Waves of change

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"Have you seen my son? Are you here to search for my son?" she asked me. I had never met her before. She looked helpless, worried, poor, and then there was something else - something bleak. Like she didn't know what to expect, didn't know if she should have hope. She was 55 at least, and looked like she had been walking around vaguely, along every road that led to the beach, the government hospital, the school with temporary tents.

3 years ago (Dec 26th, to be specific), in a tsunami-hit Cuddalore, everyone who was wearing halfway neat clothes must have looked like an "official" to her - from the collector's office or the police. And since I was one of the few "official" looking women around, she stopped me to ask me that question "where's my son? He went out fishing yesterday... I haven't seen him since."

When my editor had packed me off the previous day to 'cover the aftermath of the tsunami,' he had told me specifically he wanted me to meet lots of people and get him 'human interest stuff.' But this was a shocker - I had come with a sense of adventure, of "meeting people and telling their stories." But this - this, I didn't know how to handle. I vaguely shook my head and she sensed that she had got the wrong party. She was suddenly angry - "you don't know? You're not from the collector's office? Then why are you talking to me and wasting my time?" she walked off without waiting for a reply.

I think that's when the depression sort of seeped in. After that, it was the rows and rows of bodies being pulled out from under the debris that really got to me - here I was, to "do a job." But when you see so many bodies bloated by the sea-water and lying in the sand, women and men sitting on the streets and crying senselessly, children looking lost... you lose something. The tsunami had changed their lives in many ways, but it changed mine too.

One of the resolutions I made, strangely, was to get married. I don't know when the thought struck me. Maybe it was when I saw this young couple waiting for sonia gandhi's convoy to go away before they could claim the body of their child. They took their two-year-old daughter's body wrapped in a Turkish towel with a blanket given in rehab thrown over their shoulder. At that time, I think I decided that I should live my life to the fullest, travel all I want, go see the people and places I want to, not waste a moment.... And yes, be with the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with... because if young parents who must have all along wanted to grow old seeing their little child playing in the sand, learning to walk and talk, go to school with a little hanky pinned to her uniform, had to face this ... then, well... anything could really happen to anyone. Though I had all along believed that anything could happen to anyone but Not to Me, here was something else.

The tsunami was not so much about the lives lost, as it was about the lives changed.