The Human-Quake

The Human-Quake

(This was written for a drama act based on the experiences of 2015's earthquake witnessed by our team of "We" For Change, a non-profit organization, where I had volunteered then)

Late night like always, I had been surfing the internet,

Suddenly got reminded of my friend, well, not that intimate

I messaged her,

“Hello, Grace”

(Well, Grace was my online friend, Grace, white face from a foreign place, Dutch race, quite a humble case)

I guess that’s enough about Grace.

I emailed her, “Hello, Grace”

“You said you’d be visiting my place,

Your travelling plan’s the same or have you replaced?

Call me, just in case.”

You see, Grace wanted to see Kathmandu,

And I wanted to show her all beautiful places old and new

With the message, I turned off my laptop

Yawns, dizzy dreams, tiredness and sleep on my backdrop

I fell asleep.

 

6 a.m. in the morning,

Shut up clock! stop alarming as I’ve stopped yawning

Partly round orange sun, warning

Oh my darling! Your direct rays are on my left cheeks

I know you’ve been shining, but do you mind a bit turning?

It’s a big day today, I gotta be moving.

I and my friends have planned to meet, we’re going to hike

Shivapuri, be ready to nudge my skin, be ready to strike.

After some hours, we, friends met,

Brought our foods, some cooked and some baked.

We laughed, we ran, we stopped, we ran again, we drank,

Yet many stairs up to the hill! We stopped again,

We couldn't run more, we walked, we drank, we ate, we danced, we sang

What a hiking! And finally, the stairs were over

It was just the slope, forest, trees and us, and our stupidity

Then suddenly my legs, they trembled

Guys, did you feel that? All disassembled,

Thud!

My cell phone dropped, hopped and stopped.

Well, I didn’t care, I swear, it was my dear,

But that moment, life became much a worth, you couldn’t compare.

Monica di and Tara yelled, “EARTHQUAKE, EARTHQUAKE”,

Some under the arms of one guy, bent, scared with almost a heart ache.

And three of us, holding a large trunk,

I know it’s risky under a tree but who cared, you couldn't think anything of,

I held that tree so tightly that even my future husband will get that hug unlikely,

Poor guy, Poor tree!

I alternatively saw the ground and the jeans of a friend next (I didn't realise whose jeans those were),

Raising my head had become more difficult than raising a 20 pound dumbbell

The earth shook, shivered, quivered, I felt shifted too,

Half a minute and pause.

Branches fell, the ground cracked, a day so black

All of us hikers were very confused, I asked, “Guys, should we just go back?”

A moment, after almost a panic attack, “What was that?”

My friend, Rochak, I guess he was the only one in the hiking mood, he didn’t stop singing all during that quake,

Did anyone check, was he awake?

Didn’t he feel all those frightening shakes?

Wasn’t that any big thing for him to take?

Everyone, then shouted, “Rochak, stop, this is an Earthquake”

But I felt he wasn’t singing,

It’s what people did during their last breath, so close to death and life at stake,

So, then, was he praying?

And I thought again, “Naah, Rochak is an atheist”

He was in fact showing it’s nothing big to take

He was neither singing nor praying, I guess he was consoling.

I rose my head up, though I still felt like raising dumbbells,

I looked above, okay, those jeans were of my friend, Bikesh, I realized finally,

So, this was the earthquake? The direst thing? It happened so easily,

No casualties, no yelling (besides us)

Did we just experience it at this height? I thought.

We moved above, at the top,

This time I didn’t like the cold breeze of Shivapuri nudging my skin, please, just drop!

A bunch of tourists, on top, they told Dharahara’s gone, see!

We saw and we didn’t see, so the quake didn’t go that easy

No signals on top, everyone cursed the telecom company,

And me, worried about my family.

Rochak, still happy and singing,

This time I said, “Okay, Rochak, stop now”,

We didn’t know what happened and how?

Networks, FMs everything were so blank like our minds,

Neither could we move forward nor behind,

Aftershocks, some of them defined, were still coming in every rectors and kind.

We couldn’t stay there whole night,

We lined, again unlined, combined and declined.

Luckily, some of us got the phone network and

Like herd of calves waiting to suck milk, turn by turn waited to call home,

Thank god, everyone was safe at home and not alone.

 

As soon as we left the hill, we found that we were fortunate but most in the country weren’t,

Down the roads of Balaju, old houses were all gone, new ones- some collapsed, some about to collapse,

And those that remained still, feared being overlapped.

The roads were torn apart; I never had seen it that way,

Few vehicles and huge mass on road, contrary to the earlier day

We got a bus and whole way home; I thought how my house looked like,

Luckily, it looked the same, but people inside, they looked different

Everyone in the town, scared, frightened, threatened, scurried, worried and some buried.

Kathmandu was no more that place I wanted to show Grace,

Now it was a so misplaced, humans displaced, formidably, a broken place.

 

Nature was harsh on us, I know, but it didn’t kill us,

We killed ourselves,

Tall houses, skyscrapers, crowded streets, legally built illegal buildings,

Weren’t these what we made?

We got for what we’d paid,

It wasn’t an earthquake, but a man-made grenade,

That stayed, weighed, delayed, decayed, slowly displayed, and finally dismayed,

Now, rest of us, whether strayed or not strayed,

Let us take it a as a lesson and be ready to aid.

Let the whole country and government learn from Haiti,

Let it just be a natural disaster and not a political calamity,

Alive ones, we need to be the heroes and to the deceased, I hope they rest in peace, almighty.

 

-Shraddha Acharya