Tamil Nadu, India
New Year’s Eve – 2004
There is no joy tonight along the coast of Tamil Nadu. Spanning 700 miles of India’s coastline, this year, at its end, lays in tatters. The moon tonight wanes on a scene of apocalypse.
From a church hall here in the town of Vailakani, the voice of a choir rings out in eulogy across the broken silhouettes of a silent town, and reaches to the waves in supplication. They are notes of deep and heavy grief – a fitting score for the shock that lingers here.
If the horror of the tsunami here is collective, its legacy is personal. I watched a man today stand long and motionless on a ragged beach, searching for answers from the silvery sea. He was, in those moments, the visage of a nation, a lone image wrestling with a grief so profound it as yet has no voice. Such is the mood here tonight.
Everything here seems suddenly small in a way that only nature can make it so. The aid response is gathering, but help comes mostly from within. Indian’s have given freely and trucks full of volunteers pour into the worst hit areas, handing rice and clothes and bread and water from the backs of trucks to up-reaching survivors. If there is any good to draw from the disaster here it is that humanity, in its purest form, still rises when hope for so many is lost.
The road ahead is long. As mostly fishermen, the wrecked survivors must now learn to live again with their murderous neighbor. The water has calmed. The sea whispers and purrs again, singing softly from the beach across which it raged. But those trees still standing bend accusingly seaward, and nets once used to drag a living from the sea hang like shrouds from their battered trunks. The legacy of this disaster is too big simply to linger – it redefines.
I am 300 yards from the beach. It is ten minutes to midnight – New Year’s Eve – and the breeze from the sea plays the curtains of my room like a ghost. Tomorrow, the world will wake up to a new beginning. But in Vailankani, dawn will bring more to the beach to seek in the wreckage some part of their past. There is no joy tonight along the coast of Tamil Nadu.
