A Nightmare Devouring a Dream

It was not that late on this Sunday morning as usually it is for the school going children on a holiday. Madhavan was peacefully asleep in his tiny bedstead in the small room of their semi-concrete little house, situated in a little fishing hamlet off the coast, about two kilometres from Velanganni near Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu.

His sister Jayachitra appeared even more angelic in her sleep. She carried a smile while sleeping, as if an ever-persistent sweet dream safely blanketed her. It was about 8:30 a.m. Their father, a moderately well-off fisherman from the tiny settlement, had left for fishing in his fibre catamaran. Their mother, not expecting the children to wake up for another hour and half, had left for Velanganni about half an hour ago.

Madhavan’s house, a little semi-concrete hutment with whitewashed walls and red sloping roof could well have been called a small fisherman’s pride. A safe cosy world; an axis of long-cherished dreams; a small world inside the bigger world of the quiet fishing village, the latter still boxed up in the larger world of the houses on the shorefront. At a short distance, light blue waves gently surged and receded. The sea all welcoming and friendly, except on occasions when there were storms.

Life as usual, mundane life dragging with surety, keeping routine, maintaining hope, retaining society yoked in practised roles and responsibilities. Beach sand, mud, masonry, planks, boats, jetties, and beach huts. A fishing world. Sea and fish rule the air. Menfolk going into the sea. Women taking fish to the market. A slightly boasting air sailing over the wealthy fishermen’s small villas with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns, verandah, and tiled floor. Golden sand ready to simmer under the sun, like any other day, waiting for the sun to add to its elevation. In the background, the bluish calm of the sea looking meditatively into the Bay of Bengal. A morning as vivacious like any other, so dreamy that a passing angel might have been struck by the majestic calm and languorous beauty of this unit of the world. Specks of grey white clouds in bluish expanses of the sky. Greenish black silhouette of the fishing trawlers moving on the watery bosom. Even the celestial flier may not have an inkling of what lay ahead within a time-span of just fifteen minutes.

It was the fateful morning of December 26, 2004 when a Tsunami wreaked death and destruction across coastal areas in the whole region. When hurtling waves swallowed many a dream. The times when the nature forgot its objectivity to turn furious. Boxing Day Tragedy: a frightful gift of death, doom, and destruction by the sea as it opened its Christmas Box. A black Sunday when white silvery sandy beaches were spattered with calamitous mud wherein rolled the boats, fishing trawlers, and bungalows. The day when cars, buses, and trucks were washed away like toys in a miniaturised play-act of flooding by the children on the beach on normal days. When even mighty bridges and sturdy railway lines collapsed like pack of cards under the monster wave.

So the fate of this little hamlet appeared sealed for the wrong, just at the moment the first tidal wave came silently wreaking havoc like a poisonous snake.

Madhavan’s sleep was broken by an angry shake of the tiny house. A boat’s bow came in splintering away the feeble resistance of the door, the very same door that their mother closed behind her every night, leaving her two children in the warmly protecting air of the little room. Before he could make out what had happened, water was greedily coming up the little height of his bed. Was it a bad dream? No, it was something worse.

Their house was at the outer fringe of the high-tide mark of the first wave. So giving them first hurried warning, the water swashed back even more dangerously than it had arrived. Elsewhere lower down the coast, the waves swept defenceless people desperately trying to reach higher ground. The things that had been done in years were undone in a momentary swash. In Nagapattinam, Nagore and Velanganni vehicles, boats, humans, animals and houses were converted into a tangled mass of wood, metal, and bodies.

As the next wave came upon their palm-fringed little hamlet, proudly holding its settlement-lore for the sake of these simple fishermen, all structures were razed to the ground. The boat came dangerously smashing in and hit the wall. The evil progeny of the submarine slumping flooded the room in all its muddy flurry.

“The sea has gone mad!” Madavan’s death-stricken voice cut across the roaring rage and reached his younger sister’s ears.

On many occasions in the crowded bazaars, his mother had left them alone in the past, instructing him to take care of his little sister. Even in the face of this terrible moment, the instruction overcame his danger-struck senses. Jumping into the boat’s bow, he dragged Jayachitra safely into his brotherly arms. Just a few seconds later, the house was blown away and the boat was lifted to the level of the top palm branches, whose height once filled him with curiosity, awe and surprise. He was grasping his sister as strongly as he could manage. Luck throws a tiny handful of survival chance in such chaos. Who gets it is beyond the comprehension of any law of determination.

