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| Sunday, 27 February 2005 |
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A tsunami diary by Nirupama Menon Rao Nine A. M., December 26, 2004. In Bangalore, I received the following message on my cellphone: "Sea intrusion in Batti. Massive damage reported. Unconfirmed." I read the message, interpreting it as yet another instance of water-logging in floodprone Batticaloa. But this is not a one-off. The phone rings and I hear about a sea "attack" along the Sri Lankan coast. Television networks have meanwhile started reporting an earthquake in Sumatra and damage from tidal waves in Tamil Nadu, the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and in Sri Lanka. This onslaught from the sea comes packaged with the word - "tsunami". A word confined to Hokusai (Japanese) woodblock prints, to the trenchant Pacific Ocean, not to the ocean to which we gave our name, the Indian Ocean. Somehow on this Sunday, we find ourselves at world's end, with the bottoms of harbours suddenly exposed, beaches shining with speckled sea creatures and wondrous hues of shells from the deep. A sea that waits for little children to scream with delight at this faerie world, and to move closer, and, then... swoops down on them, black, roaring, and unforgiving. I return to Sri Lanka. There is a pall of gloom everywhere. The stories about the dead and missing populate the atmosphere around me. One account haunts me constantly in the days ahead. The Faujdars and the Seetharamans, both from India, holidaying at Yala on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka, are in their nightclothes in their rooms at the Yala Safari lodge, when the Jurassic roar of the sea ambushes them, the quintessential, cunning raptor. The youngest offspring of these families, Farzan and Arvind, aged nine and seven, escape the giant waves that devour their parents and other relatives. Farzan is found on a tree, lacerated, but alive. Arvind is miraculously unscathed. But the tsunami has altered their lives forever. Farzan's uncle from Mumbai, Percy, identifies the body of his mother, Farzan's grand mother, who also died at Yala, from her heirloom ruby earrings. Her body is mutilated, and unrecognisable, but the ruby earrings remain, old Parsee goldwork and fine stones that the sea could not eliminate, even as its water sloshed and flooded the lungs of the 75-year-old woman who was wearing them. Percy and Kashmira, his wife, are kindly people, who are loyal and true to their family obligations. Farzan is in good hands, but he is unaware of the tragedy that has suddenly deprived him of his parents, grandmother, and older brother. Two weeks after the tragedy, in hospital in Mumbai, recovering from his injuries, he is determined to get well, so that he can "go to Sri Lanka, and look for mummy and daddy." A heartbreaking denouement to a tragedy that is difficult to accept or explain. Little Arvind, on the other hand, keeps dialling his father's telephone number, hoping he will answer. And when he does not, the seven-year-old says flatly: "I know father is dead." These are hardy pocket survivors, Farzan and Arvind, spared by the very ocean that swallowed their families. There are many more children like Farzan and Arvind. Indian and Sri Lankan and Indonesian children who have lost parents and are traumatised by what happened on that black Sunday. Prema, Arvind's mother, is listed initially as "missing." Weeks later, posted on the wall of the hospital at Tissa Maharama, south of Yala, appearing among photographs of the dead is the picture of a body whose face at least approximates to Prema's. I am shown a passport photograph of Prema as she really was - a typical "South Indian girl" face, shot in a small street studio, with painted mountains in the back ground, and no warning of the black wall of water that will one day swallow her and then disinter her, to be buried in Tissa Maharama. I think of the normal, uneventful life she left behind for a short Christmas vacation, and her senseless death. In the Millennium School in Dubai, the classmates of Ashwin, Arvind's older brother who also died at Yala, post little memorial notes on the school's website. Notes for Ashwin, who is described as a dear, sweet boy, who had wanted to go to Kenya on safari, like his closest school friend, but ended up in Yala. His Chennai-based great uncle, Natarajan, who comes to Sri Lanka to search for Prema, ask me, "Why did they have to go to Yala?" Always, after a tragedy, it is in our nature to wonder how things could have been different. There is an odd irony about the Election