For the last few days, Thresia has been walking to her house in Idukki district’s Upputhara at 5 am along with her four children to cook food, pack it and return to the anganwadi where they are staying. Her children are 13, 11, six and the youngest is 18 months old. Her husband Suresh, a daily wage worker, cannot miss even a day’s work as he has to feed his family and provide treatment for the eldest child who has a few disabilities. The reason Thresia and Suresh have been staying at the anganwadi with their parents and children for the last few days is strange – stones falling on their house for the last one month.
It all started on July 2. “Stones, small to medium ones, have started raining down on our roof. Day and night it happens, there is no particular time. It lasts for 15 to 30 minutes. Our roof got damaged,” Suresh said. Some parts of their house were damaged and their 6-year-old son was injured after a stone fell on him. Thresia’s parents, Selvaraj and Mary, who live nearby are also facing a similar problem.
Both the families live on 5 cents of land in the first ward of Upputhara panchayat in tiny houses consisting of three rooms, including a kitchen. There are no proper doors or window panes, so the stones falling on the roof scatter inside their rooms and kitchen.
Initially the family suspected someone was deliberately harassing them, so they approached the police. “I informed the police initially, but they didn’t come to investigate even after two weeks. The stones kept falling and we were all scared. A person who lives nearby said the stones are rising from the ground and falling on top of the house. We also saw the stones swirling in the air. We had no clue what to do,” Suresh said.
Gradually, other residents also started believing the family as they saw the stones falling and could not determine where they were coming from.
“I informed the Geology Department, and officials from Thodupuzha visited the site. They could not find any scientific reason behind this. The family claims that the stones rise from the ground, swirl in the air and then fall on their roof. Geologists said that if it was a sign of warning before a landslide, there would have been some mud or soil along with the stones. They said it was very unlikely for stones alone to fall,” Upputhara panchayat president James Jacob told TNM.
But he admitted it was true that the stones were falling. “Many have seen it happening, but we have no clue about the reason behind it. Also, we don’t think the stones are coming from the ground,” he added. After officials visited the family, they were shifted to a nearby anganwadi.
“To cook food for the family, we have to go home. Also, as my father and husband go for work, somebody needs to be at home if officials come to visit. The anganwadi is far from our house and every morning I walk there with our children. What else to do? We haven’t experienced anything like this before, we were all living there so peacefully,” Thresia said.