Stories from my travels

When You Feel the Earth Tremble, Don’t Ignore it

It’s no small matter to find yourself in the middle of a natural disaster

“Sal, wake up!”

I was roused from sleep by an urgent voice in my ear. Not the most welcome thing at 6.40 am to the mother of a highly energetic toddler!

It was Boxing Day, 2004, and we were staying at Amritapuri Ashram, the home of Mata Amritanandamayi, known by many as Amma, or The Hugging Mother.

The ashram is located on a narrow strip of land, around 200 metres wide (from memory) between the sea and the famous Keralan Backwaters. Our room was in a building much closer to the edge of the Backwaters than to the sea and the windows faced away from the sea.

The previous two days — Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — had been high energy, contrary to what one might expect in a Hindu ashram in South India, and I had been looking forward to my two-year-old possibly allowing me to sleep in a bit this morning.

As I opened my eyes I saw her still sleeping soundly beside me and, on the other side of me, my partner was sitting up, alert and concerned.

“Can you feel the bed shaking?” He asked.

I sat up and, indeed, felt as if the bed was trembling violently, but I still didn’t quite believe it.

I looked over towards the portable bathtub that I had bought for my daughter, still full from the previous evening. The water sloshing from side to side confirmed it for me.

We were feeling the tremors of an earthquake!

I leapt out of bed, flung a dress over my head, threw our passports and travellers cheques into a bag, along with a few disposable nappies, and grabbed the baby sling.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Let’s go!”

Outside the building, the world appeared normal…

We made our way downstairs and out of the building. Our room was on the top floor of a fifteen-storey building and, as it turned out, no one on ground level seemed to have noticed a thing.

Good old physics, I thought. When an earthquake happens, there’s clearly going to be greater movement at the top of a tall building than at the bottom.

However, I needed someone to tell me they had felt it too.

It felt urgent…dangerous, somehow. As if something else was lurking, about to pounce.

I asked people who were milling around outside. No one had felt a thing.

We went to the nearby chai shop, run by an elderly woman and her two daughters. The tall daughter wearing the neck brace served us. She had injured her neck by being hit on the head by a falling coconut — a seemingly more common occurrence than any other dangers in these parts. She shrugged and shook her head when I asked her if she had felt the tremors.

This was crazy! Why had no one else noticed this earthquake? It was big — I knew it was. And a big earthquake could not…should not…go unnoticed.

I started to feel slightly crazed, and totally fixated on one thing — getting people to listen the hell to me! My gut was telling me that it was just a warning for something bigger. I had no idea what, but something…

I spoke to more and more people, even going to speak to the Western Office (where tourists registered to stay in the ashram), but they also shrugged and said, “What are we supposed to do with this information?”

They looked at me as if I had totally lost the plot. To them, I was just another mad westerner, finding my way to a Hindu ashram to run away from a society I didn’t feel I belonged in; indulging myself in some crazy belief that I had exceptional spiritual powers that could predict that something bad was about to happen.

They had seen many of us come and leave again. I was just another in an endless stream!

Only I wasn’t.

Honestly, if they had only known that I held no pretences at having had deep, spiritual revelations, had never read the Vedic scriptures, and certainly couldn’t read the stars and planets. I just had a gut feeling and it was screaming at me — that was all.

One lady asked me if I hadn’t been having a deep, spiritual experience in meditation? As much as my ego would have loved to lay claim to an elevated spiritual awakening — and be privy to those conversations about deep meditative experiences that I would hear around the place — that wasn’t going to help my cause.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

We moved on with our day.

The ashram began to fill with people. It had been announced that Amma would be holding a Devi Bhava that evening (literally translated as ‘in the mood of Devi’ or ‘the divine mother’), where she would perform rituals during which she assumed the most compassionate and divine persona from the godly realms, and welcomed people into her arms through the night.

These nights had become more and more popular over the years that she had been welcoming visitors into the ashram. But they had, by then, become few and far between and this was the first scheduled Devi Bhava in many months. Not surprisingly, by late morning the ashram was the busiest it had ever been.

It was estimated that there were around 20,000 people there in total on that day.

By midday, I started to feel tired and my daughter was showing signs of needing her nap, so we began heading back to our room. As I walked towards the building in which we were staying, I looked around with this strange feeling arising again. That something was coming. And soon.

I entered the building and felt the cool floor against my bare feet, I realised that we had forgotten to retrieve our sandals from the temple steps. It was easily done, since the ground was mostly covered in sand and didn’t feel unnatural to walk on in bare feet.

“Oh well,” I thought. “I will find them later.”

Little did I know that I wouldn’t get the chance and that of the two pairs of sandals left by my daughter and me on the temple steps that day, only half a pair would later be recovered…

We settled ourselves down to sleep for a bit. My daughter fell asleep quickly, while I lay with my eyes closed, drifting off gradually as I took in the sound of the water in the shower that my partner was taking and, through the window, of the motorboats ferrying people to and from the mainland.

I was just starting to slip into dreamland when I was jolted awake by the sounds from outside the window turning into the screams and shouts of panicked humans!

I jumped up from my bed and ran to the window. Outside I could see a woman standing knee-deep in water and crying out to someone. I saw water gushing fiercely around either side of the building, and a local fishing boat floating by.

“The sea is rising!” I thought. “We need to get out of here!”

This is a rehashed version of a previously-shared story.

Want to find out what happens next? Read Part 2 here…