PICKING UP THE PIECES

It's as if even the road is afraid to go down that last stretch to the 'valley of death'.

- Jeemon Jacob

Ten days have passed since a wailing wall of monsoon water and mountain debris cannoned down on two villages, Mundakkai and Chooralmala, leaving only memories, videos and sundered human body parts. But nothing ventures beyond Kalpetta, the administrative headquarters of Wayanad district, which you hit climbing up the hairpin bends from Kozhikode. Only ambulances and police vehicles stir the gravel on those last 21 kilometres. Past Meppadi, you bump into police checkpoints-another reminder that the emergency period isn't over. Search and rescue operations are still on for the 152 people who have not been accounted for.

There is nothing to mark the two villages that have disappeared, except for some broken signage. School, houses, the small line of shops down main street, the resorts on the outskirts, it's all now part of a mud sludge, a thick brown line across the foothills, running down from Punchirimattom, the epicentre of the first landslide. The July 29 disaster has officially claimed the lives of 224 people, including 88 women and 37 children. The unofficial toll exceeds 500. Only 172 bodies have been identified so far-180odd body parts, severed from perhaps a roughly proportionate number of owners, await claimants. Perhaps in vain.

On August 6, around 35 unidentified bodies and 154 body parts were buried, after all-faith prayers, in Puthumala, itself a site where a landslide had killed five people in August 2019. The mourners included state ministers and district officials. The bodies and body parts are in separate individual pits, validated for now by a DNA identification number till identities are confirmed, enabling relatives to come forward later, say officials.