Over a week after Cyclone Amphan devastated large swathes of East Midnapore, Santipada Das, 73, sat forlorn at his residence in Howrah’s Santragachhi having lost his native home to the nature’s fury.
The septuagenarian, who was born in Khejuri, rued how he could not visit his childhood home for one last time before it was “flattened” on May 20.
“The house made of mud was more than 70-years-old and I grew up there with my parents and two brothers. Although my parents and brothers died and I live in Howrah, I could never think of selling it because I cannot forget the smell of the earth there,” Das said, sitting alongside his wife Malarani, 66, whose poor health has kept him from travelling frequently to Khejuri over the last few years.
“Although I am sitting at home (in Howrah) now, I feel like I have been left homeless,” he added. Das had moved to Howrah in 1996 as he worked as a cashier in a bank from where he retired in 2008.
The two-storey mud and asbestos home in Khejuri’s Kulbarigram had four rooms, a kitchen and a toilet — all of which are a heap of rubble after the cyclone .
The house had faced the wrath of a cyclone before also. In 2009, Cyclone Aila had wiped out two rooms as it had flattened the extended portion of the house.
“What are left now are one wall and two pillars,” said Das, whose fondest memories of the home, other than his own childhood, is of taking his daughters there for weekend stays when they were children. Both of them are settled in Singapore and Noida now.
“I made it a point to visit Khejuri during Durga Puja because my in-laws live at Bhagabpur which is nearby. It is still hard to believe that my father’s childhood home is gone. It meant a lot to him,” said Santipada’s elder daughter Moumita Patra, who is settled in Noida.
Cyclone Aila had damaged the extended portion of the house, but what happened last week was “not comparable”, said Das who has only seen photographs of the ancestral home’s ruins. .
“Nearly 2,000 homes in Khejuri were destroyed completely. We are aware so many people like Santipada had their ancestral homes here. Even if the state disburses funds for reconstruction, what they have lost can never be restored,” said local MLA Ranjit Mandal.