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.