A motley crowd was running futilely away from the sea, unmindful of a costly car turned upside down right in the middle of their path. Nets, masts, fishing trawlers, canoes and mechanised boats lay in a tangled mass. Water muffled the breaking and snapping sounds of the world built with so much of focussed passion. Only the sea roared, subduing all other lesser noises. A young man was running away from the beach with a young girl’s body in his supposedly protecting hands. However, the monster was grinning instead of grieving over the massive loss of lives and property around. Plants, wood, and damaged boats lay over dead fish. In just a few minutes it was a changed world; the world which was almost the same with its mundane routines over the years.

We have been running miles ahead of our dreams. As concrete buildings cluttered the seafront, fisherfolk moved within perilous vicinity of even storms, not to mention a Tsunami. The angry sea rebuked: destroyed communities, vandalised beaches, mutilated bodies, and twisted boats. It simply pushed the table, scattering everything like broken crockery. The beachfront engulfed by the disaster, there was only one anatomy recognisable. Disaster’s. The massive keel and hull of a ship that moved proudly, smoothly, for fish, money and life, now stuck up, torn and bruised, among coastline rocks. Water is generous to fish and ships. A liveable world to the former, to flap, to swim; a soft road for the latter, to move, to almost run on an even keel. The sea had perhaps momentarily abandoned the customary role. The fish lay dead, hurled inland and left to die muddy death in the world outside. The ship lying on the rocks, tilted to its right on its keel.

A crushed world. Fear hung in the air over the debris. Rumours did perilous rounds. Every now and then people, like tiny insects, began running helter-skelter, away and further away from the sea. The sea that spawned death and destruction. The gigantic seismic waves unleashed by the super-massive undersea earthquake loomed large in panicked air. Buildings, huts, fishermen and tourists became just tiny testimonials to the wanton destructive power of the massive geological plates pushing against each other with demonic pressure.

Fractured images in a broken mirror. Fragments and pieces of broken dreams. Lorries, pushcarts, and pilgrims to the seashore on the full moon day were mercilessly moulded into a muddy slush. The twenty-thirty feet sea wall smacked two kilometres inland, destroying secluded mangrove paradises, people working in salt pans, breakfasters, as well as fishermen out in the sea for catching fish and prawns. Decimated coastal fishing hamlets and battered fishing canoes, torn-apart beach front and an incontrollable mother crying over the shirtless dead body of her daughter of Jayachitra’s age, bore mournful testimony to the madness of the killer wave. People were happy in their  varied ways, now they cried for the same loss, a monotonous line of loss of relatives, family, and houses.

Hundreds of bodies were lying in the sand. Holding his sister’s hand, he passed by the body of Kittoo, her eyes half-closed and her mother, robbed of the diamond of her maternity, crying so loud that Madhavan dragged his sister away from the scene, horribly terrified. The dead little girl had been friendly enough to offer him a lollipop as their mothers introduced them at a local thoroughfare a few months back. He still recalled that particular taste as he moved away. However bitter the life around, a child but has an innocent little world of sweetness. He carried that little world in his mouth. There in the dangerous sea, he saw the coastguard ships braving the unusually ruffled sea. For a moment he was wonderstruck as to why the sea was behaving so madly. The sea appeared playful even. A joyous memory: the boat’s rough planking, painted freely, artlessly in red and white; his feet struggling in the bow, stomach taut over the gunwale, his hands holding her sister’s as he laughingly dragged her to the edge. A smile on his lips cracking the bloody crust on his lower lip. Pain. Again he was pulled into scary reality.

He thought his parents will return. They will all be together in their sweet home. A child’s hope as vast as the sky. And till then it was his duty to take care and protect his little sister like on so many occasions in the past.

The titanic Tsunami caused by the fifth largest earthquake in hundred years occurred on the twenty-sixth—a date that has become synonymous with the destructive face of nature. On 26 December, 2003, it was Bam in Iran that bore the brunt of the raw, unnerving, shaking forces of nature; On 26 January, 2001, there was epical devastation by the Bhuj and Latur earthquake. And now it happened again on the same date—quite unexpectedly since Tsunami is such a rare phenomenon in the South Asian region. It just caught the people on the wrong foot.

