<b>Geetanjali Krishna:</b> Living on shaky ground

A couple of days ago, when our new house was being painted, I was standing in the backyard when it happened. A pigeon took flight with a loud squawk as the earth began to shake under my feet. A phone rang and one of the painters perched on a ladder fished out his phone. "It was an earthquake," he informed me. "That was my wife calling from the village to tell me it happened again." His village was in Gorakhpur district, bordering Nepal, he said, and ever since the fateful April trembler, they'd been rocked by so many aftershocks that normal life had virtually come to a standstill. I asked him how much damage his village had suffered. "A couple of houses collapsed, especially the ones made of concrete," he said. The school building had a deep crack too. Other than that, the mud and wood dwellings of the poor remained unscathed. "Yet, for over a week after the big earthquake, my wife said that she made the family sleep outdoors fearing that another would strike at night," he said. His wife declared that she was coming to Delhi with the children, because the village was just not safe anymore.

I asked him if his village had seen a lot of death and destruction this time. "Thankfully, no," he replied. "Other than a couple of minor injuries caused by house collapse, not a lot." It sounded scary enough, but the paranoia the latest earthquake had created in his village seemed slightly out of proportion. Why, I asked, were people in his village panicking so much? "The jolts they experienced during the April earthquake were immense, way more than what we experienced here in Delhi," he said. People in the village were deeply shaken in every sense. And when they saw the cracked school building and the handful of collapsed homes, they were even more scared. "Most of them have internet on their phones, and when they read reports that there could be more, that the Himalayas were a disaster waiting to happen, my family, too, began to fear like everyone else that if there was a bigger quake than what they'd experienced, it could destroy their village," he recounted. Every evening in the centre of the village, his children would sit with their friends, swapping tall tales of natural disasters. The collective fear psychosis was exacerbated by the aftershocks. "Even though they were relatively mild, my family, along with the other villagers were convinced that something was not right deep under the earth," he said.

The effects of the quake were now being felt below as well as above the ground. For years, he said, his wife and young sons had been pestering him to let them live with him in the city. "Now these earthquakes have given them a good reason," he said. However, he'd been resisting the idea, as he realised how impractical it would be to support them on his painter's salary - about Rs 8,000 to 10,000 a month. "They only see the opportunities that Delhi offers, but don't realise how expensive living here is..." he said gloomily.

I asked him where he lived. In a multi-storeyed tenement in Sangam Vihar, he said. "The landlord has cleverly managed to build two floors above his own jhuggi and I'm renting a room on the top," he said. "Do you know that Delhi is situated over at least three active seismic faults? If there is a big earthquake here, I'm afraid that tenements like yours will be the first to collapse," I told him. He looked worried and then smiled, "Let me tell my wife and boys this, maybe this will stall them."