A Tale from the Earth’s Tremble
(What My Young
Grandpa Taught Me in summer)
I
was about nine, wide-eyed and full of questions. That summer, we visited my
maternal grandfather’s house in Dibrugarh — a classic Assam-type home, humble
yet strong. Iron pillars held up lime-plastered bamboo walls, the roof glinted
with corrugated tin sheets under the fierce summer sun. That house wasn’t just
bricks and beams — it was memory and tradition molded into architecture.
One morning, under the mellow sun, my young grandfather (Late Devakanta Bordoloi, youngest son of Assamese Novel emperor Rajanikanta Bordoloi) — cane-hookah in hand, settled in his porch chair — called us near. We sat around him, the porch smelling faintly of tobacco and earth. And then, he began:
“It was August 15. India’s Independence Day, a Tuesday, 7:39 PM. We had just wrapped up the celebrations. Your great-grandmaa lay in bed — her leg was to be operated on in a few days. And then... the earth began to growl.”
His voice dropped to a hush. We leaned in closer.
“It sounded like thunder rolling from far away — and suddenly, the house rocked. Not shook — rocked, like a boat on wild waves. Cracks opened in the yard. Plaster fell like snow. Even our wells went muddy. But in that panic, we moved — not frozen, but fueled by instinct.”
He carried his ailing mother (my great-grandmaa) to safety. The rest of the family gathered in the yard under the moonlit sky, wide-eyed and barefoot, watching the house creak and groan like an old wooden ship.
But that wasn’t the end of the tale.
“That night,” he said, “we dragged out an old tent from the storeroom. Bamboo poles, jute ropes, and hands working together — we built a temporary home in the yard.”
They stayed there for a month.
They made water filters from sand, stone, charcoal - Added alum and bleaching powder to the well. Cooked under a makeshift Bhelaghṛa kitchen — with dry straw, dry banana leaves, and bamboo. At night, they lit up their world with kerosene and mustard oil lamps. It was survival. But it felt like Bhogāli Bihu — a festival of firewood and resilience.
“We didn’t wait for help. We remembered. We rebuilt. And we lived — the way our ancestors taught us to live.”
That morning, I didn't just hear a story. I inherited a blueprint — of how tradition meets disaster with strength, wisdom, and unity.
This is more than a tale. It is a living strategy — passed down like sacred thread — to be followed if disaster strikes again.
Let us preserve these stories. Let us prepare through them. Because sometimes, the best disaster plan is already hidden in the stories our elders once whispered under the summer sun.
#HeritageHeals
#EarthquakeWisdom #AssamTypeResilience #TraditionalKnowledge
#DisasterPreparedness #ICOMOSIndia #NorthEastNarratives
0 Comments