When the landslide hit, Sruthi's house was washed away, along with its inhabitants.
She lost her entire family and some relatives. All she had left for a close confidante was her fiance Jenson.
Days after the landslide and the loss of her family, Jenson died in a road accident that also left Sruthi with serious injuries.
News of the accident and Sruthi's backdrop as the lone surviving member of a family wiped out in the July landslide, was picked up by the media, and people rushed to help.
Shyam G Menon reports from Wayanad: A Must Read Feature.
A crutch was parked to her left side.
The scars and scabs of still healing wounds were visible on her left foot.
"My right leg suffered a mild fracture and healed with a simple cast. But the left leg was damaged badly and had multiple fractures. The doctors had to operate and insert steel rods to hold it together," Sruthi Jenson said.
As of early November 2024, she lived a couple of kilometres away from the centre of Kalpetta town in Wayanad.
Despite the location map she sent me; it took a while to find her. There was no shortage of help. Many people in the locality seemed to know her.
One person close to her house as per the map, thought she had shifted to a new house being built for her and so dispatched me in that direction.
At a supermarket marking the neighbourhood of the second location, shop assistants remembered her instantly. "Sruthi from Mundakkai, isn't it? Has difficulty walking? She was here recently," one of them said.
While all of them knew her, none knew exactly where she lived.
So, I called Sruthi and she directed me to her house, which as it turned out, was in the block of flats right next to the location originally pinned on the map.
It was 98 days since Wayanad's landslide of July 30, 2024.
Calm and composed
Sruthi, 24, isn't from Mundakkai. She hails from Chooralmala, a bit ahead of Mundakkai on the road leading to Punjirimattom.
In end-July 2024, a massive landslide swept through these settlements, destroying houses and leaving hundreds dead and missing.
Sruthi was in Kozhikode, where she worked in the billing department of a hospital.
Her family -- father, mother and younger sister -- who lived in a two storeyed-house had been in touch with her through the days of heavy rain preceding the landslide.
The house was close to the local school on the banks of the Punnapuzha river flowing down from an amphitheatre of hills; part of the Camel's Hump Mountains.
The area, Punnapuzha included, is part of the originating points of the Chaliyar river.
The heavy rain and the risk of river waters rising and flooding the area had prompted Sruthi's family to shift to the second floor of their house.
Like many in the region, they weren't prepared for the scale and intensity of the calamity brewing.
When the landslide hit, Sruthi's house was washed away, along with its inhabitants.
She lost her entire family and some relatives. All she had left for a close confidante was her fiance Jenson.
As of date, over 400 people have died in the landslide of July 30; more than 100 are still missing (source: Wikipedia).
Days after the landslide and the loss of her family, Jenson died in a road accident that also left Sruthi with serious injuries to her legs.
News of the accident and Sruthi's backdrop as the lone surviving member of a family wiped out in the July landslide, was picked up by the media.
People pitched in to help. One such instance was a YouTube channel offering to procure land and build her a house.
Sruthi said that she received a part of the aid promised to survivors by the state government; disbursement of the rest was awaited.
Courtesy helpful agencies, she was provided essential household equipment to restart her life.
She also got periodic grocery supplies. Sruthi said that she wasn't aware of any survivor totally left in the lurch.
Most people had got some assistance. The wait was for getting the complete help promised, which also included relocation and rehabilitation.
Sruthi is currently in the final year of her BA (English) programme. With her injured leg expected to take months to heal, regain strength and let her walk properly again, Sruthi doesn't work anymore in Kozhikode.
She quit her old job at the hospital. The government has promised her a new one.
Throughout our conversation, she stayed calm and collected. I asked Sruthi if in addition to her physical injuries, which required healing and time for the same, she had ever sought the help of a counselor to cope with this mentally challenging phase. She said no.
There was a network -- a WhatsApp group -- of the landslide survivors, primarily meant to exchange notes on the aid promised them and how to avail it.
The network also doubled as an emotional support group, Sruthi said.
A brooding scar in the mountains
Till the tragedy of end-July, I hadn't heard of Chooralmala, Mundakkai and Punjirimattom.
On November 4, the day before I met Sruthi, three of us -- all journalists -- traveled to the landslide hit region.
Not long after we left Kalpetta, we began encountering adventure parks, the emblem of a trend in tourism that is neither adventure nor the appreciation for nature and the study of it, which a place like Wayanad deserves.
It is instead, packaged thrills that may be enjoyed in the company of the social media-crazy.
Unlike many tourist destinations in India's hills, Wayanad -- rather puzzlingly -- has a lot of these parks.
