By Vani Doraisamy
Colachel-In the aftermath of Tsunami-pic courtesy of: ywam-India
Earlier this month, as the TV flashed visuals of Peshawar mourning its young and the mass cremations that marked the death of innocence, I was gripped by an eerie sense of recall. Ten years ago, I too had stood on a mass grave which had swallowed up the bodies of more than a hundred children. I am branded forever with that memory. Then too, children had died without realizing what had hit them. Then too, those that survived refused to believe that they were luckier than those who fell.
In the February of 2005, more than a month after the tsunami had smashed into it, Colachel, the sleepy little port town in Kanyakumari in southern Tamil Nadu, was still waiting for the waves to bring back the lost. And there were those that would never come back. Nearly a hundred and twenty bloated little corpses lay buried in an unmarked mass grave inside the local church, with a lone crucifix to mark the spot.
I had told the parish priest I wanted to see the place, not quite prepared for the horror of hearing him say, “You are standing on it.” A hastily poured slab of concrete was what lay between me and 120 dead kids. I remember springing back , shaken to the bones. I remember how, for so many weeks after that, I would feel a cold chill running through me whenever I saw a child, any child.
How does one make peace with those memories?
How do you negotiate the remembrance of the pristine white Velankanni basilica standing unshaken against a by-then-clear blue sea when, just the night before, after having said their Christmas prayers, nearly 1500 pilgrims had been swallowed whole by the waves?
How does one forget how they were now laid out in silent rows under an awning bathed in bright post-apocalyptic sunlight?
I remember how numb I felt. Numbness would become my survival strategy for the next two months, as I traveled the coast of Tamil Nadu, looking for answers, on a journey that was intensely personal.
Continue reading ‘10 years after the tsunami, a look back into those moments I wished I wasn’t a journalist’ »
