Almost a hundred thousand people died, tens of thousands were injured or maimed and millions left desolate and homeless by the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that hit Pakistan on October 8, 2005. But all of the people who lived through the terror and survived the aftermath are children of the instant that got away…
It struck without warning: a behemoth that roared below the earth’s surface and created havoc above it.
When the first jolt hit Margalla Towers, an upscale apartment building in Islamabad, I was asleep in my 8th floor apartment. As soon as I was shaken awake by the intensity of that first subterranean blow, I lay motionless, willing it to stop, as I’d done on innumerable occasions before in the past three years when an earthquake, with its epicenter hundreds of miles away, had sent spine-tingling tremors through this building. Then, the building would shake for about half-a-minute, household objects would perform a brief St. Vitus’ dance, I would hear some of my more enterprising neighbours run out of the building at a fairly rapid rate – but I would stay put. After all, if the building was to collapse, how far down from the 8th floor would I manage to get?
This time, however, there was no mere tremor. After the first jolt that woke me up, a second one followed, then a third. Each jolt seemed stronger in intensity than the last and I sat up in bed, clutching a pillow and still willing it to stop.
It didn’t. And the ten-storeyed building swayed alarmingly with each ripple that rushed beneath the earth’s surface: I heard books fall out of their shelves in my lounge, heard the sound of crockery come crashing down in the kitchen, saw a large floor lamp in my room fly and then tumble over, even as I was thrown, myself, from one side of the bed to the other.
All this happened in seconds. But the earthquake didn’t stop, even as I clung on to whatever purchase I could find on my bed, just so I could retain my balance. It didn’t stop, even after I heard the distinct sound of masonry cracking and looked up to see huge cracks appear on a wall to my left in front of my startled eyes. The jolts didn’t stop as the terrifying sound of the walls cracking continued and bits of debris began to fall from the roof.
Then, I heard a new sound: a deafening, roaring sound that engulfed my hearing. The earthquake continued, the walls continued to crack, the roof determinedly held together but shed debris as if it was jettisoning ballast but it was that gigantic roar, that indescribable, terrifying, unidentifiable roar that consumed all the other sounds.
Until the screams started. I’d heard people scream as they ran out of the building last year when an earthquake, measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale and with its epicenter about 350 miles north-west of Islamabad, seemed to go on interminably. But that one stopped after an excruciatingly long 45 seconds and, even then, it was more of the shake-and-rattle variety.
But the screams I heard this time were different: these began and ended, then began and ended; the ending, each time, was abrupt, as if a switch had been thrown to cut the sound off midway. They echoed down the long corridors of the apartment complex and added to the sense of terror I felt.
The jolts became harder still and the threnody of sound was now added to by a different set of screams – and these came in through my bedroom window. The building now didn’t sway as much as it swung from side to side, tilting over to one side, then snapping back to the other. There was no chance of moving: all I could do was clutch on to my pillow and pray that the roof didn’t cave in.
Then, it happened: the most powerful jolt of all and I felt the building go. It tilted over to an impossible 45 degrees at least, but, in that instant that I thought all was lost, it snapped back to an upright position and began to shake in a more customary earthquake mode.
That is when I moved and, with considerable alacrity, given the inertia of the previous, panic-strewn few minutes, I made my way to the door.
But the building still shook and vibrated on its foundations so progress was slow. When I opened the door to the corridor outside, I was greeted by a cloud of dust that wafted its silent way around the corner of the passage that led to the back of the building. A water pipe had burst but it lay out of my line of vision around the corner; and I wasn’t interested in investigating: all I wanted was to get on the stairs in front of me and go down as fast as possible. As I approached the staircase, I saw a family of foreigners – the husband, a UN official, carrying his little daughter; the wife clutching on to her man’s T-shirt – come thundering down the stairs from the 10th floor. More people followed and I joined them, but chose to walk because water from several burst pipes was already cascading down the steps.
All the way down, the stairs were strewn with debris and the building still shook, which meant that more continued to fall. On the 5th floor, I met a young woman whom I’d exchanged greetings with, briefly, on a few occasions and carried her little daughter down: the child trembled with the fear I felt too, but couldn’t show.
