You just had your lunch and you lie down to relax. You are in the fourth floor of a five-storey building. Your five-year-old baby brother smiles at you—you smile back. It is an uneventful overcast afternoon. Suddenly, you feel like something deep down the ground is moving. Something pounds. The movement, it gets stronger. Your body sways with the motion of the building—there is nothing that you can hold on to that could give you stability. The world shakes vigorously.

You hurry under a table, holding your baby brother so hard that he starts crying. You know it is an earthquake and you stop everything you are doing and just stay still, feeling the ground move underneath you, praying, hoping for things to calm down. A certain confusion overcomes—is it the earth that is pounding, or is it just your heart?

You hope it stops but it doesn’t—it only gets stronger. Objects move around you, hangings start shaking. You panic and look around; you don’t know if it is safe for you to get out of the building. The building is still in motion; you can hear the walls shriek. You wonder if the building will crumble and fall and bury you alive.

You get up; there is an urge to find a safer place. Your arms are outspread to your sides—there is balance to maintain, there is support to find and grasp onto. You reposition one arm to cover your head—there is fear of falling objects. But there is a brother to protect too. You scream. You wonder if this is it, if your time has come. You stop in front of a

wall in the room and think: “Is this the end?”

You pray to god for salvation and as you pray, the movement becomes weaker. Now, the pounding of the heart is much stronger than the pounding of the ground. And without a moment’s hesitation, you run. Your brother in your arms, you run like the wind, run like there is no tomorrow—you run for your life. And once you are out, you stop for breath and to look around. You gasp at the fallen walls and the bent poles. You forget everything as tears roll down your eyes, making their way down your cheeks and onto your shirt collar, soaking it.

nnn

I evaded death and lived to talk of it. I experienced first-hand the trauma of living through one of Mother Nature’s deadliest catastrophes. After the quake, the streets were an impression of a war zone. As we walked, the continuous aftershocks were haunting. Shock had overcome and we were devoid of reaction. The ground underneath felt like it was coming undone. Furthermore, the streets had been torn apart in the middle, opening up the earth.

That night was an abomination; more aftershocks were in store for us. I was glad that I survived, but the happiness was not enough to suppress the despair that would consume me in the coming days. So many had lost lives and the news of more death kept on coming. Tears welled up in my eyes when I heard the news of the death toll reach 500—the fact that the number would go up to thousands was incomprehensible to me then.

That night, we spent under the night sky. I laid down on the ground—all my thoughts centred on the events of the day. I had survived but I couldn’t stop the tears. I cried silently under the cold sky—I cried for myself, I cried for us Nepalis.

I woke up the next morning and thanked god for letting me survive the wreckage. I pleaded him to stop all this.

We had been through enough, enough for the rest of our lives.  My grandma had once told me the story of how she had survived the 1990 BS earthquake.

I too had a story to tell now. But along with the story is a constant prayer for a third 1990 to not occur for the future to experience.

Uprety is an A-levels student at Budhanilkantha School