The tarpaulin tent reeked of slush, fish, fear, and imminent death. Inside were a 19-year-old mother and her two boys aged one and two. Their world had come crashing down minutes before — the kadal they worshipped, had raged into their seaside home. “We waited,” recalls Arulselvi. The waves had hurled them deep inside a tank in their neighbourhood of Srinivasapuram and they were buried below layers of rubble that were once homes, shops, and temples. Then, Arulselvi heard a voice. “It was a lady from the locality. I called out to her; told her we were inside the thotti . She brought help.” Arulselvi and her children were rescued unharmed. That was when she first heard the word — tsunami.
It has been ten years since the tsunami struck Chennai; the memories though, are fresh. It’s the people who depend on the sea for a living who were most affected. The fisherfolks' settlements bordering the Marina were dissolved by the waves like sandcastles. Today, life goes on as though nothing had happened. Children play cricket by the beach; vendors chatter as they wait for customers; fishermen with sand-speckled feet sort out their catch — these people started life from scratch after December 26, 2004.
“ Ellam pochu — we lost everything,” says Elanga of Nochi Kuppam. She was cleaning prawns for a customer that morning. “I had just had my tea and sat down to work. Suddenly, someone shouted that the sea was coming at us,” recalls the 57-year-old. “We dropped everything and ran. Odunga, odunga (run, run) was all I heard.” Elanga remembered a file back at home. It had papers to claim her dead husband’s pension; her family’s future depended on it. “I sent for my son to fetch it,” she says. Holding the file to her chest, Elanga ran with the rest of the kuppam. She lost balance in the melee, fell into a ditch and broke her leg. “We spent a week by the Santhome church. There were no homes to go back to,” she says.
Jalamani clung to a pole by the Lighthouse when the water rose to her chest. “If not, I would have been washed away like my two goats,” she says. Manjara Velli remembers fish “flying”. “The catch was all swept away; the water was full of dead fish.” She adds after a pause: “But there were dead children floating in the water at neighbouring Ayodhyakuppam and Srinivasapuram.”
These two settlements, that are closest to the sea by the Marina, were also the most affected. Kalaiselvi of Srinivasapuram walked to her usual spot to buy fish to sell that morning. She points to a bush by a building on Loop Road and says, “I saw four dead people inside it after the tsunami. There were three here,” she points to the road. “And two there.”
Her husband Govind was out fishing in the waters by the Broken Bridge. “We had left a catamaran some distance from where we were raising the nets. Suddenly, it started gliding towards us,” he says. “That’s when we realised there was something wrong.”
The sea they grew up in, turned hostile. Winds howled and the water loomed over them. “I saw my 15 kg net tossed like a feather,” remembers Govind. He managed to escape. Velu’s friends, however, were not so lucky. “Four of us went to sea that day,” he says. “Only two came back.” Velu saw a bunch of boys who were playing cricket on the beach being washed away.
Govind lost his nets and boats. “I bought another with the Rs.4,000-worth coupons the government gave,” he adds. The tsunami has left a lot of people bitter. Fisherman Thennarasu is tired of talking about it. “I’ve spoken to hundreds of people like you,” he glowers. “What’s the point? Can you give back what we lost?”
Arulselvi, however, has realised how much she values life. “When we were trapped inside, all I could think of was my husband who was at sea,” she says. “If the water was this forceful on land, imagine how it must have been at sea.” Once she was rescued, she dropped off her children at a relative’s place and rushed back to the ravaged kuppam in search of her husband. Arulselvi will never forget what she saw. Draped in a torn sari, she scoured the mounds of debris for a sign of familiarity.
She found him lying on a catamaran, crying to the skies. “Are the boys alright?” he asked, the moment he saw her. “I lost my net,” he then sighed. Their home, the cupboard with all their clothes, the kitchen with the utensils her mother gave her when she got married...they were all gone. But at that moment, Arulselvi didn’t care about anything else. “I hugged him and cried and cried,” she smiles.