All hope seemed to have vanished from the people’s Tsunami-tortured faces. Whenever a VIP visited the relief camps, the people folded hands with such desperation and helplessness like they had never done before any of their Gods. There was so much to say for so many losses, for so little of the help that might come their way now. Some even vent out their desperation to the hilt during these rare fleeting moments as the hurried VIP chickened out of the mess lest there might be some mud smeared on his clean shirt.

Holding his hands over his smashed head a man was crying inconsolably. It was the mournful acme of sorrow. Just tears and cries didn’t appear sufficient to give expression to the sorrow born of the terrible loss of his little son, daughter and wife. His very purpose in life had been washed away. The four-five years old boy, who had given him so many reasons to start out for work and return home after finishing a bone-breaking schedule, was now lying to be buried hurriedly in line with his eternally asleep sister. The mother’s covered body appeared sleeping comfortably under warm clothes like somewhere in North Indian winters at the time.

On every face ‘missing’ and ‘homeless’ was written. Explosive tidal waves which had taken many countries in their destructive spectrum now haunted the tormented psyches of these displaced, hungry, and destitute masses. Hospital morgues were choked with unclaimed bodies so there were mass burials. Multihued coastal community that once glittered with the sea’s softly gyrating waves now bore horrific testimony to the all-battering sea-surge. Massive relief operations, on the other hand, were turning out to be a small and feeble whiff of desperation. Still people engaged a hopeful talk in the stinking relief camps, narrating the miraculous tale of an infant’s survival, written inexplicably on a floating mattress. Kudos to life—one single flicker of life lighting up the endless depths of thousands of lost lives. Well, that’s life!

This earthquake off the coast of Sumatra was so powerful that geologists claimed it made the earth wobble on its axis. The evil aftermaths of this emission of energy, caused due to the undersea slippage of the fault-lines, were felt in every nook corner of the earth. Like tiny insects people were scurrying to safety, impassively carrying the leftovers. A battered woman was moving expressionlessly carrying a colour television set on her head. Her little home, fishpond and vegetable garden all lost and other family members still missing. How was the television set saved? It could have been another story of miraculous survival. We cannot expect it to be dry at least. It must have been in water and not in working condition. But after losing your present, you salvage survival crumbs from the past and look into the future with certain shared memories. It was the tiny idiot box that had seen so many moments of their togetherness. She carried the spoilt box of memories on her head, still catching onto the thin strands of hope, to meet her family, to gather the sinews again, to make a nest once more.

Madhavan saw Nikhita. The left side of her face smashed. In place of the childish smile, a purplish scar and reddish right eye gave her a fearsome expression. Seemingly unmindful of her serious, unattended open injury, she was munching a crumb that had luckily fallen in her pleading hands from somewhere. In the face of such calamity, you have to grasp to the streaks of life filtering through the screen from the unknown world. Also you have to be lucky among thousands of hands that try to hold that iota of life. They had played together on many occasions. It was but no occasion to play. Jayachitra smiled at their neighbour carrying a different face now. The girl was too young to feel the pain of loss; she could just sense the dull pain in her head. Nikhita, however, was grown enough to have an idea of the loss, and knew it was not the time to reciprocate a smile. They remained sitting silently. Unable to bear some silent unseen agony, the once agile chirpy girl got up and moved limpingly. He watched her almost lifeless body move away with undecided steps. Where is she going? He thought of following her, but then dropped the idea because she appeared not to even know them.

Whenever something worth eating fell in his hands, he first gave it to sister to eat, happily looked at her as she ate, and with enthusiasm thought of the praise he will get from pa and ma when they will come to know of this. He seemed to forget all the hardships as his present melted to make a happy picture of the future. When they will be together, they will go to the school, their mother will cook, and father will go fishing. His hopeful eyes putting the scattered pieces together.

