Furniture floated, fridge fell -- when heavy rains brought sleepless nights in Palakkad

PALAKKAD (KERALA): Rains have been relentless for the past several days. Fear of rising water entering our home has snatched away sleep.

The thought of rushing out of the house in the middle of the night is frightening.

The unprecedented rains lashing Kerala, which have flooded large swathes of the state, reached Palakkad town where my elderly parents live on August 9. When I called them from New Delhi in panic, they told me water had entered the ground floor of our twostory house.

Furniture was floating, they said. The refrigerator had fallen; Utensils, knickknacks and clothes were swept away; the kitchen was gutted. With water filling all the rooms, they moved to the first floor, which is an independent unit.

Thankfully, they had food stocks and there is a also kitchen on the first floor.

Worried about their safety, I flew to Coimbatore on Monday, August 13, and took a bus for a one-hour ride to Palakkad. Mercifully, the rain had eased a little when I arrived a little after noon, and I could make it to the house without incident. The sight that greeted me was a shock. Our home for more than two decades was a mess, even though my father, who is 72, and 66-year-old mother, had cleaned up the ground floor with the help of neighbours.

But rains continued to beat down relentlessly. A canal nearby, which joins Kalpathy river a few kilometers away, was overflowing, its brownish water slowly spilling out of the embankment and adding to the gurgling rivulets on the streets bisecting mostly single-story homes on both sides.

Next day, the skies opened up and the heavy downpour lasted almost the entire day. The front yard was flooded. The flower garden which my mother had lovingly nurtured, even planting a now-thriving Christmas tree, was swamped. The only signs of vegetation were the two short hybrid coconut trees, their fronds and trunk sticking out defiantly above the muddy water.

With no electricity, and mobiles phones running out of power, many of us in the colony were cut off from the outside world. We depended on word-of-mouth information from locals who would periodically visit the homes to check on residents. Those who still had mobile phone connectivity checked desperately on Whatsapp for information or tried to call rescue teams. Most of the time, the numbers were busy or just did not get connected.

While shifting out was the main priority, another concern was about reptiles and poisonous snakes swarming in the brownish waters.