PICTURE SPEAK

"My pregnant aunt could not walk out of the hut and my grandmother refused to leave her. They died together." MALA, LABOURER IN TRANQUEBAR, TAMIL NADU: Mala grieves over her grandmother, 65-year-old Valambal, and aunt who held hands and decided to die together when the tide rushed into their home. Even as she spends her days in a shelter, the nightmare remains.

Sunday morning. 7.58 a.m. local time. When the sea parted off the coast of Indonesia, the raging water roared with a medieval echo. Rising from the floor of the ocean in gigantic waves, it robbed nations of their land, families of their loved ones and towns of their identity. White shrouds in mass graves sometimes with a solitary wreath, heartbroken parents clutching the clammy hands of children long dead, hollow eyes surveying heaps of broken homes and desolate relief workers with their mouths covered, trying desperately to escape the stench of death. The day after Christmas, the world was left shaken.

The Sumatra earthquake that recorded 9 on the Richter scale had triggered a tsunami that lashed across the coast of 13 nations. When the waves receded, the magnitude of tragedy was revealed-over 85,000 dead and millions left homeless. From the 572 dots that comprise the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Somalia, a country which makes headlines for war as much as for lack of water, the tsunami left little standing in its wake. It was a wave which exposed the tenuous grasp humanity has on life. A ring of fire that united the First World traveller with the Third World survivor. In grief. And in loss. In India, as the toll crossed 10,000, it was a tragedy on the scale of the 1993 Latur earthquake, worse than the cyclone that lashed Orissa in 1999. Imagine 20,000 nuclear weapons going off at the same time. Imagine, it happened.

NAGAPATTINAM: Black Sunday

PICTURE SPEAK

THE TOLL IT TOOK: Bodies piled in a mass grave in Nagapattinam

As enormous earth movers pick up bodies from the beach, 16-year-old Riju David from Kochi sobs inconsolably. It was 9 a.m. when he, like hundreds of other pilgrims, returned from Mass to shop on the beach and wet his feet in the calm sea. Then, in the blink of an eye, the horror dawned. "There was a deafening roar like that of a jet engine. I saw a colossal, deep-brown, elephant-like wave speeding at us,'' he recalls. Hundreds of children, women and men turned back and sprinted towards the safety of the steps of the 16th century Velankanni shrine built by the Portuguese. The water receded within minutes but two more waves followed immediately, taking with them the lives of nearly 300 people-among them Riju's parents and aunt.

Just 300 km east of Chennai, the road to Velankanni is one thousands of pilgrims take every year to offer their respects to Mother Mary, better known here as Arogyamatha or Our Lady of Health. She protects seafarers from a sometimes playful, sometimes deadly sea, as much as she provides livelihood for its fishermen. But this Sunday, a huge pandal that her faithful had erected for a special Christmas Mass was turned into a burial ground even as women wailed, their cries bouncing off the granite walls of an untouched edifice. Devastated shops, shattered vehicles and dead animals lay strewn in what has become the nation's worst-hit coastal district.

The church rector Father P. Xavier still shudders in despair. "Hearing the cries, I ran down and saw the huge waves dashing against the church steps and then receding. But the path up to the sea was by then littered with bodies and debris,'' he says. Only those who were attending Mass in Malayalam at the time escaped unhurt because though the water demolished part of the compound walls, it did not enter the shrine.

The situation was the same everywhere in Nagapattinam district, where the toll was 4,900 at last count. The water came, wiped out huts, sliced away buildings, submerged entire families. Even the general hospital in the harbour town of Nagapattinam was not spared. Ten-feet-high waves gushed into the building, just 300 m from the sea, creating havoc. "By evening, we had 490 bodies, among whom were those of 140 patients," says resident medical officer Dr S. Rajendran.

The town, under sea water for over half an hour, may never look the same again. Fishing boats have been washed ashore to a distance of 1 km, with many landing on the rail tracks near Nagapattinam railway station. Settlements have been washed away. Electricity poles have been uprooted and the streets are teeming with people who have found no place in the 75-odd relief camps which are spilling over with survivors. For one of them, Amrutha, even survival has no meaning. As rescue workers try to extricate the body of her two-year-old daughter Rosy, all she can mutter repeatedly is: "She is not dead, she is not dead.'' Would that it were so.

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