In what can be termed as the largest ever relief operations during peace time, all three wings of defence forces were notching out every ounce of their professional efforts. However, the extent of the tragedy was such that even the most humane of their efforts appeared lost in the mishandling chaos around. Life had derailed, and so were the common most expectations. The dead bodies had lost reverence and respect, and the scenes like carrying a dead body tied to a wooden stick jolted the last bit of optimism still lurking around. It appeared strikingly unreligious as the dead are given utmost reverence under normal times. Under such disharmonic times, however, all civilized norms get thrown into the dustbin of survival, and humanity sucks out draughts from the same to somehow survive and see another day. Volunteers were dragging dead bodies on all fours to save them from still worse fate of rotting in the open. Relief and rescue personnel worked mechanically; clearing away the rubble and the bodies with the same expression. There was no other way. It was frightening, more so for his sister. You have to be brave, he recalled his father once telling him. Embracing his sister, turning her face the other way, he braved the sight, his breathing heavy and heat beating fast.

Having lost each and everything related to her, an old lady was wailing piteously. Her wide-open, toothless mouth and lost dull eyes drowned in the salty surge of the sea of tears. Her face was questioningly raised to the God’s eyes somewhere in the sky. He had seen her earlier. He recalled vividly. No doubt it was she. She had grinned and acknowledged his father’s greetings, while he looked happily wearing a bright red shirt, walking with his father on some Sunday, going to the market holding his father’s hand. Now her hands hung limply in air; palms wide open having lost each and every belonging linked to the lines on them through the inexplicable and invisible chord of love, relationships, and life’s abounding pleasantries.

Badly battered alive bodies were walking upon hundreds of others still buried in the sand. Their vibrant fishing hamlets wiped out of existence. The fishermen robbed of their catamarans and nets looked at the sea as if it was some perennial foe; broken was that sanctimonious bridge that links a fisherman to the sea like a farmer is linked to his plot of land. The army had dispatched various columns to somehow undo the horrendous extent of this catastrophe. The whole of humanity seemed to have been stranded in a tortuous quagmire. It was a struggle to survive, to move in the mud to gather the broken pieces, to find the surviving family members, then walk a bit more to take on what remained of life.

The Coast Guard, Navy, and Air Force were carrying out aerial reconnaissance mission to salvage some pride from the human side in the face of this gruesome attack of nature. Temples, churches, mosques, schools and offices were being converted to makeshift shelters for this badly battered section of the modern humanity.

Bodies in hundreds—naked, half naked, black, brown, some already showing initial signs of purplish decay; others still fresh like they were asleep; children, men, women, old, young, middle aged—were waiting for the final rites. Nobody was bothered about their caste, class, creed, or religion. It was just a gruesome mass of corpses. Manmade differences melt in the face of assault by the larger forces.

Relief workers were frantically digging a big mass grave to provide a quick burial place, where these victims could be laid to rest within the shortest period of time. No ladder was available to carry the bodies to the bottom of the pit, so even the last respect that could have been given to the once-thriving life had to be abandoned. The uncomplaining corpses were thus thrown into the pit. The hands alive and moving being forced to carry out this apparently inhuman burial, almost feeling ashamed and carrying bruises on their conscience. No God-fearing eye could spare even a single look at the jumbled up limbs once the work had been done, so closing their eyes the workers threw earth over these unknown and even casually acquainted faces.

The nearby beach—a little shiny patch of softness to absorb fatigue and tension—had vanished in a deadly jiffy. The beautiful sand-work was unprotestingly swept off as the waves came rising in a flash and then completing the first calamitous cycle, the water subsided as hurriedly as it had surged. Here Madhavan had spent many hours with family and friends on holidays waiting for his father’s boat to return from fishing. The seaside hotel, from whose balcony he had panoramic view of the paternal extent of the sea while his father supplied fish to the kitchen, had been ransacked by the mobbish waves. He looked at the rubble. Some happy memory waved at him to bring a smile on his face. He looked more intently into the rubble to rebuild those nice times. Even his childish fancy failed him. That world seemed to have been ripped apart. No, it wouldn’t be the same again. He was suddenly scared. ‘But I shouldn’t get scared because I am elder brother and have to take care of Jayachitra,’ he worked up a little resolution.

