Lest we forget.....

They said she was barely four months old when they first saw her. The great wave had tossed her into a bramble shrub. There were thorns in her hair and scratches on her face.

Of her parents, there was no trace. Two days later, they found her brother who had sought shelter with a neighbour.

Today, Abhinaya is everybody’s darling. At the Cuddalore government orphanage, she is the prima donna. She is perhaps the most written about tsunami orphan in Tamil Nadu. When I first saw her, she was so fascinated by the camera of the photographer who accompanied me that she would let out a loud joyous cry every time the flash bulb popped. A child’s simple joy and behind it the greatest tragedy of our times.

One feels apologetic to write about the tsunami by simply saying, `Two years have passed….’

For me, it was a personal journey of self-discovery that took me to every godforsaken tsunami hamlet in the State, relentlessly looking for scraps of human dignity among survivors. My well-intentioned, but still-born blog notwithstanding, one day I hope to come terms with those memories which, for all of us journalists who were doing the rounds then, will be a curse we will have to bear till the end.

How does one come to terms, for example, with the memory of firemen pulling out from the sand near the Marina the bodies of six boys, who had been buried head first, and who had been playing boisterous street cricket when their lives ended?

Or a rescue worker in Cuddalore quietly carrying what appeared to be a white gunny sack and when you drew close, you found it was the wave-bleached body of a five-year old girl in a lace frock?

Or the surreal scene at the Velankanni shrine where, under all that Christmassy-glitter of the little coloured lamps strung across the shamiana, nearly two thousand bodies lay? Some of them had come from as far as Orissa and had to be buried almost immediately because their corpses had started falling apart.

Or the memory of the bleakness in eight-year-old Vigneswari’s eyes when she said her wave-dead father--a fisherman in Nagapattinam-- had promised her a gift for her birthday but now she did not have anybody who would ever buy her a gift?

Or the Christ-like stoicism of fisherman Victor in Akkaraipettai who, though both his children were still missing, had gone around collecting food packets to feed other frightfully hungry children?

Or the memory of the mass grave in Kanyakumari’s Colachel? We had been told there was a children’s’ grave inside the compound of the parish church and Father Stanley had pointed us to beyond a closed gate. We reached there and found just a raised Cross on a simple, cement platform. We looked around in vain for the graves when somebody informed us that we were already standing on them.

A cold shiver shot through us. Underneath our feet, behind the cement platform, lay the bodies of nearly 150 children. They had all been brought there to rest by their parents who had held decomposing son-flesh and daughter-flesh in their hands and still retained sanity to give them a decent burial.

All one can do now is crave the blessedness of forgetting….