“Go ahead and walk over them. We just want them to dry so that we can burn them all,” called out a woman from inside a house in the Kandukrishichira locality of the Kainakary panchayat in Alappuzha district. Waste disposal is a challenge in inundated Kuttanad and residents wait to offer all their damaged possessions to bonfires.
Damp world
Further down the street, outside R. Thangamma’s house, laid out on the damp path were books and yellowing newspapers newspapers, even a few X-ray sheets, not clothes.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Go ahead,” urged Ms. Thangamma. She paused. “They belonged to our youngest son,” she said, breaking down.
When T.E. Rajkumar passed away in 2011 after a battle with cancer that left him a double-amputee, his parents held on to his possessions. “I even kept his Singapore leg,” she says, pointing to the prosthetic, caked in clay, stuck to the fence, where it was washed out of the house by the flood.
The couple now face the prospect of rebuilding from scratch, on their own, in the twilight of their lives.
ADVERTISEMENT
High life expectancy
It is a scene playing out across flood-affected Kerala: thanks to one of the highest life expectancy rates in India, the State has the highest proportion of the elderly in its population. This newspaper had reported in 2015 that research by the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the Cochin University of Science and Technology found that about 6% of the 30 lakh-odd people over 60 years live alone.
Amina Kottayakkaran (65), a resident of the Kottathara dam site in the Wayanad district, has fallen out with her son, a government employee. When the rushing waters of the swelling Cherupuzha — a tributary of the Kabini river — took the wall at the back of her house along with it on August 8, Ms. Amina, a widow, took refuge in a neighbour's house nearby.
If neighbours were the first responders for the elders, Kerala's army of volunteers was their safety net. Mr. Gopinathan says that, apart from his two other sons, a large group of young men previously unknown to him had helped clean up the house.
That still leaves many who fall through the cracks. K.K. Raghuvaran, who has been running a fever for over four days, ate his lunch on Tuesday sitting on a chair in ankle-deep water within his house. Mr. Raghuvaran and wife Revamma, in their late 60s, left a relief camp and returned to their home along the 'Aarupungu padasekharam' (a collection of farmlands) of Kainakary panchayat in Alappuzha despite the inundation. “We have to do the cleaning ourselves, so we thought we should not wait,” says Ms. Revamma.
The couple’s house is clearly unsafe to live in: its walls are damp, there are cracks along the back of the building. “We have nowhere else to go. The neighbours are probably worse-off,” says Mr. Raghuvaran.