On Christmas, the visitors had put offerings and money in boxes in the church. The priest was now distributing the same to the needy lined up, of all faiths and beliefs, having lost their colour, mired in the same colour of tragedy, mere battered human beings. The priest distributed the things with a peculiar sense of detachedness as if it didn’t matter anything to him anymore. Madhavan held his sister in front of him in the queue. Putting some coins and some candies on their open palms, the priest put his hand on their hands, first on the girl and then her brother. It was the first human touch of sympathy since days, since so long that he hardly remembered the last time he felt the same. He felt like crying out and ask the elderly priest about his parents. But then the queue moved on mechanically and he just stepped ahead. He knew it was futile. How will the priest help him in finding his parents, he calculated the impossibility of the task. But then who will? All he knew was that he has to take care of his sister and continue looking around to catch a fragment of his lost world. But the world had been shattered in a way that all broken pieces appeared the same. These seemed to belong to all and none at the same time. 

The gigantic rupture in the earth’s womb whiplashing deadly ripples on the open bosom of the sea, which gained horrific momentum over hundreds of kilometres, had broken the languorous calm of that Sunday morning. Hoping to see his father’s boat he went to the fishing jetty. It but was decimated, only tiny vestiges remained. Some sullen fishermen were helplessly looking at the angrily lapping watery tongues, more dangerous than fire, hissing against the broken stone and woodwork. Much to the pitiful cry of his tiny heart, a big mechanised fishing vessel had been washed ashore. It was lying on its side like a big whale stranded on sand, like a broken toy on the table. It appeared damn funny to them. They laughed, gesticulating like two little monkeys, pointing towards the funny tragedy. Children can laugh, for the good only, even if there is hardly any reason to. 

Children cry as easily as they laugh. He cried. He ran weeping, holding Jayachitra’s hand as tightly as he could, lest the chaos snatch her away. She was the only possession he was left with. A trench-like long and deep mass grave was being dug. Coming to its edge, he saw the horrific sight of a girl being carried to the bottom. He cried loudly and ran with his sister, scared that they had gone mad and were burying girls and might snatch his sister to do the same to her.

“Father and mother will get angry at me if I don’t take care of her,” he was calculating with his innocent mind.

He was now moving towards Velakanni beach hoping to find their mother. On the way he came across the water-work done by the seismic onslaught of the waves. Leftovers were being dragged out of the devastated fishing hutments. Rubble-strewn landscape glittered with Tsunami’s calligraphy—mud smeared utensils, battered clothes, smashed trunks, tattered cupboards, broken chairs, unhinged tables, open chests, and dislodged cots. Many a time, they went crashing into battered fishing canoes. The survivors, wailing hysterically, were being led to relief camps and hospitals. Municipal lorries were carrying dozens of bodies to dump them into huge pits and municipal graveyards. Killing the last emotion for the dead, their relatives just handed over the bodies to the relief workers for burial. Most of the bodies had been smashed beyond recognition. There was no need for post-mortem now, so the hospitals were getting rid of corpses as soon as possible.

The huts and semi-concrete houses of Seruthur, a fishermen colony about a kilometre from Velankanni, had been rubbled beyond recognition. Subramaniam uncle, a fast friend of his father, was not at his customary place today to greet him. He just stared at the place where he supposed the house to exist.

A little shrine of the sea goddess, worshiped by the fisherfolk with special protective prayers offering toddy, turmeric water and neem leaves, stood half ravaged. Trail of death and destruction around it still grinned wantonly. He had seen his mother praying. ‘God listens to your prayers if you pray with a clean heart,’ he remembered her telling him one day. He went up to the broken shrine to pray with a clean heart. He wasn’t sure whether he will be able to do it with a clean heart or not. ‘In any case the God couldn’t save its own house,’ he felt like making fun of God and turn a little joke of it. But then he was scared the God might delay meeting with their parents. Recalling all mannerisms of his mother, he sat down to pray. The agonised air continued to tickle him, the sounds around, and he gave up the effort to muster up a clean heart.  

Collapsed walls and roofs meekly brandished the signs of destruction at the VIP and official vehicles buzzing around. A fishing trawler had been rammed into a minor bridge. Sacrificed coastal life had been offered at the seismic altar. Boats, electric poles, nets, planks, boards, roof tins, clothes, and ropes were scattered over the grotesque mud. Hopelessly people wandered through the mud and water puddles. Everybody seemed to be hopping around like children, sullen-faced children rather.

