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Journalism of Courage
Squatting on the wreckage of a canoe crushed by killer waves, gazing out into the calm sea, Thyagarajan is worried about tomorrow. ‘‘Moonram pakkam (the third day),’’ he says.
This fisherman firmly believes in the myth that if the sea loves you, it will return your body the third day after. And, he’s sure the sea loved his mother Pachamma. After all, he says, like most others in Sreenivasapuram, she had lived near the waves for all 65 years of her life.
Yesterday, a few minutes after he left Pachamma in their little thatched home in Chennai’s Foreshore Estate, the waves came crashing in. An hour later, when Thyagarajan ran back to his mother, there was just his battered hut, no mother.
He spent yesterday running all over the beach, hoping the waters would miraculously throw her back alive. But by noon today, after he had looked up the last of the eight bodies that were trucked in, he knew.
Then, he came back to his beach to wait.
‘‘Maybe, she will come back to say she had run away when the waves came,’’ he says.
A hundred metres away, 12-year-old Syed is desperately trying to salvage something from the remains scattered around a five-feet-high piece of wall that used to be his home.
His mother Muktiar Begum was in the kitchen with her 19-year-old sister Davoodbi when the waves thundered in. Syed escaped, but the waves dashed his mother and sister against the walls.
‘‘My mother’s head split open. When the waters were gone, both of them were dead, on the beach,’’ says Syed.
Chennai’s coastal chunks woke up to similar stories of horror today.
In the city, the Marina beach is now a junkyard of shattered canoes, shops and hutments. And 24 hours later, the State Government is yet to pull its act together.
In most of the affected areas, the only food survivors got today was in packets distributed by some voluntary bodies. There was nobody to coordinate their efforts, no one to ensure that the packets reached where they should.
Drinking water is not available in some areas, and there are no toilet facilities either.
‘‘Better tell the city corporation to disinfect the area with at least bleaching powder and vaccinate the survivors for cholera. Or else, we could very well have an epidemic out here,’’ says a group of Government medics running a makeshift camp in Pattanapakkam.
Even now, no one knows for sure how many morning joggers and fisherfolk were washed away in that catastrophic hour. ‘‘It’s safer to go by the body count,’’ says a senior police officer.
Selvan, one of the survivors, is more worried that there may be dead bodies yet under the wet, stinking debris. ‘‘Can’t you smell it, the stink? Fish doesn’t smell this way, only rotting bodies do. Please get the police to bring in their sniffer dogs,’’ he says.
‘‘The doctors said we should drink only boiled water. But we have no vessels, no stove, nothing,’’ says Syedunnisa, who came back home to find just a doorway standing.
