The Jalans from Jaipur came to Nepal to attend their grandson's wedding, but instead of memories of festivities they went back with an experience that has shaken the old couple to the core.
"I have never seen something of this kind in the 77 years of my life. I have seen and experienced earthquakes before, but this was unimaginable. This was a nightmare...A nightmare from which many people haven't even woken up yet," Ram Avatar Jalan told PTI.
Ram and his 73-year-old wife Usha Jalan were at different places on that fateful day, when a 7.9 magnitude earthquake ripped through the heart of Nepal, claiming thousands of lives and reducing the Himalayan nation's architectural heritage to mounds of debris.
"I was at home and my husband had gone to a hospital. I was on the second floor and everything started shaking violently. The ceiling was moving so fast it was making me dizzy. I tried to hold on to something to reach to the stair to go out in the open, but I could hardly walk," Usha said.
But, the experience was far more painful for Ram, who said, "it still sends chill down my spine."
"I was on the fifth floor of the hospital. And, from the window I saw the building of some bank shaking violently. I mean, it wasn't just shaking, it was as if some brutal force was rattling it violently. And, then I saw its first floor falling.
"We feel lucky to have survived that. Though, the wedding got postponed, everyone was thanking god that we came out of it safe," Ram said
But, the aftershocks that followed the first tremor left Jalans and their family paranoid, and he said, for next five days, we slept in our cars.
"That very night, all of our families, we took out our cars and drove to the Army cantonment area, fairly open and parked our vehicles there.
"For five days straight, we slept inside our cars. We had locked our homes, but we just could not go back. It was hitting us every now and then," he said.
Ram said, the couple had arrived in Kathmandu in second week of April, and there so many plans for the wedding of my brother's grandson, but "fate had something else in store".
"We still like Nepal very much and I hope to see it again the cheerful and beautiful beaconing tourists from everywhere," Ram said.
Over 40 Indians among 57 foreigners have died in the devastating temblor.
