July 28, 2005


The monsoon’s mark on my vacation to India

By Lochan Shah
Special to the Times

It doesn’t happen often, but it so happened that when I was in India during the monsoon season, my extended family, on my mom’s side, and me were in a city that flooded and we were forced to evacuate to my aunt’s second story in her house.

A water-logged-home in Shivam Society. A local newspaper carried a picture of the flood.

Actually, it didn’t really rain that much. The problem was, the house we were living in was reasonably close to the Bhuki River, which is a tributary to the Vishwamitri River. The Vishwamitri River’s backwater flooded the Bhuki River, and then the Bhuki River’s backwater flooded us, turning roads into rivers, houses into tents, and ponds into seas. We stayed in the second story house (my aunt’s house) for 96 hours (four days).

After a while, we got a call from my other aunt who said we (our area: Shivam Society) were on TV because many complexes in the area were underwater, and the whole area was like many separate islands—each island being a single house. This had never happened before in Shivam Society.

At some point, we looked outside and saw that when people rode by, you could not see their bikes or motorcycles, and cars parked on upper levels were halfway submerged underwater. We saw full grown adults up to their chests in water, and the water in the lower houses were 2-3 feet deep. All the stagnant water surrounding the house worried everybody and there was a fear of a disease epidemic.

Lochan Shah holding a local newspaper depicting the flood.

My mother decided to call the United States Embassy to see if we could be transported to Bombay where my father was at the time.

As my mom put it, for the first time in our life we were stranded with no electricity, unreliable landlines, limited water and food supplies, and no ground access. Everyone in the city was in the same boat, so to speak.

Katherine Snow of the US Embassy said we should talk to a very helpful person called Mr. Pargi (the Police Commissioner of Vadodara City) who later transported us via boat to the outskirts of the flood. From there, he arranged for a police van to transport us along with our luggage to the airport where we got on a plane and were flown to Bombay. The flight was about one hour long, and they served waffles with honey for breakfast. We finally arrived in Bombay at 8:30 a.m. where upon it began to rain…again!

Lochan Shah recently graduated from the fifth grade at Graystone Elementary School.