KOZHIKODE

: Aranikkal Azeez walked into what was once a

classroom

at govt vocational higher secondary school in

Meppadi

– 16km from

Mundakkai

, a town uphill where a gushing wall of water, mud and stones buried all in its path early Monday. The room, typically filled with the chatter of students, had transformed into a temporary morgue. A line of freezers held the bodies of those claimed by the catastrophic landslide.

Azeez’s gaze fixed on the body of a woman inside one of these freezers.
Overwhelmed with sorrow, he cried out: “What misfortune. I can’t identify my daughter. We cannot confirm we got her.”

Relatives

gently then led him out of the room, his steps unsteady.
Outside, Azeez’s head swooned, and he was helped to a bench in another building where he lay down, exhausted by the anguish. His brothers stood nearby and said they were 80% sure the body marked as number 75, found 25km away in Chaliyar river, was that of Azeez’s daughter Shabna.
Azeez doubted that Shabna and his other missing family members would have been washed all the way to Chaliyar. By Wednesday night,

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teams had found 52 bodies from Chaliyar and as many as 84 body parts, making identification even more challenging. A body identified by one family was claimed by another, leading to its return to the freezer Wednesday. Azeez’s distress was palpable, echoing the collective grief of a community in mourning in Kerala’s Wayanad district.