S Shruthi, who lost nine members of her family in the devastating Wayanad landslide of 2024 and then lost her fiance in a road accident weeks later, began a new chapter in her life on Saturday as she married Sandeep at the Guruvayur Sree Krishna Temple in Kerala.
The wedding, held early in the morning in the presence of close relatives, friends and public representatives, marked a moment of hope for a young woman whose story had become one of the most poignant accounts of loss and resilience to emerge from the disaster.
Shruthi married Sandeep, a native of Mananthavady who works at the Wayanad Collectorate, at the famous temple town of Guruvayur. The ceremony was attended by her surviving relatives and friends, and by CPI MLA and former minister K Rajan, who had coordinated the rehabilitation efforts following the Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslide and who stood in as a guardian for Shruthi during the wedding rituals.
The couple had become engaged in July this year, and Shruthi expressed happiness about their future together.
For those who have followed Shruthi's story, the wedding is a deeply moving turn in a life that has been marked by one tragedy after another. On 30 July 2024, in the early hours of the morning, massive landslides struck the villages of Chooralmala and Mundakkai in Wayanad district, burying homes, schools and entire families under tonnes of mud and debris. More than 400 people were killed in the disaster, one of the worst natural calamities Kerala has witnessed in recent years.
Shruthi, then 24 years old, lost nine members of her family in a single night, including her parents Sivanna and Sabitha, her younger sister Sreya, her paternal uncle and aunt Siddaraj and Divya, their son Lakshvath Krishna, her maternal grandmother and two maternal uncles.
Her father had saved four and a half lakh rupees and 15 sovereigns of gold for her wedding. That money, carefully set aside over years, was buried deep in the earth along with the family home, lost forever in the landslide. Shruthi herself survived, but she was left without the people who had shaped her life and without the home in which she had grown up.
In the days after the disaster, she clung to her fiance Jenson for support. The two had been in love for nearly ten years and had been engaged just a month before the landslide. They had planned to marry in September 2024, in a simple ceremony, once the post-funeral rituals for her family were completed.
Jenson stood by her through the worst days, accompanying her to the Puthumala graveyard where her family members were laid to rest, and helping her find the strength to carry on.
Then tragedy struck a second time. On 13 September 2024, just weeks after the landslide, Jenson was killed in a road accident near Vellaramkunnu in Wayanad. The van he was driving collided with a private bus, and he died of head injuries despite being rushed to a private hospital in Meppadi.
Shruthi, who was travelling with him, survived with severe injuries to both her legs, which required the placement of an external fixator, a metal frame designed to hold the bones in place while they healed.
The double loss left Shruthi bereft. She had lost her family to the landslide and then the man she had planned to build a new life with, all within six weeks. In interviews afterwards, she spoke of how the tragedies had changed her, saying she no longer knew how to laugh and that she feared more tragedy would befall her.
Her story, reported widely across Kerala and the rest of India, became a symbol of the human cost of the Wayanad disaster, and of the extraordinary resilience of its survivors.
Slowly, with support from the state government and from those around her, Shruthi began to rebuild her life. She had been working in the accounts department of a private hospital in Kozhikode when the landslide struck. On the instructions of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, she was later appointed as a clerk in the postal section of the revenue department, giving her a stable government job and a measure of security.
She returned to Chooralmala only once after the disaster, on the 41st day, for a memorial ceremony for the victims, and has not gone back since.
It was in the course of her work at the Wayanad Collectorate that she met Sandeep, who also works there. The two grew close, and their engagement in July this year was welcomed by many across Kerala who had followed her story. When news of the wedding spread on Saturday, messages of congratulation poured in from across the state, with people who had prayed for her recovery now celebrating her happiness.
The wedding at Guruvayur holds particular significance. The temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna, is one of the most revered shrines in Kerala, and thousands of devotees visit it every day seeking blessings for new beginnings. For Shruthi, marrying there, in the presence of K Rajan, who took on the role of a father figure and oversaw the rituals, was a way of honouring both her past and her future.
Rajan, who as revenue minister had coordinated the relief and rehabilitation work in the landslide-hit region during the previous government, has remained a constant presence in the lives of the survivors.
The story of the Wayanad landslides is one of staggering loss. The twin landslides that struck in the early hours of 30 July 2024 wiped out entire neighbourhoods in Chooralmala, Mundakkai and Vellarimala, destroying the Vellaramala school where Shruthi had studied for ten years and killing many of its children.
Rescue and relief operations continued for weeks, and the rehabilitation of survivors, including the construction of new homes in safer locations, remains an ongoing effort more than two years later.
Shruthi's wedding does not erase that loss, and those who know her say she carries the memory of her family and of Jenson with her still. But it does mark a moment when a young woman who lost almost everything has chosen to look forward. Her decision to marry, to build a home and a family of her own, is an act of quiet courage, and it has resonated far beyond Wayanad.
As she begins her married life with Sandeep, Shruthi carries with her the goodwill of a state that watched her endure the unendurable. Her journey from the debris of Chooralmala to the wedding hall at Guruvayur is a reminder that even after the worst disasters, life finds a way to begin again.
(Reporting based on Onmanorama, Deccan Herald and The South First.)