Even in Delhi, I sometimes feel the earth is still shaking: A Kathmandu quake survivor's story

Singh recalls the anxious moments after the quake, is all praise for the IAF

Delhi resident Simran was at the fag-end of her almost month-long stay in Nepal. The KPMG consultant had been in Kathmandu since March 30 and had a ticket booked for April 29. 

Then the earth shook. 

“We were up and about in our apartment in the Lalitpur area when suddenly everything started shaking, and the apartment started cracking,” she recalls of the first floor serviced apartment she and a colleague were staying in for the duration of their project. “We just ran out as tiles and plaster started to fall on us.” 

The two decided to check into a hotel, as advised by all their friends – her boss booked her a room at the Hyatt. “We started walking but it was really far and a taxi driver tried to cheat us by charging us more money, so I asked him how he could do such a thing at such a time,” she told Business Standard. 

As providence would have it, a good Samaritan driving by offered them a ride and dropped them at the Hyatt. 

“The hotel staff was wonderful,” she says. “They opened up the hotel to everyone. The building had some structural damage, but they opened up the grounds, gave everyone food and tea, blankets and mattresses. Even in the middle of everything, they kept the bathrooms clean, and they allowed everyone to use their landlines to call home because connectivity was so poor.” 

People sit solemnly inside the IAF cargo plane

Even through the night, the hotel staff, Singh said, would periodically make announcements about expected aftershocks and wake people up so they could be prepared. Singh and her colleague managed to make their way back to the apartment one last time. “We just grabbed everything we had and dumped it into a suitcase,” she remembers. 

But through it all, she is amazed by how calm people stayed. “I only saw two hysterical women through the entire ordeal. Otherwise, after the first quake, everyone was really calm, and people just started camping out, stocking up on food and essentials.”

“When it happened, I told myself there was no point getting emotional, we had to stay calm. Even at the airport, although it was quite chaotic, people were calm,” she recalls.

She reserves the highest praise for the Indian armed forces, though. 

“The Air Force guys were just amazing, flying in at such short notice. They were the ones handling everything at the airport. They flew in so quickly, and they brought water, which the airport had run out of, just in time. I owe my life to them,” Singh says. “They were amazing.”

Singh went on to the tarmac and managed to get on the first evacuation flight that left on Sunday. “They were prioritising women, children, old persons and sick people to evacuate and we managed to get out,” Singh says gratefully. 

But even in Delhi, she says she sometimes feels the ground is still shaking. “I called my colleague to check if it was just me,” she said. 

But despite her good luck, she says, there was one moment at the Kathmandu airport when she thought she wouldn’t make it out alive. 

“We were at the airport – and remember, the tremors had been continuing all this time – and it started to shake again and I looked up at the ceiling and there was this fan and I thought ‘What if this ceiling or the fan falls on my head?’, that’s the moment I thought I’m going to die right here.” 

IAF cargo plane that evacuated people