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| The first rains |
Thursday 29th December 2011: there
was talk of a cyclone all over Auroville and it was in the air. At Pour Tous co-operative food store a
French Aurovillian joked with his friend, in the produce queue;
Tu te provisionnes avant le cyclone?
Actually, there was no sense of panic
buying amongst the shoppers. I doubled my apple and curd rations
nonetheless.
Later that morning, I
cycled to La Piscine as usual for my
daily swim. I was disappointed to find the gates closed and locked and rattled
them pointlessly, in annoyance.
The sky above was grey as it had been in
recent days and true, there was a discernable breeze, but everything seemed as
normal. So I continued on, to use Aurelec’s, wi-fi hotspot. I took an outside table. A
fierce swirl of wind loosened dry leaves from an overhanging jackfruit tree,
they clattered and skittered across the ground. I thought it prudent to leave
to protect my techonology.
As I cycled back to my guesthouse, the sky
darkened and fat plops of warm rain began to fall. Inconvenient but
unremarkable, the north east monsoon which started at the end of October had
persisted through December with several days of downpours.
As dusk fell, I donned my waterproofs to
fetch a tiffin dinner from the Solar
Kitchen. Rajaveni, my hostess kindly suggested we go together on her scooter. There
was a light rain, nothing remarkable.
Back at Douceur,
we feasted on salad, soup, pancakes and tomato sauce, we could not have known
then that this would be our last hot meal for a few days.
The electricity was cut later that evening,
an official decision, with health and safety in mind. So after some reading by
torchlight, I closed my eyes to sleep early, around eight pm.
The cyclone winds arrived that night and persisted
through much of Friday. I was quite safe in my room, all I could do was lay I
bed and listen to the extraordinary sounds of the storm. The unrelenting rain, gushing from the skies,
the fierce wind ripping through trees and structures, I could only guess at the
damage being caused.
As dawn arrived, the rain and winds continued
well into the afternoon. I sat with others in the guest house, watching the
extreme movement of trees as trunks and branches thrashed and fell. We were fortunate enough to be housed in a
very secure building with brick walls, a tiled roof and double screened
windows.
At around four pm, the worst of the weather
had abated. I waited a while to be sure and then put on my waterproofs and
walking sandals, I needed to survey the scene and take in what had happened as
the experience thus far had a very unreal quality.
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| Trees and branches everywhere |
I stepped out of the guesthouse and gaped;
the landscape was completely unrecognisable. So many of the large trees that created
privacy had fallen, exposing neighbouring houses.
The paths and roads had
disappeared entirely, as the ground was now covered in a carpet of greenery;
leaves and branches everywhere.
As I tentatively picked my way along, I had
to keep checking where I was, everything was unrecognisable.
I crawled through
a tunnel of fallen bamboo to reach the main road, which was criss-crossed by
tree trunks, huge root balls caked in red earth exposed to the air. The roads were completely impassable and I
noted other damage; collapsed roofs, fallen power cables.
It was eery and still, no traffic, and just
a few people such as myself tip-toeing around, exploring. Softly, the rain began again, it would
continue into the next day. Back at the guesthouse I described my findings and
we began to speculate on what was happening in the rest of Auroville.
I felt a particular concern for low impact
communities such as Sadhana Forest, that I had visited the previous week. Surely
their keet (coconut frond) and bamboo
dwellings would have been completely destroyed, I wondered whether or not they
had got away in time. Equally the beach community of Repos, metres from the shoreline would have suffered the full
impact of the cyclone.
That evening we shared a quiet supper by
candlelight, not much was said, there was so much to be absorbed. During the
coming days, the scale of what had happened would reveal itself and we would
all have our personal interpretations and conclusions. For now, I knew enough
to be thoroughly grateful that I was safe, well and had suffered no physical
injury to myself or my possessions.
OM
