Shudder island

Rijuta Dey on that frightful school excursion to the Andamans when the 2004 tsunami struck

December 26, 2014 09:20 pm | Updated 09:20 pm IST

Children play at a beach in Port Blair, in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago, Saturday, Sept. 8, 2007. A new Indian tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean has been completed and is scheduled to be operational by the end of September 2007, a government minister said Friday. The Dec. 2004 tsunami killed an estimated 10,700 in India, in which this island archipelago was among the worst hit. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Children play at a beach in Port Blair, in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago, Saturday, Sept. 8, 2007. A new Indian tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean has been completed and is scheduled to be operational by the end of September 2007, a government minister said Friday. The Dec. 2004 tsunami killed an estimated 10,700 in India, in which this island archipelago was among the worst hit. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

It has been 10 years since an earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale ripped apart the seafloor of the Indian Ocean, generating a trans-oceanic tsunami whose killer waves slammed into the coastline of 11 countries.

This deadly natural disaster ensured the word ‘tsunami’ entered into the everyday lexicon. Before this, my knowledge of the word was confined to what I had read in a tiny box in a Geography book in class 8.

I was there, close to the epicentre of the earthquake that is said to have unleashed an energy equivalent to over 1,500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Like many of them, I was on a holiday, a school trip to the Andamans, my first trip without my parents, in the company of 50-odd school mates. It turned out to be more memorable than any of us had hoped for.

It had taken more than three days of journeying to reach Port Blair, including a train ride from Jamshedpur to Chennai, from where we embarked on the MV Akbar to reach Port Blair. I remember sitting on the deck as the sun set over the calm waters, suffusing the sky in brilliant orange and pink hues, and a fellow student remarking ominously, “I have a feeling something bad is going to happen.”

We shushed him, and returned to our bunkers, and woke up the next day to see the ship draw close to Port Blair. It was December 24, 2004. We were staying in an inexpensive part of the city, which was quite a drive from the waterside.

Christmas day was spent frolicking on Corbyn’s Cove Beach, not so much a beach as a small curve of sand backed by palm trees. We had a rooftop party that night, and retired well-fed and tired.

At around 6.30 a.m. on December 26, I woke up as the bed was shaking violently — I kicked my roommate and asked her to stop shaking her leg, only to realise that the TV couldn’t be shaking because of her. We sprang out of the bed, and ran downstairs in our nightclothes. I just about registered how everything seemed to be vibrating in my vision. We girls stood outside the hotel, the earth shaking ceaselessly, and watched the glass façade of the hotel shatter on the road. Rather, the other girls watched, as without my glasses I was blind as a bat.

We waited in the middle of the road, swaying continuously, as the strong aftershocks were unrelenting. Only when the sun was high in the sky did we notice that the road had cracked open and that our hotel building was leaning on the adjoining building.

Feeling very sorry for ourselves, some of the girls started crying: some rued the fact that they had fought with their parents to come for the excursion, and others wondered about the fate of the boys, who were in a different hotel. I was just wondering when we could go back and start the day’s activities — there was a scheduled boat ride I was quite keen on.

Such were my petty concerns, when the earthquake had set off a tsunami that killed more than 250,000 people in a single day and left more than 1.7 million homeless in 18 countries. We would remain in the dark about this horrific aftermath for another two days — the first time I read about the tsunami was on the flight back to Kolkata from Port Blair.

The boys arrived at our hotel, took one look at our tear-stained faces, and made a big joke of it. Many of them were still nursing hangovers from the previous night, and were merely annoyed about having to leave their beds so abruptly.

We were moved to an open field that night, sharing one blanket among three, and tried to sleep as strong aftershocks kept jolting us every now and then. We were fed by the kind hotel staff, and it felt as if we were out camping rather than being stranded in the middle of a disaster zone.

We extricated our luggage the next day and made our way to the airport — the scene there was straight out of a disaster movie. We spent another night out in the cold, and woke up as a particularly vicious aftershock shook me to my very core.

The next day we managed to get on a flight, thanks to Tata Steel’s intervention, and were met by a barrage of reporters at the Kolkata airport. One of them shoved a mic near my face and asked if I had been scared for my life. “No, I was just upset my holiday ended abruptly,” I said, nonplussed.

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