Karad Diaries-3

The earthquake occurred in the early morning, waking all of us up instantly. We were all sleeping on the floor as usual, but earth under us moved to and fro as if we were all sleeping on a giant swing, and we could not understand what was happening at first. We were all frightened, Sanju suggested we recite Ramaraksha and we all started reciting it in earnest. This went on for what felt like eternity, but could not have been more than a few minutes. After the movement stopped and everything was quite still, we rushed out of the house and assembled in the front courtyard. All the members of the landlord’s family had already gathered here, who, like us, were in their night-dresses, and there, in the sight of other people, we recovered enough to talk animatedly about the experience.

As it turned out, this was not altogether a novel experience for some from the landlord’s family, who used to live at Koyananagar, where earthquakes had occurred previously, but of course, they were of a smaller magnitude. We later learnt the devastating effects of this quake, which had caused havoc in Koyananagar and surrounding area near the epicentre of the earthquake. Our school was converted into a makeshift hospital to cater to the large number of people who were caught in the collapsing buildings and suffered injuries. After this quake, there were many aftershocks, and I remember sleeping out on the street en masse, for fear that the house would collapse over our head and later we moved to Kolhapur for a few months as the school was closed and we were given temporary admission in Vidyapeeth High School near Ambabai Temple in Kolhapur.

Surprisingly, there was virtually no damage to the structure of the house we lived in, mainly because it was a single storied structure with brick walls and a lightweight roof of steel sheets. So after a few months, we came back and continued to live in the same house as if nothing was amiss. I continued with my studies, and it was about an year after that I tried to take my life for reasons I can not remember, nor justify in any way.

As I recollect, we had a few choice locations for study, which I had found out with my friends in the school. One was under the old bridge over Koyana, where there was a gap between the steel girders and top of the stone pier of the bridge. This was quite high up and tricky to reach from the road at top but not really scary as the pier was very wide and the height of girder was about 6’, giving a good headroom. The other location was inside the shikhar (roof) of a deserted temple on the bank of the river, which was slightly dark inside but gave enough light from the opening to enable us to read if we sat just near the opening. It was in this location I tried drinking Tic-20, an insecticide, but apart from its horrible taste it turned out to be quite harmless. I have forgotten where I procured the bottle or why I did it, but remember that I felt relieved after I found out it did not work.

Much later, in an IIA seminar on character building, we were discussing the fears and loss of self-confidence in the young who are unable to accept the reality about them; I disagreed with the speaker and said nobody can feel insecure about his physical features or appearance, which is genetically programmed, but later recalled this incident and felt there might be some truth in this after all, as I recall no other reason for me to be so unhappy as to try to take my own life at the time.