Parmeshwar Devkota

Saila Tamang, a snack shopkeeper near Rudramati Chowk, was popular among his colleagues, friends and customers because of his hoarse voice and his remarks on politicians, people and contemporary issues. He was popularly known as Sanldai among them. We, the inhabitants around his hotel, used to laugh at his conservation with his customers in his stall.
One bad Saturday at noon, Sanldai made a loudest possible hoarse shouting mixed with one or two swearing words to his meek wife and ran to the bank of the Rudramati River, carrying her. We could hear his shrill voice clearly, and in no time all of us followed him wailing and crying. A loud noise of shuttering and cacophony echoed in Kapan.
Some women, holding their kids on the lap and others handling them started screaming and running on the streets without a specific place to go, as if they had become directionless. As we arrived at an open space on the bank of the Rudramati, we felt relieved.
After a minute or so, we heard a loud bang of sound. Immediately after the first sound, we heard the second one. We were fearful that those might be the sounds of our houses collapsing. We tried to call our loved ones who were out at that time, but the cell-phone did not work. After some times, some people started posting and sharing floods of news. Some were true, but a majority were false. A fake news item that I will never forget was that Narayanghat Bazaar came to the ground. Another news about the Dharahara collapse killing unspecified number of people, which turned out to be true.
At that time, as this pen pusher touched on the mother earth, shivering heavily like a big fish does before dying. I thought that the end of the world had finally come. We did not get water to drink, food to eat and place to sleep in. We feared being near the houses. We ran away thinking that they are time bombs ready to explode, so did not go near any house.
The next day, the news of people dying in the 7.8 magnitude earthquake having the epicentre at Barpak in Gorkha started pouring in. The death and devastation were shocking. The government disclosed that 9,000 people got killed, 250 people went missing and about 22,000 people got serious injuries in the quake and aftershock on May 12. Though the quake was smaller in comparison to that of 1934, but deaths and damage it did was big.
Earthquakes of that magnitude can kill people in thousands. To my surprise, countries having strong technological knowhow and scientists are not searching for early warning technologies. Russia, China, Britain, the USA and India manufactured the effective vaccines for COVID-19, and even comparatively weaker countries, excluding aforementioned, tried their best to produce same.
But, neither the resourceful countries nor the scientifically innovative ones are trying to invent an early warning system against earthquake. My earnest request to the scientists of the world would be that they make either individual or concerted effort to develop the early warning system as soon as possible, so that thousands of lives can be saved every year.