2 Decades On, Survivors Still Counting Cost Of The Great Wave

Anjamma was sorting fish on the beach somewhere on the Tharangambadi coast when she saw a giant wave rise.

- Divya Chandrababu

She instantly dropped her catch of the day and began running towards her house where her mother was alone with her four children. "I was running and screaming at my mother to carry the children," says Anjamma. Then the wave was upon her. "I lost my consciousness and I remembered waking up near my neighbour's house. There was rubble on me."

Anjamma saw her neighbour's daughter's hands dangling near the rubble and she pulled her out; the girl was alive. Next, she limped toward the remains of her home. Only one of her four children was there. The rest of them had been washed away with her mother in the tsunami. "I only found my daughter Sowjanya lying there, unconscious, without clothes," says Anjamma. She found the body of her four-year-old daughter, Sandhya, on the street and those of her remaining two children, Sharmili and Akhilan, in the hospital.

The three children were buried in a mass burial ground in Tharangambadi in erstwhile Nagapattinam district, the worst hit region in Tamil Nadu. A 9.1 magnitude submarine earthquake in the Indian Ocean zone triggered a massive tsunami that wrecked India's East coast.

It was December 26, 2004. At least 10,749 people in India were killed, leaving several families homeless and some victims without a trace. According to the then Thanjavur district collector K Radhakrishnan, Tamil Nadu alone accounted for around 7,900 of the dead. And Anjamma's district was the worst hit: "6,065 were from Nagapattinam which accounted for 75% of the deaths in the state," says Radhakrishnan.

Family torn apart

Anjamma, along with her husband Ayyadurai and daughter Sowjanya, was relocated to a house allotted for tsunami survivors in Tharangambadi. "Sowjanya swallowed too much water in the tsunami but she somehow survived. But, her entire body has been bloated and swollen since then and she could never be healthy," says Anjamma.