Jayakodi, the fisherman uncle who talked to him so lovingly and confidently that the child in him considered the big fisherman as the bravest man in the world, bore the sight of a big mountain collapsing. The big bulky man’s spectacularly heart-rending mournful abandonment to the incessant stream of sobs made him more curious than scared. The more the big man tried to control himself, the more uncontrollable became the stream of sorrow shaking his body with piteous convulsions. Bending on his knees, he was holding his boy’s lifeless hand against his left eye as if to prevent the stream of sorrow. His wife was wailing by his side, her face convulsing on the boy’s chest. He thought the boy was lucky in having his parents by his side. But then the boy will not get up to smile at his parents. He knew death meant the point of no return. They were, he and his sister, but alive and would smile on meeting their parents. Then his heart beat faster. What if, if ma and pa don’t smile when we meet them. He was gripped by fear. The scene of him and Jayachitra wailing by their parents unsmiling bodies flashed in his head. He had seen too many dead bodies, so the picture came vivid. He started crying. Seeing him cry, his sister cried even louder. He heard her crying, recalled his responsibility, embraced her, and caressed her to smile again.  

Everybody appeared robbed of something most precious in life. Against this background of black-music of death, the sea thundered demonically, forcing the badly pillaged human beings to rush inland and cram the make-shift relief camps. The people were just simply fleeing away from themselves; away from their God-ordained right (or duty) of performing the final rights of the dead bodies coming their way whom they recognised as their direct relatives and dear friends. Their badly smashed selves dithered from taking up this responsibility.

Chinnapillai from a neighbouring colony was bravely putting a flower garland around the twisted neck of his girl wearing a pink frock. His wife’s body lay at some distance. Around them dead fish littered the muddied landscape. He had seen thus jolly person. Their small family had been a guest at his house, last year, and had lunch at their place. Yes, he remembered her dress. Pink. Was it the same? He peered into the frock to find out if it was the same. No, he wasn’t sure. He was staring at the dead girl, or at her frock rather, when he shifted his look and found the unfortunate father looking at him. He thought he will recognise him, but then found the man was just seeing through him. He was alive, but perhaps he didn’t see any longer.

Quite anxious to lay her frail hands upon something useful for the life staring into her feeble old eyes, an old woman, clad in a tattered sari, was furtively roaming around in the Tsunami battlefield. Plastic cans, broken dented utensils, plastic chairs, and a sack of clothes were the things that lay around her waiting to enter some badly contrived shelter. Her once cosy shelter having been blown and scattered away like brittle matchsticks, it was a humungous task, at this stage of life, to make a beginning, to regain a foothold again. The Tsunami had left behind many a dangerous sea resident on the land. Angrily the old woman threw a big stone at a scorpion, as if taking it as the veritable representation of the deadly sea. A boy wailed nearby, fruitlessly pleading that he had been bitten by a snake. In normal times it would have been news, driving people to rush to his help, but not now.

At a short distance, people were running to beg rations from the relief workers. Most of them did not know how the sudden shifting of the sea floor and the consequent vertical displacement of water created disequilibrium in it giving birth to this evil child of death and destruction. Now survival meant with how much strength you could stretch out your begging hands as voluntary organisations came with food and clothes. There were hundreds of hands jostling for littlest of piece. Hands stretched out flatly, tautly on their all five; lines on the palms—the webbing of luck and fate—glaringly evident like death-sentencing signature of the Tsunami.

He, having made his sister stand at a safe distance, tried to fight his way into the faceless behemoth of a beggar, the pity-faced, soulless, multiple-handed creature, jostling, shifting, restless to survive, to grab the morsels of life. He was pinched down in the innards of this ever-hungry creature. Gasping for breath, scared for life, he howled and found himself pushed out. An old woman, beggar before and beggar now, got him up and handed him a handful of plain boiled rice. Smiling through tears, holding the treasure in his cupped palms, he ran to his sister. He held it to her mouth. The little one was hungrier than he expected and ate all of it, like a little puppy gobbling greedily from a bowl. There was rice around her mouth. He wiped these last grains from her face, put these on his palm and ate, closing eyes. He was happy that she was no longer hungry and will not cry for some time now.

The black Sunday had gobbled everything. Temples, churches, mosques, and an odd gurudwara had been razed to the ground. The survivors had put red rags as signs of reverence at the former shrines. Here hundreds were trying to sew up their tattered faith and praying for the survival, well-being and finding their near and dear ones. Faith and its symbols had been cut down. It will take some time for it to heal, to grow. Well, all this takes time of course.

