Picking Up The Pieces

As lakhs of Malayalis return to their homes to retrieve the fragments of their broken lives, Kerala tries to hold itself together with help from volunteers and relief in cash and kind. The state’s real test remains those still in the camps

- M.G. Arun

As Sanija, 36, from Pandanadu village in Chengannur taluk of Kerala’s Alappuzha district, hangs clothes out to dry near the heap of rubble that was once her home, her face betrays no expression. A few clothes are all that she could salvage from her two-room home after the floods began on August 14. The swelling Pampa river, furious with water from the dams which were forced to lift shutters after continuous rains of over a week, drowned 10,000 homes in Pandanadu, just two months after it had taken Sanija’s husband Suresh, a fisherman. Widowed, and with three young children to fend for, Sanija used to stitch clothes for a living. Now she finds her sewing machine too rendered useless. “Everything is lost. I have no more tears left in my eyes,” she says, as her father Padmasanan, 72, points to more household appliances, including a TV and a fridge, lying deep in the rubble.