It was an ordinary Sunday evening as I sat in front of the television with my cup of tea. A leisurely time .Before I could take a sip I was disturbed by strange vibrations and then suddenly the bed started moving too and fro. I reflexly blurted “Is it an earthquake?” and then within a few minutes we evacuated our house and stood outside wondering. A phone call gave an indication of some earthquake in Patna. It were the tremors of a distant earthquake that was clear by now. I had felt the tremors of the Bhuj earthquake a decade back and it was horrifying.  I was reluctant to go upstairs as I felt the 4.8 Richter aftershocks as well and my family agreed when the news confirmed a 6.8 Richter earthquake in Sikkim and a second one of 4.8 Richter scale.

It took time to unfold all the damage and loss of life. The intensity of the earthquake was so high that it could have been devastating had it been a densely populated metropolitan. What we felt was just a few seconds of horror and when the earth danced beneath me I didn’t know where to keep my feet and my thoughts. It was a blank head wrapped in fear. Nothing immediate or remote mattered which I was probably musing over before that sip of tea. The terrain it primarily effected has sparser population has an ongoing power project on the river Teesta by Teesta Urja limited. It was God’s grace that even earth’s wrath and ‘tandav’ could not unleash that great a devastation. It was the day of Vishwakarma Pooja and most workers had not come to work because of the Pooja .What a close miss!!

The Buddhist monastery Sikkim which turned into rubbles , could have been a century old if not for the earthquake. The fateful day being a Sunday the prayers finished at 5:30 in the evening rather than the usual 6:30 pm saving the monks from the earthquake that hit at 6:10 pm. God saved them all.

It took me sometime to normalize . All I wondered was that we are so badly entangled in the thick of thins that we fail to see the fraility of our existence. It was a two second tremor that brought me face to face to reality ........... it is other thing that I inevitably sunk back in the ‘maya jaal’ ... the ‘matrix’ by Monday morning J.  Same old juggling through the day ....racing and whining  endlessly for otherwise ‘meaningless’  goals .