Commission of India identity card that lands on my table one day. I take some time in trying to place its provenance. And then, I realise that it belongs to Farzan's grandmother, Soonu, dignified and imposing, who had travelled to Yala with her voter's card, embracing the destiny that cast the final vote for her. The sea discriminates in favour of identity cards, so we may count the dead and missing, while it devours mothers and fathers and children. And, when it makes exceptions for the living, they are partial exemptions, one survivor in a whole family, one Arvind, one Farzan, little will o' the wisps, carried aloft by the very wave that snuffed out the lives of their families, to be deposited on high ground, nobody's children. I record the stories of Farzan and Arvind because I have a first-hand knowledge of their sad experience. The newspapers are full of accounts of similar tragedies. The deluge that overwhelms us now is of a grief that has no answers. It is elemental, deep, and profound, like to ocean itself. The shoreline of Sri Lanka is one vast heap of debris. Buddha statues, mosques and a few Hindu temples and churches that have survived tell you of the centuries-old life that populated these shores until that Sunday morning. Not that the tsunami has spared all these structures. There is a temple at Navalady in Batticaloa which had its chariot hurled like a torpedo to lie twisted on its side. There is a silence here that even the vultures forget to punctuate. Only the colours survive - the electric blue and violet of the temple walls, the green of the mosque on the seashore at Kalmunai in Ampara, the upturned blue of fishing boats tossed into living rooms, the terra-cotta red of twisted train carriages at Telwatta, of the "Queen of the Sea" express, and the white tourist buses half-sunk in the lagoon in Hambantota. Colours that paint a new Guernica of torment, and, sand-crusted death. There is a man in Batticaloa who outsmarted the tsunami. His name is Reverend Sanders. As the raging wave chased him and the children from the orphanage he runs, across the Batticaloa lagoon, the Reverend, who is no mariner, did what every sailor does on a stormy sea - he rode his boat into the oncoming wave. "In the name of my God, I command you!" said he as he took his boat into the swirling wall of water that was ready to devour him and his 28 children. All survived. The Reverend just managed to summon his God. The others who died across the coasts of Asia were not so lucky. God was not looking when the sea sneaked up behind the boys playing cricket on the Marina in Chennai, or the pilgrims on the beach at Velankanni, by the Church of the Virgin. The fishermen who populate this coast have fished here for centuries, setting out from harbours that welcomed Arab dhows over a millennium ago. At Kalmunai, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, I see a boat that is half burned, not by a freakish twist of nature, but because villagers set it alight to be able to see in the night, and to keep warm outside the ruins of their houses. After the initial surge of fear and anger at the sea, they are now reconciled to venturing out into the waters once again. Rumours run rife that there are no fish off the seas in the east, at least, not the fish they are used to catching. There are strange, new species, not native to these parts being caught in the nets of the fishermen. While this may be a transient phenomenon, the lament of the fisherfolk is real. For the fish they once caught, for the catamarans and fibreglass boats shattered and flipped into places on land that make them difficult to retrieve or refloat, for the dead and missing in their families. It is difficult to watch the sea with anything but shock and awe, and a speechless, aching, emptiness, even though the waters are calm and beautiful once again. Somewhere, in the long forgotten histories of the human race, we know there have been previous tsunamis. Maybe, this was how ancient civilisations suddenly vanished - on a similar, idyllic Sunday morning. And yet, those of our early ancestors, who survived that manifestation of the ocean's wrath, went on with their lives. So too, will we, dealing as before, with birth, youth, old age, and death, and allowing that rhythm to coexist with the sea, because that is the way of this planet, the only place of our arrivals and our exits. Is there another choice? But the sea cannot take our grief away from us. We will grow old, but not our grief. (The writer is India's High Commissioner to Sri Lanka). Courtesy: The Hindu |
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