Besides these installations catering to thrills, there were several resorts and plantations along the road to Chooralmala.
Past the first set of police check posts ensuring that disaster tourism stood discouraged and only those with a valid reason to proceed further were allowed in, one saw the physical presence of Wayand's November by-election thinning.
The number and frequency of posters reduced. After identity cards shown and due approval obtained from the local police control room, we reached Chooralmala, a market place with most shops shut.
Just before the newly built Bailey Bridge, we saw the local campaign offices of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front (LDF).
From the bridge, the damaged local school was visible. While I didn't know it then, Sruthi's house once stood near that school.
Below, the bridge constructed by the army, Punnapuzha flowed tame and small that early November; if seen through a drone-camera at height, it would have resembled an obedient vein of water in a vast boulder field of a flood plain.
Mundakkai and Punjirimattom beyond the bridge, were ghost towns. Many of the buildings still standing there were either damaged or abandoned because the residents had been told to leave.
The only people around were plantation workers. They were brought to work in the morning in jeeps and taken out from the area after work, in the early hours of evening.
Police patrolled the region, possibly to check unauthorised entry. The predominant cash crop around, was tea.
A little before Sentinel Rock (it is also the name of a local tea estate), we met Manikandan.
A postman, he was out to deliver letters to the plantation company's office. He stayed in Chooralmala.
On July 30, Manikandan had been among the persons informed by the landslide-hit upstream, of the calamity unfolding. He alerted the authorities concerned.
The rest has been the stuff of heartless statistics about the dead, missing and the injured and relentless media coverage.
With nobody living anymore in Mundakkai and Punjirimattom, the postman's workload had shrunk.
Indeed, while he was talking to us, two plantation employees passed by and Manikandan was able to hand over his day's quota of company letters right there.
That done, Manikandan returned to Chooralmala. According to him, some people from these parts who had shifted to Meppadi after the landslide, preferred to collect their letters from the Chooralmala post office. He had to be there, for them.
Proceeding further to a Mundakkai devoid of residents, we found signs of the landslide's brute power.
Grifin Nadh, the driver of the car we hired from Kozhikode, recognised (from previous visits) the spot we stood in.
With a mosque perched nearby at a higher level, it was the erstwhile Mundakkai market.
In the post-slide landscape, the first floor of the mosque was perhaps 10 to 15 feet above us and the Punnapuzha valley, now flattened into a wide flood plain riddled with boulders and rocks, 20 feet below us.
A portion of the mosque's ground floor and first floor had collapsed. The likely culprit was a large rock that sat planted firmly in the courtyard like an unexploded artillery shell.
We asked Jaffer, a forest guard, who passed by, what the story resident in that scene was.
According to him, prior to the calamity, there was a fork in the river further upstream and one of those streams was already turbid, betraying likely landslide.
The Punnapuzha, Jaffer said, used to be far lower than where it was now. The river bed had risen manifold due to siltation by the landslide and what we were looking at and sometimes standing on, was the debris field. "There were houses here," he said.
At a point or two, we could see the remains of a house-floor. A crumpled mass of steel, recognisable as a car only by its tyres, lay among the rocks.
Jaffer said, the mud flow roaring down from upstream had slammed into the opposite bank of the stream, ricochetted and sent projectiles like that rock hurtling towards the mosque.
"What you are seeing here and in the damaged buildings nearby is the aftermath of all that water and landslide debris sweeping in and out, just sweeping in and out," he said.
Jaffer hailed from the landslide-hit region. Standing there and imagining what he said, one got an idea of the power in that mud-flow.
It was from this segment of the road, debris-strewn and lined with damaged buildings, that we saw a distant yet prominent scar on Vellarimala, the hill (it is part of the Camel's Hump Mountains) at the apex of the river valley. The expanse of that scar was enormous.
The point of origin of the landslide, the scar brooded in the distance like a still angry being, it's gaze on us and we enveloped by the quietness of the place.
Closer to Punjirimattom, we came across more abandoned houses and crumpled vehicles.
A small steel bridge had been freshly built over the stream here for workers to reach the cardamom plantations on the other side.
We turned back from the small bridge for the sky had become heavily overcast and it was the season of the returning monsoon.
Water levels in streams in the hills can rise at short notice, should there be a strong enough shower.
As we returned via Sentinel Rock -- the name etched onto a large boulder -- my friend spoke of a story from these parts.
The boulder bearing the name, stood out in the surrounding environment for its lack of organic link to things around.
