When All is Not Lost in the Hurricane Ophelia

My first experience of a natural calamity was in 1978 when most of Trivandrum city’s low-lying areas were drowned in neck deep water. Water rushed into our home too but only at ankle length. Outside our house, lots of mud pots, utensils from houses were seen floating while some people skilfully swam in the muddy waters. Thatched huts and mud walls fall easily as water rushes in. Schools and colleges are closed. Snakes, frogs all sort of reptiles enter the houses. The elderly and the children easily catch infectious diseases and end up in hospital.

The newspapers and the radio will be filled with news of missing people, drowned, damage to houses, buildings and roads. After the 1978 floods, I saw two other such floods hit Kerala and once we (Me and wife Aswathy) narrowly escaped landslide as we were returning from honeymoon in July 1997 in Munnar.

When you are child you watch all these displacement and destruction with ease, but as you grow up each natural calamity creates fear, panic and a feeling of helplessness.  The large-scale destruction in the Mumbai floods a few years ago and recently in Chennai are stark reminders of how weak mankind is against an unexpected natural calamity that can strike any moment in our lives.

As I read Danielle Steel’s Rushing Waters, I got reminded of all the natural disasters I have heard about and seen. In junior college, we had a poem in Hindi by Harvansh Rai Bachan (father of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan)-Need ka nirman phir phir. The central theme is that destruction and construction keep happening in sequence. Rebuilding is an essential part of nature after a disaster.

In Rushing Waters, Danielle Steel peeps into the lives of a few men and women whose lives change for the better after the destruction unleashed by Hurricane Ophelia. Physical losses are inevitable in those living in downtown areas as proximity to rivers and below sea level elevation makes it vulnerable to destruction.

Ellen, an interior designer in London and Charles Williams, a British investment banker travel to New York for business and to visit their family only to get caught in the Hurricane. Ellen could help her mother Grace shift to a shelter while Charles could be with his separated wife and two daughters. 

Apart from creating an atmosphere of anxiety and stress ahead of the Hurricane Ophelia which is experienced by Ellen and Charles in the flight from London itself, the onset of the hurricane, the sudden rush of waters in downtown area, the darkness, strong winds all bring the reader right into the thick of action.

Even as each of the characters face the Hurricane right before them, an inner turmoil is going on in their lives which has to do with their close relationships with spouse, lovers or for those alone, the longing for friendship.

Then the story of the three musketeers of NYU, Anna, Peter, Ben and his black Labrador Mike. Despite, Anna’s request to come to her uptown home, Peter and Ben chose to stay back and finally they were drowned in the rushing waters and loss of Ben caused a trauma that couldn’t be erased so easily for Anna and Peter.

For the ER Doctor Juliette Dubois, fighting to save thousands of lives amid darkness and no electricity, the hurricane also creates an opportunity to find her soulmate.

The different emotions of people-agony, pathos, shock, disappointment, fear in different situations creates an empathy while each victim find a way out of the tragedy only to emerge stronger. As the author notes lives of some people change for the better after a hurricane no matter it may take several months to bring their homes or property back in shape.

It was a chance visit the author’s FB page that made me search for a Danielle Steel book and don’t regret it. Now understand what makes her the favourite of millions of readers worldwide and why they wait eagerly for each new work. . As is evident from the comments posted in her FB page about her latest book The Duchess. She has written over 90 books most of them bestsellers

( Rushing Waters: Danielle Steel, Penguin India, 2016, INR 599 PP 319)