Forgetting Only Way Of Coping: Survivors

Aparna Nambiar / TNN / Dec 25, 2005, 00:25 IST

Text Size

Small
Medium
Large

Jayakumar finds it difficult to admit that the tsunami is a part of him now. He won't talk about the disaster...

Forgetting Only Way Of Coping: Survivors

SECUNDERABAD: As a chill December wind blows, he pulls his shawl tighter around himself and holds out his hands to the bonfire. "My name," he says and stops. "People called me Tsunami Uyir Thayypiyavarkal (survivor)," he says bitterly.
Jayakumar finds it difficult to admit that the tsunami is a part of him now. He won't talk about the disaster, but tries to retrieve the life he had beyond that wall of water.
It is a futile attempt to recover the past, much like clutching at flotsam against the roaring wave. It took away everything �� a seven-year-old daughter and a wife whose fate is still unknown �� and left a silence in his life, from which a cold anger emanates.
"I don't know how I came here," he says of his flight to Secunderabad in the weeks after the disaster. "I didn't even realise it was one year already. I was hoping no one would remind me."

Why are so many tsunami survivors reluctant to talk about it? Whether it is a sailor from the Andamans, a forsaken believer from Nagapattinam, or a fisherman from Cuddalore, the common thread that ran through the tsunami survivors
The Times of India spoke to in Secunderabad was a sullen disinclination to talk about it. The wave has become a wall preventing them from going back to what they were before December 26, 2004.

For months after the tragedy, Jayakumar would not reveal his name to the strangers to whose midst he escaped. He came to Secunderabad, not so much to escape the tsunami itself as to flee the topsy-turvy world it left him in.
He came to resent the busy sights and sounds that filled post-tsunami days in his village of Singarathoppu in Tamil Nadu: The drone of important cars come to do important things, the disaster tourists, the hushed concern of samaritans, the bustle of rehab workers, in short, everything.
"I wanted silence," he says now. He thinks he has found it in Secunderabad, doing odd jobs at the railway station.
But two words do permeate the silence from that day in December. No number of odd jobs will still them. "Appa! Appa!"
Srinivas's way of drowning the silence in him is not to brood, but to fiercely fill it with the din and bustle of everyday life.
The 18-year-old's day starts with delivering newspapers, and it takes in a countless tasks and errands for a living.
He rattles off his plans: "I want to work hard, do a lot of things, earn money, go abroad, start an orphanage." And then, "I want to forget everything."
Yes, he agrees not everything can be forgotten at will. Not the sight of his mother being tossed up in the air and slammed against a wall.
"I wish someone would hit me hard on my head so that I lose my memory." Forgetting is a way of coping for the tsunami survivors.

End of Article