Remembrance · History · 9 min read

The Morning the Bridge Fell: Remembering the Fourteen Children of Munnar, 7 November 1984

A helicopter circled over the High Range Club, and the children of the Government High School ran to see it. Within minutes, the old bridge over the Muthirapuzha had given way. A remembrance of the fourteen who never came home, and of the town that has never forgotten them.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Mornings in Old Munnar in early November begin slowly. Mist lies along the river until the sun is well above the hills, and the tea bushes on the slopes are wet and dark. On the morning of Wednesday, 7 November 1984, the children of the Government High School in Old Munnar came to school as they did every day, down the estate roads and across the river, in their uniforms, with their tiffin boxes and their books.

It was an uneasy time in the country. A week earlier, on 31 October, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated in New Delhi. The radio still spoke of mourning, of violence in the cities far to the north, of a nation holding its breath. But Munnar was a long way from Delhi, and children are children. In the hills, life had begun to return to its ordinary rhythm of bells and lessons and the long walk home.

A sound in the sky

Some time in the late morning, during the school interval, a sound came over the hills that few of the children had ever heard so close: the beating of a helicopter's blades. The machine circled above the town and dropped towards the playing ground of the High Range Club, the old planters' club across the Muthirapuzha river.

In Munnar it is remembered that the helicopter had come to carry a relative of the Union Minister Buta Singh. To the children, none of that mattered. Most of them had only ever seen helicopters as specks in the sky or pictures in a book. Here was one landing almost in front of them.

They ran. Hundreds of them streamed out of the school and down towards the river, laughing and shouting, pulling each other by the hand. Between them and the club ground lay the river, and over the river ran the footbridge, an old suspension bridge first slung across the water in the planters' days to link Old Munnar with the Chokkanad estate. Later, concrete slabs had been laid on its steel girders, and the girders had grown old.

The children crowded onto it, more and more of them, to get a better view of the helicopter settling on the grass. And as they pressed towards one side, the old bridge gave way.

The river

There was a sound like a tearing, and then the water. Children who had been leaning over the railing a moment before were in the river, among broken slabs and twisted metal.

The people of Munnar ran to the river and went into the water after the children. Reports say that local people pulled around two hundred children from the river and the wreckage. Without them, the toll would have been far greater.

But not everyone could be saved. When the searching was done, fourteen children had drowned.

The fourteen

Their names speak of Munnar's many communities, and many of them were girls. Their classmates and families still say their names, and they are recorded here so that they are not forgotten:

• A. Rajalakshmi
• S. Jayalakshmi
• M. Vijaya
• N. Mariyammal
• R. Thankamala
• P. Saraswathi
• Kalyanakumar
• Sundari
• P. Rabiya
• T. Jensy
• T. Shibu
• P. Muthumari
• S. Kalayammal
• C. Rajendran

Each name was a whole world. Somewhere that evening there was a plate of rice left uneaten, a school bag that would not be unpacked, a younger brother waiting at the line-house door for a sister who would not come up the path. A mother who had plaited her daughter's hair that morning would never plait it again. A father who had walked his son to the gate would carry him home.

The silence that followed

Munnar is a small place, and in 1984 it was smaller still. Nobody was untouched. The children who drowned were the classmates, cousins, neighbours and friends of families across the town, and in the days that followed a heavy silence settled over Munnar.

There is a particular cruelty in the way the tragedy happened. Nothing the children did was wrong. They did what any child would do: they heard something wonderful and ran to see it. Their curiosity, the very thing that makes childhood what it is, led them onto an old bridge that could not bear them. The helicopter came and went. For the families left behind, the moment never ended.

Those who lived through that day speak of it in quiet voices even now. One local man who rushed to the river that morning told a newspaper on the thirty-seventh anniversary that the numbness of that day had never left him. Parents grew old carrying the weight of it. Brothers and sisters grew up in the shadow of an empty place at the table. The classmates who survived went on to finish school, marry, raise children and grandchildren of their own, and still they have not forgotten the friends who stopped at fourteen.

Bangles, bindis and jasmine

Every year on 7 November, at around half past ten in the morning, the hour the bridge fell, people gather at the memorial stone near the High Range Club in Old Munnar. They are the surviving classmates, now in their fifties, relatives of the children, teachers, and the alumni of the school, now the Government Vocational Higher Secondary School.

They bring flowers and say prayers. And the classmates bring something else: glass bangles, bindis, ribbons, jasmine for the hair, and sweets. They are the small treasures of girlhood, the things a schoolgirl in Munnar might have loved in 1984, offered each year to friends who never grew old enough to outgrow them.

The bridge itself was rebuilt in 1989. In the great flood of August 2018, the Muthirapuzha rose again and swept the new bridge away. But the memory has outlasted the bridges.

Remembering

Tragedies like the one at Munnar rarely reach the history books. They were reported briefly at the time and overshadowed by the larger events of a terrible year for India. They live on in families and in small towns, in the stories told at kitchen tables and the names read out at a stone beside a river.

The fourteen children of Munnar should be remembered for how they lived, not only for how they died: as children who ran laughing towards something wonderful on a bright November morning. If you pass the High Range Club in Old Munnar, pause for a moment at the river. Remember Rajalakshmi and Jayalakshmi, Vijaya and Mariyammal, Thankamala and Saraswathi, Kalyanakumar and Sundari, Rabiya and Jensy, Shibu and Muthumari, Kalayammal and Rajendran. And remember the town that has kept their names alive for more than forty years.