In this town, road to recovery starts from a priest’s doorsteps

His eyes bloodshot, Father Gomez wanders wistfully among the wreckage along the beach. A bright blue boat sits in the sand cracked in two like an eggshell, the reinforced concrete pier jutting into the sea has survived the sledgehammer force of the tidal waves but in many places, iron couplings stick out of their sockets.

‘‘Father, correcting the pipe alignments won’t work. It will take too long. Let’s have them re-laid completely. That’s the only practical solution,’’ says assistant executive engineer of the Tamil Nadu Water Authority, M Arockiam.

There’s frantic need to resume piped water supply in the town but, as the engineer says, iron content in the water remains beyond permissible limits. ‘‘Our tube wells are 500 feet deep and the pipes are all twisted. You straighten one and seawater keeps coming in through some other crack you can’t detect,’’ says Arockiam.

The formidable apparatus of the administration is arrayed here, including special ‘high-power’ teams from Chennai, but when it comes to getting sage advice, eliciting people’s cooperation or pushing through a proposal unmindful of the red tape, all those in the frontline of relief come to the assistant parish priest of Colachel.

Till last week, Father Gomez couldn’t stir out of St Mary’s School, where he was immersed in the nitty-gritty of running the largest relief camp in an area where more than 800 people died and close to a lakh have been displaced.

He was there in the forefront right after disaster struck, initially even helping with the numbering and logging of newly-arrived bodies.

After that, he was in the camp, persuading the Satya Sai Baba Trust to send more blankets, rushing to the school portico to settle an impromptu fight among stressed-out survivors, checking out on Sister Fathima who had passed out from fatigue—long nights that fed into longer days and still longer nights.

‘‘Haven’t had a proper bath for a week,’’ Father Gomez admits sheepishly.

In the long mud trench that separates the town from the sea, a crane is trying to salvage an earthmover sinking by the minute in the sludge. The effort is a study in the frustrations of limited equipment and unprecedented disaster. The crane struggles to lift the earthmover’s chassis, fails, struggles again.

‘‘We were just not prepared for this. It’s the three monsoon months (June to September) when we anticipate disasters,’’ says Father Gomez.

The tsunami has rewritten, perhaps permanently, the covenant between the people of Colachel and the sea that provides them their livelihood. In this town and the surrounding villages, fishing has been the ancestral occupation. Hindus worship the sea as a goddess who provides for her people while Christians dab sea water on their foreheads and eyelids, and pray to the Virgin Mary and St Anthony to afford them a good passage.

Colachel was reclaimed, adorned, docked and wharfed by the erstwhile Travancore kings. It became a major hub in mid-18th Century following the historic battle of Colachel when Marthanda Varma’s captains sank D’ Lannoy’s fleet off this very same harbour, and with it what remained of Dutch ambitions to colonise India.

But what makes Colachel resonate, even among city folk along the Arabian Sea coast, are its native catamaran fishermen. Men who dare the deep on two twelve-feet long pieces of wood lashed together.

No beach in Kerala, including ones in its remotest north, have not had a group of Tamil catamaran fishermen disembarking there one season or the other. With their exotic catches and exuberant ways, Colachel’s fishermen are the nomads of the south seas, as it were.

From near the pier fronting Aniston Bhavanam and the Tamil Nadu Maritime Board’s office, Father Gomez cheers a handful of fishermen preparing to go to sea, the second time in three days. Three each to a catamaran, they push the sleek craft into the waves and then straddle it. Each man cups water in his right hand and then pours it over the transom, an offering to kadalthai or the sea goddess. Lifebuoys, their only concession to the tsunami, hangs out from the catamarans’ davits.

Because it sits so close to the sea’s surface, the catamaran’s geo-tectonics are often accelerated. ‘‘The catamaran is always rocking. It’s up one moment, down the next. Our sight is limited to a small circle. We are warned of approaching vessels by changes in the water,’’ says Emmanuel Devasahayam, who is not part of the sea-goers today.

By now, his mid-morning survey over, Father Gomez starts trudging back to the St Mary’s camp. Stagnant salt water lies in pools in his path, reflecting a gray sky.

Soon, the catamarans would have disappeared over the horizon and Father Gomez back to tending his busy flock.