A career spent on the field has its positives and negatives and the inevitable life lessons. Especially if you’ve seen a fair share of natural and man-made calamities — moments when life meant very little to some people and everything to others. Scenes from the past play out later, unsummoned. As Wordsworth said, “They flash upon that inward eye.” Sometimes it’s a good memory and you are lucky, but often they are torturous scenes, observed, written about. The mind desperately tries to forget, but clearly cannot.
Sometimes they come upon you, summoned, triggered by something recent — a news flash, a visitor from the past, a clipping from the archives, a court judgment. In July 2004, 94 children died because they went to school that day, in small-town Kumbakonam. The school, a three-storeyed building, caught fire after a spark from the noon meal kitchen landed on the thatched roof. The casualties were high because there was little room to escape. Before help could arrive, children inside were burnt to a cinder.
The Hindu ran pictures cautioning viewer discretion, because anything there was to show was horrific. It was possibly the worst-ever scene any journalist who was there had seen, yet. The tsunami five months later would alter that irrevocably. But then there were the burnt classrooms, the overpowering stench, the severed, the charred body parts lying strewn in still pools of water that the fireman’s hose brought a tad too late, the spines of textbooks, and blackboards where the tar went curling up, as if trying to scurry to escape the lick of the flames.
The books lying in the water still had names on them, the ink running with the wetness, but it brought to us, in a sudden whiff, a sense of the children who went to these classes, who wrote in those books — one in which the Tamil curved stylishly, another clearly a child’s hand scrawling in a hurry, a little blackened finger left behind lying on a partially burnt map of Tamil Nadu. A temporary port seemed to open up and we had a fascinating and yet macabre glimpse into their world as it burnt — the sheer panic and mad scramble, the screams and tears before everything quietened down to a hiss, and then nothing.
The mind scarcely forgets. Thirteen years later, as a court released those responsible for the building and its violations against period served already, the mind summons these ghosts again, with stunning clarity. They’ll fade away, of course, but as the mind plays its tricks, they seem real as of now.
