Amid Wayanad's devastation, couple reaffirms vows at landslide graveyard

Puthumala (Wayanad): It is said marriages are made in heaven but this is a love story where vows have been kept and reaffirmed in a graveyard meant for the victims of the Wayanad landslides disaster.

Shruthi S, a resident of Chooralmala village, got engaged to 27-year-old Jenson on June 2 after a 10-year long courtship.

Tragedy struck the 24-year-old accountant, who works at a hospital in nearby Kozhikode district, when she received the news that her family of nine, including her parents and younger sister, had been killed in the devastating landslides that struck the scenic Wayanad district of Kerala on July 30.

Just a day before the tragedy marks a month, Shruthi and Jenson visited the Puthumala graveyard on Thursday. This graveyard was created by the district administration on a land donated by a local tea estate to bury the identified and unidentified bodies and body parts of the landslides victims.

Shruthi had already cremated her father and younger sister but there was no news about her mother. We just got to know that her mother was buried here after a DNA match came back positive, Jenson told PTI.

She has come to pay her last respects to her mother, who was laid to rest here by the volunteers, Jenson said, pointing to the grave where a number was inscribed on a tombstone as a sign of the unclaimed body.

"We have reaffirmed our commitment to be together... nothing will change my love for her," he added.

The graveyard, according to Wayanad district officials, has 47 bodies and 209 body parts buried there. Once a DNA match results in identification, the family members are informed so that they can find closure.

Jenson, who works for a car cleaning company in the district, says he promised himself that he would never leave the side of her fiancée, who is also his school-time friend, when she told him about the tragedy that had befallen her family.

He has not returned to work since the tragedy struck Shruthi's family and several others in the area a month ago.

"We liked each other since our school days. Our engagement took place with both the families coming together happily despite this being an inter-religion alliance," Jenson, a Christian, says as he rests his chin on Shruthi's head while she prayed for her mother's peace with folded hands.

There was never a moment that he left me alone since the landslides occurred. He has been with me to the hospitals, mortuary and even when I met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a camp here when he came visiting, Shruthi, a Hindu, says, trying hard to control her tears and the lump in her throat.

The couple, initially set to tie the knot in December with fanfare, will now have a simple court-registered marriage next month. Shruthi lost about Rs 4 lakh in cash and around 15 'sovereigns' of gold along with her home that was washed away in the massive silt and gravel-laden waters triggered by the landslides that Kerala -- an unprecedented disaster in Kerala's history, the couple said.

Locals say that, according to local rituals, a wedding can only take place after 41 days of mourning. They also explained that one sovereign of gold there equals about 8 grams of the yellow metal. "My parents and my sister would have been so happy to see my wedding... I don't know why this happened to me... ," Shruthi says, gripping Jenson's hands.

Her parents worked as daily-wage earners at the local tea plantation, while her sister was in her second year of college. My home got washed away in the landslides, she says, grimacing with pain as she recounts that they had a housewarming for their newly built home just about a month before the tragedy.

The couple slowly walked out of the graveyard, holding each other's hands, with Shruthi murmuring to Jenson that they have to come back soon to replace the tombstone bearing a number with her mother's name, Sabitha. The landslides have claimed more than 200 lives and an equal number of body parts have been found at the disaster-hit sites of three villages and even from the Chaliyar river that runs along the district, about 470 kilometres from the capital, Thiruvananthapuram.