Tsunami redefines island people’s ties with the sea

He pointed to where the tsunami had redrawn the coastline, creating curves in place of a straight edge. It seemed to reflect the way the murderous surge also rewrote, perhaps permanently, the relationship between the people of this island nation and the sea that surrounds it.

‘‘Now people hate the sea — they hate it,’’ said Dudley Silva, an irrigation engineer in Matara, of a population who until the tsunami liked nothing better than a sea bath on a Sunday. On Monday, he said, he had seen a woman standing and cursing the ocean, waving her arms in fury.

Of the countries affected by the tsunami, none has suffered proportionately more devastation than Sri Lanka, with 30,000 people reported killed out a population of just 19.5 million. (Indonesia has three times as many dead, but it has more than seven times the population.) Seventy per cent of Sri Lanka’s 830-mile coastline was devastated.

For fishermen, hotel keepers and all the others who live and work along the coasts, there is a toll beyond lost lives, homes and livelihoods. There is the new psychological strain of being surrounded by, and dependent on, a force that proved itself so merciless. Subakean Albino, a fisherman, first heard the ocean’s calming rhythm when his mother gave birth to him in a beachfront house 70 years ago. Throughout his adult life, he rose at 3 am and paddled out across the sea’s inky surface, hoping it would provide.

In Mullativu, his fishing town on the northern coast, home to roughly 5,000 people, Hindus worship the sea as a goddess who provides for her people. Christians like Albino dab sea water on their foreheads and eyelids and pray to the Virgin Mary and St. Anthony, who is believed to have the power to ward off ship wrecks.

Churches and temples were built along the shore, allowing people to consecrate milestones like birth, marriage and death as the surf rolled in. Young people recall frolicking in the waves. ‘‘We played in the sea, we bathed in the sea,’’ said Selva Malar, a 23-year-old whose name means Rich Flower. ‘‘We loved the sea.’’

The deep familiarity with the sea is one of the reasons many people remain so bewildered by the tsunami. Sellakandu Selvanayagam, a 71-year-old matriarch, said she could sense when the weather shifted and the ocean became dangerous. But she and other longtime coastal residents said they had no inkling that Sunday that a tsunami was approaching. ‘‘This time we were taken by surprise,’’ she said.

Selvanayagam was swept away by the first wave and managed to survive by clinging to a mango tree. Her brother and all seven of his children died.

In other parts of the town, entire families were wiped out, with one man losing 25 relatives, according to survivors. On other parts of the coast, whole villages disappeared. In all, 3,000 people are believed to have perished in a matter of minutes in Mullativu and in surrounding villages.

Albino talks of the sea as if it were part person, part god. ‘‘We see it as a mother,’’ he said of the force that has been his lifelong companion. ‘‘Our mother has punished us.’’