Meppadi (Wayanad): Shaija Baby (48) is back to being busy, taking stock of her community, and going from house to house, distributing chlorine tablets and bleaching powders to disinfect wells overrun by floodwater. As an accredited social health activist (ASHA) attached to Meppadi Family Health Centre (FHC) for 15 years, Shaija is used to the hectic schedule.

But she had an overwhelming 10 days since July 30, when the gigantic boulders and uprooted wild trees from the Vellarimala hills razed the houses and lives in Mundakkai and Chooralmala villages. Shaija single-handedly helped find closure to around a hundred families by identifying the bodies, dismembered and mutilated by the landslides. "There was not a day I reached home before midnight," said Shaija, herself a victim of multiple landslides. Often nights are extended till 2.30 am. The police conducting the inquest on bodies brought from Mundakkai, Chooralmala and Chaliyar river in faraway Nilambur regularly sought her help to identify the deceased.

Shaija recalled calling a family at the relief camp after seeing the body of a woman who had recently gotten a second ear piercing. "As soon as I saw the second stud, I knew it was her," said Shaija.

In most cases, her intimate knowledge of her people helped her identify bodies which even relatives could not. She relied on their jewellery, inscriptions on the jewellery, body piercings, nail polish and the shape of beards.

Shortly after the landslide, the body of an elderly man was retrieved from the Chaliyar River and ambulanced to the FHC. The lower part of the body was missing, and the face was severely damaged above the lips. Shaija immediately recognised the man, aged around 78 years. "We were very close. He always kept his beard trimmed and had recently returned from the Hajj (pilgrimage). I identified him by his lips and beard," said Shaija.

She called the man's son and told him the deceased was his father. "I know," she told him. The son was not too convinced. "He asked me to check for a lump on his elbow. When I checked, there was a lump," she said.

Shaija said she always had an intimate relationship with the two villages; Chooralmala where she was born and grew up and Mundakkai where she was married to. When her husband died in the UAE in 2005, she was left to fend for herself with two toddlers. Residents of Mundakkai embraced her family and took care of her.

In 2006, she became a leader (mate) of her neighbourhood group working under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). In 2009, she became an ASHA. In 2015, she was elected as a member of the Meppadi grama panchayat from Mundakkai ward and became the vice-president of the local body. "The people of Chooralmala and Mundakkai are not my neighbours. They are my family," Shaija said. "I am not a person who will pass by people by saying a hasty hi. I talk to them and enquire about their well-being," she said.

In 2019, when the landslide at nearby Puthumala destroyed around 100 houses and killed 17 persons, she moved to Meppadi town, 15km from Mundakkai. But People's Foundation, an NGO in Kozhikode, was building a two-bedroom house for her on School Road at Chooralmala, next to her ancestral house.

The multiple landslides triggered at Vellarimala hill razed her house under construction and also her ancestral house. The construction of her house was complete till the lintel, the concrete beam above windows and doors.

The ancestral house had her father Krishnankutty (73), who was paralysed after a stroke on May 3, her mother Girija, her brother Jayesh and his wife and two children. "After the first landslide around 1.30 am, Jayesh carried my father through the hills and the rest of the family followed him," said Shaija. "They avoided the School Road and so all of them are alive today," she said.

As soon as she came to know of the landslide in the night, she, as an ASHA, alerted the Family Health Centre. "When I learned that the debris flow reached Chooralmala, I knew it would be a big disaster. Puthumala would be nothing compared to it because I know how many people lived in these two places. Their faces and names crossed my mind," she said. Of the 200 houses in Chooralmala, 154 were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, she said. In 2020, there were 357 houses in Mundakkai. Most of them were also gone. "In any case, no one can live in these two villages," she said. In Chooralmala, she could not find a trace of her three-bedroom ancestral house. "We had a big well with a parapet around it. I could not find the position of the well," she said.

Shaila said all the residents kept aside their loss and started working to help the survivors. Shaija took it upon herself to identify the dead. "A 14-year-old girl could not recognise her mother. I identified her by her wedding ring. Mercifully, the bodies of most of the children were not disfigured in the landslide," she said.

Shaija said standing at the morgue for hours and days identifying people she held close to was emotionally taxing. "I had to do it. We could accept what hit us in the night but we cannot accept that those who left us went unidentified," she said.