Rising Waters and Fear of a Great Flood

Rising waters that we are now seeing after three days of heavy rain falling all across the country, stir fears of a Noah-type flood, of isolation, separation, and deprivation.

Watching the waters rise outside the house, I remember an incident from the 1960s when the newspapers papers reported about groups of people in Europe and the US,  who believed that the world would end on a particular day. The reports said that the doomsday believers had begun to retreat to hilltops because they thought the end would come through another great flood. 

At that time, my father was working in Cameron Highlands working on the country's first hydroelectric project. My mother was away visiting her ailing mother in India and would be separated from us for several weeks. My siblings and I who were all still in school were looked after by a friend. 

I remember my father's concerns about leaving us after he had read the doomsday stories.  My father was a man who was truly larger than life. Nothing bothered him that he could not handle, worse come to worst, with a broomstick in his hand.  But on that day, before he was about to leave for the highlands, he seemed worried. He called us all together and said that if anything happened, he will send a car to take us to the Highlands. He said we will try and reach our mother by calling relatives in India, but that we may not be able to get her back on time. We were speechless, not so much because of any doomsday fear-we were skeptical about that - but by our father's reaction to the news and his evident fear that the world would end.

The predicted day came and went. The world did not end. All my siblings are still alive. My parents have both died. But every time the waters rise after a heavy rain, I remember that day in the 1960s and seeing a side of my father I had not seen before. Or after. He never spoke about the meeting with us, and we never raised it with him.