Tsunami-hit gets voice back after surgery

BANGALORE: The landmark 'Majestic restaurant' near the Velankanni shrine is no more. The 40 workers of the restaurant along with the 120 guests were swept away by the killer waves. The lone survivor Raja P, a 30-year-old cook at the restaurant who underwent a host of procedures for multiple fractures at a private hospital in the city, spoke for the first time after the tsunami."Within a minute everything was over," Raja recalls, the horror in the face refusing to go. "The killer wave, almost 30 feet high, hit the shore and threw us some three kilometers from the shore..." Raja had managed to hold on to a tree in his bid to escape, but was pulled back into the sea. His head rammed a concrete wall and then a metal rod of a boat. Raja suffered multiple fractures on his lower jaw among other injuries. He had not been able to take any solid food or speak because of his broken jaw. The local hospital at Velankanni had only managed to put some stitches in his jaw in order to prevent further bleeding. A week after the disaster, Raja was brought to the city's HOSMAT hospital for a maxillo facial correction. The jaw has now been fixed and brought back to shape. The treatment was sponsored by a resident of Bangalore, Ajay Mathew. Raja is happy that he was spared by the killer tsunami. "But my house and the restaurant is all destroyed and I have nothing to look forward to. I will not go back to the coastline," he says.