The building hadn’t stopped shaking when we made it to the ground floor and out into the open. I saw a few familiar faces and waved at someone in relief, but she didn’t acknowledge and, instead, looked toward the back of the building. That was when I noticed that everyone’s face had been drained of colour: they stood ashen-faced, some in shock, some in horror, staring at a point behind my shoulder.
I turned to look and, I’m positive, the blood drained from my face as well. Where I should have seen ten stories of building, where I was used to seeing ten stories of Islamabad’s first luxury apartment building, lay a pile of rubble extending, perhaps, 30 feet high. Margalla Towers was named so because it consisted of five blocks, each ten stories high and linked together by those cavernous corridors where any sound made at one end of the building would echo through the entire five blocks. And, at first glance, it looked as if the entire three blocks at the back had collapsed, leaving only the two at the front, where I lived, standing.
There was no feeling of relief that I had survived. I couldn’t see that emotion on any face around me: everyone stood silently, not comprehending. I saw my neighbour, Abbas, come running away from the rubble – he had been amongst the first to come down, helping his grandmother down the stairs and shielding her from the falling concrete – where he had been trying to extract a young boy with his body trapped from the midriff down by half an apartment block, it seemed. I saw Nadia, my friend Omar’s wife, standing barefoot with her toddler in her arms and her three-year old clutching at her shirt. I saw Ambreen, a child psychologist, who lived on my floor with her family, looking as shocked as I was. Every one of the residents of the first two towers, all of whom had made it down safely, stood silently. Until an old lady, overcome finally by emotion, fainted in a family member’s arms and tears welled up in almost every eye.
And I understood, then, that the screams I’d heard from inside the building were of those people who died as the building collapsed, that the deafening roar I’d heard was the sound of the back half of the building collapsing and that the last set of screams I’d heard was from the people who had made it outside and watched the building fall.
After that, nothing made any sense. A police car made its ponderous way into the complex, drove right up to the rubble, followed by a crowd of eager onlookers from the vicinity, and reversed quickly away when the first strong aftershock hit. All Margalla Towers residents were told to step out on to the main road – where they were joined by thousands of people come to see the collapsed building as well as a steady stream of traffic since everyone else in Islamabad wanted to see it too.
More than a month later, it still doesn’t make any sense. For those first few hours after the earthquake, it seemed as if everything had happened in Margalla Towers with every television news channel focusing on the Islamabad apartment complex – despite the immediate announcements by various geological organizations that the epicenter had been estimated to be roughly 100 miles north-east of Islamabad, which landed it squarely in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. If the impact had been felt so strongly in Islamabad, what could have happened there, I thought.
Last year, while I was working for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), I traveled to Balakot, a bustling little town in the hills about an hour’s drive from Islamabad, and beyond to a community known as Battagram, to report on the damage caused by an earthquake which had its epicenter some 200 miles away, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Even then, the damage was extensive: houses had collapsed and the locals had been reduced to living in relatively less damaged houses or, simply, out in the open because they feared another earthquake would cause their remaining houses to fall as well. What must have happened there, I thought?
The next day, Dawn, a leading daily English broadsheet, summed it up with its headline: “Muzaffarabad turns into a Ghost town,” it said. And Balakot just didn’t exist any more.
Since then, it has been a tale of daily horror. For the first two weeks, it was damage assessment because the scale of the destruction was, and remains, colossal. The UN was moved enough to issue a “flash appeal”, meaning an urgent call for monetary help from the world’s better off nations to help cope with the disaster, as it described this earthquake as a bigger humanitarian disaster than last December’s tsunami.
The statistics, by themselves, are overwhelming: close to 80,000 dead with thousands more unaccounted for; tens of thousands injured and over four million people left homeless, without any shelter or means for food and a cruel, unrelenting winter to contend with.
Wounds like these, wounds that define an entire people spiritually, take a long time to heal. No amount of money, rehabilitation programmes, or earthquake-resistant housing will undo the damage – but what these things will do is provide these people with sustenance and medical assistance and, most importantly, hope for the future.
Because they are the children of the instant that got away from the fury of the earth. Others, like me, saw that instant, too – when the roof seemed about to cave in, but didn’t – and were lucky to come out of it unscathed. Because when it needs to go on, life always finds a way.
adnansipra 