It was early morning at Karaikal in Pondicherry, three days after the tsunami of December 2004 that we witnessed the terror all over again…well almost. The district magistrate’s office had just sounded a tsunami alert (it turned out to be incorrect) and hell had broken loose.
Within minutes an entire village had to empty out.
An old fisherwomen shouted at me to run as she herself ran barefoot, clutching a small bundle of clothes, the little relief she had managed to salvage of her life. Tempos, bikes, jeeps full of villagers, the horror writ on their faces, rushed blindly away from the sea. One could hear sirens wailing and loudspeakers warning everyone to clear the beach.
It was only my cameraman, Loka, and I who were foolhardily rushing in the opposition direction towards the coast, hoping to capture the first moments of the tsunami arriving.
Even the rickety bike we had found gave way after a while and we were forced to run by foot. In the midst of the melee, it suddenly hit home that my life was more important then the story. I got a call. It was my mother, from hundreds of kilometres away, far away from this devastation, asking if I was alright and if I had had anything to eat as yet.
Twenty years after one of the most devastating calamities in history struck south Asia, the memories are as fresh as yesterday.
Salt
I was part of the team that had launched DD News and as a reporter on Sunday duty, I offered to rush to Chennai as news of the devastation started trickling in at 11 am from Port Blair. Over the next two weeks, with not even a change of clothes or a toothbrush, I travelled coastal India from Chennai down the east coast road right upto Trivandrum, covering the disaster. Bodies were being piled onto tempos or trucks; or just being dumped in mass graves or burnt hastily in the dead of night. The only indication that there were people buried underneath was the large amounts of salt lying all around (to hasten the decomposition).
Politics, of course, was not far behind. At the Chennai airport, the newly minted United Progressive Alliance ministers would not be briefed by the state administration on what central assistance was needed or the extent of the disaster. Headed by the impervious late J. Jayalalithaa, she sent a junior official to receive Union ministers, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Dayanidhi Maran who were made to wait at the airport for nearly an hour before they were allowed to proceed. As we crossed the Marina Beach, we saw huge fishing boats piled on the road outside police headquarters and expensive SUVs gently buoying in the sea.
Eyes
But it was at Nagapattinam, the worst-hit village along the coast, that the full import of the tragedy hit home. It was not the corpses which we had got inured to by now, or the broken homes or empty villages. I guess it was the haunted look on the faces of the rescue teams. The eyes, hollow and vacant and hopeless and with no emotions left, sent a chill down my spine. It was as if I was looking at the walking dead.
In one of ghost villages that I went into in Nagapattinam, instead of the houses that were once homes, stood walls with the roofs blown away and not a soul in sight. The sea was now deceptively calm, and the waves lapping gently, and palms swaying in the balmy breeze mixed with the stench of death and decaying flesh. It was eery. The only indication that human life once existed here was a tiny old man squatting next to a small basket, smoking a beedi. In the basket were the remains of the only family member he could find, his son. He was preparing himself to bury the dead.
Walls
Geography played a huge part in deciding who survived and who did not. Velankinni with its lighthouse which guided seamen for over 300 years realised this too late when the waves went rushing in, washing away everyone gathered at the Velankinni Church. The waters rushed in with such force that they reached the East Coast Road which was at least three kilometres away. This was because the terrain is flat. Elsewhere, where the churches were built atop rocky highlands of the Western Ghats, churchgoers survived as the cliffs managed to wade off the roaring wall of water.
There were other indications of what the tsunami was really like. A wall towering over 25 feet above the water and constructed in 1735 could not save Karaikal from the water. At the beach where we expected the prime minister to land, I waited along with senior government officials and out of curiosity asked one of them why there were so many boulders lying scattered on an otherwise clean beach and why there were motor engines tethered to the ground across the beach. The engines, similar to those used in generator sets, along with the huge boulders, made an unlikely sight. It was the Lieutenant Governor who told me the engines were fishing boats that had anchored there the previous day (not even a shred of the boats except the engines were left). The stones, each weighing over a tonne, were from the wall constructed by the Dutch and improvised by the French later. The wall had stood witness to many a calamity. It vanished that December morning.
But the human spirit endures. In Sivaiganga, villages located inland set up community kitchens to feed anyone who turned up. Loka and I had our first hot meal in a week that evening in that little hamlet by the sea.
Meetu Jain is a journalist.