One cannot know from where this devastated young couple got dry wood to cremate their four-year-old twins, son and daughter. Two little pyres were burning as the unfortunate young mother buried her face in the sorrowfully heaving bosom of her husband. Though it wasn’t cold, he felt a little shiver as the tide of some strange sensation welled up the pores of his skin. He saw the fire. Felt like getting some warmth. He needed some warmth of love. He stood by the pyres, solemnly as if he was a fellow mourner. All he felt was the warmth. Flesh burning. Fire crackling. Then he got scared and ran away to his sister whom he had instructed to stand at a distance. 

Some priests were carrying out a religious procession towards the sea for its pacification. One was saying that it was the disaster born of an angry sea God. “No, it’s angry Varuna, the water God!” the other countered. Someone was trying to romp in his point that it was a sea goddess who had caused all this.

The twisted time was taking turns to get itself free of the knot it was entangled in. Then some missive triggered a panic wave. An early-morning warning from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Chief Secretaries of the affected states went around the devastated mobs in rumoured versions. Fearing another sea storm, people abandoned whatever little things they were left with and took to their heels. Horns were blazing. Vehicles and humans competed to beat the swift forces of death chasing them. The Tsunami tandava had been too fearsome to be faced twice in a lifetime. Noise made by the relief planes and helicopters was mistaken as another sea-surge. Many were injured in the stampede. The brother and sister also ran, imitating others. His sister’s small legs gave in and she fell. He got her up, tried to lift her in his arms and then run. His mind was up to the task, but his small body wasn’t. They both fell and crawled away from the stomping feet to hide by a broken wall.

That fateful day, Fatima’s four-year-old son was playing on the beach imminently facing a wall of the sea. He tried to scamper back as the Tsunami struck. She had her infant son in her lap. She also ran towards him to protect him from the perilous wall. Nonetheless, this crippling natural disaster was beyond any of her prayer to the Almighty and snatched away the boy. Tragedies defy all logic, miracles do even more. Clinging to a floating plank, she still clutched the infant and was pushed far out into the mud, and when the sea retreated with even more force, she found the board struck in the branches of a tree. A day later some gutsy fisherman got the mother and child onto the ground. A young mother, she was now feeding coconut milk to her infant daughter. Her dried motherly bosom now spent of its contents, while the heart heaved inside promising recuperation as soon as possible. She was a mother. She had to give life even if she was almost starving. Madhavan had sometimes seen his mother talking to this woman. He ran towards her for support and succour. She did not appear to recognise him. Her glassy eyes just stared into the murky horizon where the sea hissed. Mechanically her hand was raised and she caressed his little head, but then the thought of her own son overcame her like another Tsunami and she started wailing so loudly that he was scared and forced to retreat.

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress infested the foul air inside the relief camp. He had forced his way in, like it was their home. He tried to find some known face. Hundreds of orphaned children were trying to come to terms with this gross reality in feebly-lit makeshift tents. Some were lying with eyes closed but sleep was nowhere near. Some were eating from paper bowls; others were just staring at still others who did the same in return. Doctors and nurses were trying to forestall the battle against impending epidemic. He saw some familiar faces. He had definitely seen them. It was on that fine morning, the weather being exceptionally calm, his father had taken him in the boat. Christian fisherman Miller, Minsha, and Bapsha had greeted so lovingly that his head felt their blessing touch as their fishing boat passed along. He raised his hand towards them. They just looked. Memories had melted in the heat of the tragedy. Possibly they did not even recall him whose son he was. He just allowed his hand to drop down and caressed the little head of his sister.

Collapse of clean water supply had brought the camp to the verge of cholera, typhoid, and other diarrhoeal diseases of poor sanitation. Sickness loomed large in the air.

Still unburied bodies, petrifying, now placed in a nearby camp, turned dogs on the path of scavenging their once masters. A policeman, Sanjeevan, stood guard to chase away the canine onslaught. A month back his father had a row with another fisherman and this policeman had come to their house, had been extremely polite and helped to resolve the matter without aggravating the issue further. He remembered this kind, moustached face very well. He might help even now. He ran and tugged at his baton. The policeman did not remember him, but as a humanistic gesture took him to the stinking corpses so that he could recognise some acquaintance. He carefully left his sister outside and pinching his nose against shirt end to keep the stink away, inspected the corpses with utmost seriousness belying his little years on earth. He did not even know whether he was relieved or sad over not finding his parents there. The air, the stench, the corpses jolted his senses. When he came out, he was older in years in his mind.

