Omana Nair, a 54-year-old widow whose entire life has been a struggle for existence in the paddy fields and brick kilns, returned on Tuesday from the relief camp where she stayed for three days of deluge to her house in Pandanad but what the scene there was heart-breaking. She could not even enter into the compound as it was covered with two-feet-thick brown-black mud.
Not even a blade of grass was visible on the front courtyard over the carpet of mud. The only coconut tree in the compound had fallen on the roof of the neighbour’s house. Inside the house, everything — the tiled floor, chairs, tables, clothes, hearth, gas cylinder, stove, utensils — was blanketed by thick sheets of sludge and most of these were beyond salvage or repair.
Only when she passed the kitchen, she could see the real magnitude of brutality the deluge: The entire rear wall of the house had crumbled. She ran around the house shifting her eyes from crack to crack in the walls and passing her hands over them.
There was nothing she could do but to sink on to the muddy floor and wail: “What will I doij What can I doij”