For 100-year-old Ayesha Bi, it was the experience of a lifetime being pulled out of her house with a rope tied to her waist as flood waters raced through the locality of Al Jubail Colony.
The frail old lady was rescued after a neighbour broke the asbestos ceiling of her house. For her son Muhammad Khaja, the saviour was a cellphone which let him contact his neighbour Babur Khan. “Babur swam in pitch darkness with a rope and cracked open the ceiling to pull us out at 2 a.m. Then we sat on the ceiling for 12 hours,” recalls Mr. Khaja about the intervening night of October 13 and 14 when water from the Palle Cheruvu mixed with sewage flooded his one-room tenement built right beside the nala.
Same old, same old
He shows a video shot at 10.30 p.m. on October 13, 2020, when water began to rise in their house and the family of four got onto the bed to stay safe.
Nearly a year later, the family had to flee their house again as sewage water entered their home on September 28.
“Nothing has changed. We live in more fear than before,” says Mr. Khaja, who drives a carrier auto for a living.
For residents of Kabgir Nagar and Hashamabad, the flood of October 13-14 is a memory that refuses to fade. While flood markers of September 28, 1908, dot the city from the Residency Building to Miyan Mishk Masjid, there are no flood markers for the October 2020 flood that wreaked havoc from Bandlaguda to Saroornagar.
“The water rose up to here,” says Muhammad Javed, pointing to a mark left by water above the lintel of his house. Mr Javed works as a welder in Musheerbad and saw the destruction of every household item as the water rose. “Now we don’t even have a TV, leave alone other electronic items,” he says.
The Telangana government handed out ₹10,000 as part of relief efforts in the aftermath of the flooding but for families it was social workers and NGOs that helped them rebuild their lives. “We got a mixer grinder from one NGO. We got other items repaired but the stench from the sewage stayed in the house for nearly three months,” says Daulat Bi who has lived beside the nala for the past 40 years.
The Gol Bungalow dining area of the Falaknuma Palace is easily visible from the house of Daulat Bi. But that provides no relief for Daulat Bi as the water from the hillock and the surrounding hilly areas floods her home whenever there is heavy rain. The sewerage line is connected to the nala but water races down the Falaknuma hillock which is at an elevation of 586 metres above sea level (MSL) to the Kabgir Nagar area which is at 521 MSL. The families are trapped between a sewerage line and a nala.
“When we came here, there were no houses. Last year’s flood was big and it repeated this year,” says Daulat Bi as she narrates how she ran with her family in waist-deep water to the nearby masjid with the family. She was luckier than her neighbour Faimida Begum who was bitten by a snake while waiting for the water to recede from her terrace.
The colourfully painted small one room, two-room houses appear to have a concrete slab, but have asbestos sheeting as a roof making it unsafe to climb up.
Realty rates tumble
The flooding of the nala has sent real estate prices southward. “We are flattening the ground so that we can build a house. The land prices used to be ₹25,000 per yard before the flood, but now it has reduced to ₹10,000 a yard,” says Mir Mudassar Ali, a realtor building a house on the other side of the nala.
“A woman got trapped here. Another was found buried in the muck there,” informs Shaikh Zubair pointing to the signboard of a milk kiosk. “I have reached out to the corporator and the MLA, but even the basic work of walling up the nala has not been completed. The residents vacated their houses but the civic body has not carried forward the work,” says Mr. Zubair, a social worker who lives in the area.
As the unwalled nala twists and turns through the area, the residents of Kabgir Nagar, Al Jubail Colony, Hashamabad continue to live in terror of rainy nights.