Military field hospitals and temporary shelters were being set up to provide basic amenities, drinking water, clothes, and utensils. However, the extent of the damage along the 2000 kilometres southern coastline was so huge that the relief effort proved to be a molehill before the mountainous need.

He had taken up parental responsibility for his sister. Having been almost trampled to the pain of his bones, he grabbed some clothing and toiletries from the military relief site and rolling his sleeves up, sat to the task of bathing her under the tap, like his mother used to do to both of them, carefully recalling each and every nuance of the art. Kamlawati whom he recalled as the condescending elderly lady, who shared some anecdote with his mother in the vegetable market, appeared to recognise him. She sat to the task of bathing both of them. Like tiny puppies finding their mother in a stampede, they felt safest in the world. They had at least a fistful of the lost world. But then life had been jolted so terribly that everybody had lost footing. Before they could even come out of their initial childlike shyness for the casual acquaintance, the chaos grabbed the benefactor, and they lost her face in the unhitched humanity around. They were alone again in the crowd. For a while he considered to search for the old lady instead of his parents, but then looking at the disorder around dropped the idea.

A woman at a specially erected pandal was lamenting over her inability to save her elder son. She appeared brutally traumatised by her ordeal to save only one of her sons. The one-and-half-year old squeezed against her bosom, she was haunted by those flashes of memory as the perilously swirling and debris-strewn torrent snatched the other one away. Theirs was a little heaven on the palm-fringed shore before the 30-feet water wall brought overwhelming devastation. Their little hutment was twisted and snapped off its foundations as the Tsunami came crashing. The boy was clinging to her right hand while she grasped the infant with the left. Paddling for life, she knew their fate as combined three had been sealed, so in a stony ennui she allowed the waves to snatch away the boy, somewhere inside her knowing that she could have held onto him for some more time, but that surely would have been the peril of all three. As mother she had to salvage something out of the doom. She cursed herself for allowing him to be offered at the altar of twisted wreck all around. All silent and sullen now, she stared into the distance and safely cradled the baby in her arms, an expression of incalculable guilt written on every pore of her being. Mud-smeared school books, diaries, papers and photographs from some unknown house sprawled around her. She took up a photograph and stared at those unknown faces.

He saw Divakaran, a neighbour of theirs. His father had once a bloody fight with this man and got a bleeding mouth. He had hated him to the core. Even now he stared at him like a foe, least inclined to call out for help. After all, he was a true father’s son. He had to prove loyalty to his father. In anger he even felt like throwing a pebble at the enemy but desisted somehow.

Bulldozers and tractors were mechanically laying bare the mud and wreckage to find bodies and bones. Bloated, purpled, and smashed bodies were washed up on the neighbouring beach. Aah, with unstinted brutality natured had devoured live things. The very same ocean that was a source of livelihood had angrily snatched everything from them in one sudden surge.

Nearby, a cement and plaster statue of the local deity had been miraculously left unscathed amidst all the terrible ruination around. The male deity’s softly feminine features appeared aloof from the physical world mercilessly swallowed up by the tidal waves. Some people were still standing with bowed heads before this symbol of unflinching faith, praying for the safety of their near and dear ones. A lone coconut frond, survivor, proudly swayed its tattered branches on this serene sunny morning.

At a short distance, people of all religious hues were digging up graves in the dargah’s graveyard. The mighty sweep of death had removed all post-death distinctions among the corpses.

A boy suddenly went gaga over his find of radio from the wreckage. His shrill, playful cry brought grimace on the faces of gravediggers.

All around fate had been catastrophically locked. The grey crest of seamlessly swelling waves found trees, boats, nets, and concrete from near the shore lying in rice fields two kilometres away.

That was all that remained: The little boy with his younger sister. He had forgotten that he himself was a kid; he just realised that his little sister was too small and needed care. She was sleeping, her head on his lap. He stared into the chaos, to salvage some hope, to grab some more fragments of their past, to build a rope of better hope to reach their parents.