whole larger story.