vuppena

It was the year 1864, 1 st november,a DEEPAVALI day ,the season, when storms were usual for bandar....my great grandfather was supposed to be two year old at that time.


A storm was brewing in the air,and rain WAS coming in drizzles and spurts from 12"o" clock in the noon,throughout the day...A reading of RAMAYAN was in progress that evening, at our ancestral home at chinthagunta palem.. Those were the times of oil lamps.. and darkness seemed to have fallen earlier than usual because of rain...A sparse gathering was present listening to the celestial legend,...when someone noticed hot water flushing in through the THOOMULU -(drainage pipes)...AND SUDDENLY ALL THE HELL WAS LET LOOSE..The darkest situation, a nightmare, we can imagine only in our troubled slumbers.


For, in that darkness of the night,a giant tidal wave came in,13 feet in height ,80 miles in lenghth,and nine miles wide (as the crow flies,the sea is not more than three or four km,to the town) and enveloped poor bandar"s hapless inhabitants in a deadly hug,..killing more than thirty thousand people, almost half of the population, in it"s wake...instantly,..and silently and receded....Like a cat that ate the birdlings in the nest and caught licking it"s whiskers with an innocent face.It was not a Tsunami....A tidal wave..A sea surge..

Some of the bodies had been washed away,,..some were found later entangled in the Palmyra's and coconut tops,..some were left lying wherever they were..Fortunately some survived ,hanging onto those very tree tops.. The other survivors had to go through the trauma of losing their loved ones,witnessing the horrendous scenes, and the travails of returning to the daily routines.Why even drinking water would be scarce in this sort of flooding and amounts to be the first priority.Here the yeoman service rendered by the then dt. collector,hornhill were to be lauded...He was said to have worked so tirelessly,that a monument was erected in his memory a he center of town square.


For three days,the authorities were involved in the sole task of cremating, burying the putrefying bodies whichever way they could as the fears of epidemics loomed large.No mean task considering the poor facilities they had at that time. No motor transport,no electricity,no wireless,....Meanwhile some unscrupulous elements scavenged on the bodies,lifting ornaments off and plundering the ravaged houses...in fact,my grandfather used to joke that some people became rich overnight after the cyclone.


The wave was supposed to have stopped at the RAMALAYAM, near the chinthaguntapalem bridge ,,at whose foot was situated our own ancestral house,just by the side of the BANDAR KALAVA (CANAL). suri babai,who always was given to a bit of hyperbola,used to say that our house, and RAJAVARI MEDA ,were the only places to have escaped flooding.Ofcource,one has to take his words with a pinch of salt...some houses beyond ramalayam did survive..

With the resilience of a doughty warrior,Bandar soon limped back to normalcy and life DID go on......It is said that GOD does compensate.....For the thirty thousand people who lost their lives ,it now grew up to be a city of 195,000 odd population.During the fifties and sixties it became an acclaimed center for education,with reputed colleges...For sometime there used to be a law college too though it went out of existence later....It was active with the freedom movement, contributed stalwarts like SRI BHOGARAJU PATTABHI SEETHARAMAYYA GARU, who officiated as the president of INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS,..SRI PINGALI VENKAYYA who modelled our national flag to the national scene.....It was the place where the first telugu news paper KRISHNA PATHRIKA got published,and was the hub of many renowned poets ,writers journalists, and the birthplace of the great cricketing legend C.K.NAYUDU....


yet , .still..there is something.....something elusive, that , denied it the importance,..the development...it rightly deserved.one could say it did not quite recover from the storm. At least that is how it"s residents feel....The reason could have had it"s root in the 1864 tidal wave...for,no major industries or big businesses came forward to invest there after the tragedy..In one sense the after effects of the cyclone had been indirect and difficult to live down.. An instance of this was...

The British government had their treasury at MACHILIPATNAM, at the time of the great storm...when the waters were flooding and engulfing the vaults,it was said the loyal workers of the offices valiantly hung onto the iron safes to prevent them from being washed away...The officers-in charge were so impressed,and moved by this show of loyalty,they sent a report to the authorities complimenting the employees,and recommended shifting the main offices to bandar.

In return, they received an order to shift the treasury itself.