Resembling a visitor or an alien planted there by force, was the rock's current location the product of an older landslide? Back at the Bailey Bridge we paused to see both the damaged school and the place where the local temple once stood.
On the Chooralmala side, Basheer, once running a busy and successful hotel there told us of his current state.
His old eatery was damaged by the water, mud, rocks and other landslide detritus brought by Punnapuzha.
It was curtains down for his business. Making matters worse, his children had built their livelihood too in the same region as service providers linked to Basheer's eatery.
At one stroke, the landslide cut off income for Basheer and his whole family. For many days, no shop stirred to life in Chooralmala.
Then, as a consequence of a news report about him, Basheer received outside help to restart operations.
The old location was revived as a kitchen; new premises were hired to serve customers tea and food. But Basheer had a problem.
Given the government had restricted entry of people to Chooralmala, the eatery's business had shrunk to less than a third of what it was earlier.
I asked Basheer what his wish would be if he could speak to any of Wayanad's by-election candidates. "I wish that the government restore travel at least till Chooralmala. That would get me customers," he said.
At Priyanka Gandhi's local campaign office right across the road from Basheer's eatery, the officials present said that of the three wards affected by landslide, one ward saw its voting booth shifted as the people themselves had moved to safer places in the Meppadi region.
The remaining two wards had their voting booths at the same locations where they used to be in previous polls.
After a round of samosas and tea from Basheer's eatery we headed back to Meppadi and from there, to Muttil.
On the way, we passed two state transport buses, ostensibly playing the role of school bus, filled with school students returning home.
Their chatter breathed life into the still grieving air. I was told that they were former students of the school at Chooralmala, now studying elsewhere following the devastating tragedy of end-July.
A squabble over funds
After Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Wayanad visit to see the landslide affected region; after the army built one of its most media-covered Bailey Bridges, the major concern around the landslide shifted to securing funds for relocating and rehabilitating the survivors of the tragedy.
Kerala, already stretched financially and struggling to make ends meet, sought central assistance.
As matters dragged on, the issue reached the courts. The Centre recommended that Kerala dip into its state disaster relief funds for money to meet the expenses. It became a controversy.
The Centre's attitude was criticised by a retired top bureaucrat familiar with state finances, who I met in Thiruvananthapuram.
He found the Centre's approach towards the state disrespectful given India is a federal arrangement.
The size of funds needed for relocation and rehabilitation in Wayanad wasn't high.
"Pushed to the wall, we may be able to find means of funding the rehabilitation scheme. That is not the issue. The issue is how the Centre treated a non-BJP ruled state like Kerala. Other states in a similar situation have been helped. So, why not Kerala?" he asked.
As he put it, Kerala is a welfarist state with matching expenses. Yet it is not home to freebies. It spends for the welfare of its people.
At the same time, there are paradigm challenges with Kerala's economy.
Industrially, it is weak as manufacturing facilities are few. On the other hand, the service sector is big as are remittances from Keralites working and living outside the state and overseas.
The state is in a strange predicament wherein, its people have money but the state is poor.
Kerala is known to handle its tax collections in a reasonable fashion without excessively pressuring its inhabitants and while it was among states that reposed much faith in the benefits of the new General Sales Tax (GST) regime, its experience has been unsatisfactory.
In 2018 and 2019, Kerala was battered by floods entailing commensurate government expenses.
This phase was followed by the pandemic and related government expenses to help the people.
The retired senior bureaucrat didn't see the pandemic as a major hurdle. The issue is more with the current and future trajectory of government spending in Kerala for in addition to all the afore-mentioned points and the settling in of extreme weather events as a permanent fixture, the state's population is also greying fast.
Kerala's population already has the highest average age among Indian states and as the trend progresses, it goes without saying that welfarist measures will need to keep pace.
There is thus a paradigm problem, one that is unique among Indian states. And all the welfare measures are with no freebies handed around. People pay.
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New Delhi has also not increased the state's borrowing limit from the Centre (not everyone I spoke to about the state's finances wanted the borrowing limit raised; there were those who felt that working within the limit may help discipline management of finances more).
This is why the Centre's sluggish response to Kerala's request for central assistance to address the needs of Wayanad, has provoked many people.
Both the UDF and the LDF have raised the issue of the Centre doing little to fund rehabilitation despite Modi visiting Wayanad and the army being of great assistance in the search and rescue phase of the July tragedy. "It is unfair in a federal set up," the retired bureaucrat said.
This funding issue found mention in speeches by candidates and party members during the 2024 Wayanad by-election. But intriguingly, it wasn't among the most talked about issues.
Shyam G Menon is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
