Time’s hands were not speeding fast to force people to realise about getting late on this Sunday morning. Time further slows down for the school going children on a holiday. They need not rush to get ready for the school. Madhavan was peacefully asleep in his tiny bedstead in the small room of their semi-concrete little house, situated in a small 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 of the sea 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. The sea and the 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 which 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!” Madhavan’s panic-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, the fisherfolk moved
within the 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 the 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 the 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 that taste 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 back into the 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 grief 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 managed 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 which 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 which 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 hushed 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, 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 in normal times. Under such
disharmonic times, however, all civilised 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,
breathing heavily 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.
Madhavan 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 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 living 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 which 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 dye 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. It appeared 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 playful 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, 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 Velakanni, 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.
Madhavan 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 realised
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 the 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 the
beggary, pity-faced, soulless, multiple-handed creature, jostling, shifting and
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 pray 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 carry 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 the sea’s watery wall.
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 the 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 the 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 much 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 a 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 serious 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 the nature had devoured everything around. 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 a radio from the wreckage. His shrill, playful cry brought grimace on
the faces of the gravediggers.
All around the cumulative fate had been catastrophically locked. The
grey crest of seamlessly swelling waves had catapulted trees, boats, nets and
concrete from near the shore into the rice fields two kilometres inland.
