I haven’t been sleeping deeply of late, high winds batter anything that isn’t nailed down and my dreams have been cluttered with what feels like residue grief. High winds will unsettle your average air sign, I want to stand out on the highway astride a broomstick and fly away somewhere, just go wherever the wind is going to blow me. What weighs me down is attachment to the belief that this physical world is as physically real as it seems in this dream we call life. In fact of course it is not as real as we want to believe and it’s this belief that keeps our minds and souls attached to this physical plane where there is evidence enough of the temporary nature of nature. It’s what makes us cry “not fair” and “why me?” in the depths of the dark night of the soul.
The other night, the wind battered itself into my sleeping dream and I found myself awake in the middle of the night. Tossing and turning didn’t do any good, so i sought refuge in a cup of chamomile tea and checked my email as one does, compulsively reaching out for contact. My eyes could hardly believe the news I read from my friend in Almora. Was even awake or was the waking dream a nightmare that I hadn’t really awoken from? Her email made my heart clench with grief and sadness, my mind refused to provide an image for the scene she described to me from half the world away. Heavy rains in the Himalaya had soaked the earth to saturation and the fragile eco system of the foothills of Uttarakhand had simply collapsed under the weight, sliding down and covering up houses and taking lives and loves in a sudden landslide.
The happy valley where I spent so many months smugly in the breast of Mother Nature had turned into a scene of widespread grief and anguish. More than one hundred lives lost in the Almora district, in one fell sweep of mud and rocks and debris as the mountain fell down the mountain. My friends house was swept away, another friend found his cousin and the cousins entire family (excepting one) dead in their house or what was left of the house, roofs had fallen onto schoolchildren and the entire village of Papasali had been evacuated. My heart flew to my friends in their tragedy, my mind refused to comprehend a landscape so suddenly brutally and inevitably lost. I spent the day wandering around in a kind of dream as one does when confronted with sudden loss, it took almost ten hours for my heart and mind to connect the story into terms that I could deal with. Only a few sentences actually sunk in, but the picture they provided was pretty clear even if it was unimaginable…’whole villages have disappeared’, she wrote, ‘mass cremations in the rain’, ‘one friend’s body was recovered, he was holding his two week old baby’. The story was told in pictures tainted with her own grief and uncertainty as she also had lost her house. “the atmosphere around here is so heavy.” She wrote. “People are all crying or trying not to. many go out for search and rescue though there’s not much rescue. I am exhausted from 2 days of heavy work trying to save my house from the mud (also tired from sleepless nights listening to every little sound that might spell disaster)until I thought I would drop dead. But then the big slides came and I had to evacuate. I am so tired but i can’t even sit still for a minute. something in my nervous system can’t rest after all the “high alert” stuff. and when I do sit, like everyone else who is not rushing about trying to help, i just cry. not for myself though there is that too, but in response to the heavy grief in the air….it is very bad here.”
My heart has flown off to hover around the brave and resilient people of Kumaon, even if I know that from this distance all I can do is send them my love. Knowing how hard they work to stay alive there in any case this disaster is a disaster of unimaginable proportions. But in a world that is already almost Disaster Fatigued, if I tell the story of the people of Kumaon, the people who made me feel so welcome and at home in their home, quite often the first and most immediate response has been to remark to me that I am lucky to not be there.
It’s an interesting response and one I noticed during the Tsunami of 2004, I suspected then that the wide reach of the story of that disaster was not that the tsunami had wiped away entire villages and families but that it had also affected thousands of tourists who happened to also be in the way of that wave. A disaster is only a disaster if you are in it or if you know someone who is in it or sometimes if you know someone who knows someone who is in it. Which is why Pakistan is just going to have to suck up their recent disaster as they did with the earthquake of 2005. And possibly now the people of Uttarakhand and Bihar and anywhere else in the world where this years monsoons have visited with a vengeance.. China, Taiwan also have suffered from the scale of loss the rains have measured out.
The strange thing for me is that I always felt so safe and smugly at one with nature there in that valley of Papasali, even though it is known throughout India as Shiva’s backyard. Shiva is my personal God of choice, the god of destruction whose dance signifies the temporary nature of life and while I always felt at one with that philosophy also, I used to believe that mountains were unmovable.