A Sea Change

An hour from Chennai (Madras), figures wade through pools of dark, murky water. Cyclones bring unseasonable rain echoing the loaded skies of a year before. Our jeep stops in front of two large concrete houses. Immediately fifty girls and boys rush to greet us with intense curiosity. Yet as the excitement settles and the babble of Tamil voices dies down, expressions are shadowed by something unspoken. We look at their drawings: serene south Indian fishing villages cancelled out by crazed squiggles. Jagged memories of the Tsunami that upturned their lives instantly in December 2004.

Twelve months on these children are reluctant to speak of that morning when boats, crops, buildings, and thousands of people were washed away, They are aged between ten and sixteen and live now in a Karuna-funded educational hostel run by a local group called the Sakya Foundation, Their mode of remembering is succinct, visual: they draw and are eager to take photographs.

The cameras catch their experience more eloquently than any probing interviewer could. (How can we really know what it is like to be swept along by water as tall as the highest trees?) Instead their pictures speak to us. Sometimes dark and severe. But also in a friend's embrace: frogs leaping in puddles; the sun reflected in a bucket of water; distress and terror subsumed in moments of light. Miraculously a future is being shaped from the broken past.

Rasidha is ten years old and an orphan, having lost all of her immediate family in the tsunami. She only escaped because she was in her cousin's house at the time of the storm. She had never used a camera before and (like the other children in the hostel) answered “no”, when we asked who owned any photos. Puzzled at first, it suddenly dawned upon us that these kids had lost all their possessions in the "mud water", as they call it. Poignantly, Rasidha's favourite picture is a cow suckling her calf. When asked to explain why, she responded, "mother love".

Shanti is fourteen years old and lost her home in the tsunami. Her father is a fisherman who was getting ready to put to sea when the tidal waves hit. Her mother was at home cleaning pots with her younger brother. At the time, 8.55 am she was sitting in the branch of a coconut tree when she saw water approaching the height of the trees. She climbed down and ran alone to the next village. It was only at 11.30 am that she was eventually discovered by her parents. (All the children gave us times with an eerie precision.) A lively and intelligent girl, she likes being at the hostel because she is now going to a much better school. In her village the teachers didn’t always bother to attend, a common problem for poor children in rural areas.

This picture was taken by Illyaraja who is thirteen and has one younger brother and two younger sisters. His parents were farmers but the salt water ruined their land. (7,300 hectares of agricultural land was lost to the tsunami in Tamil Nadu alone.) They now scrape a living working as labourers on other people's land. Illyaraja's favourite picture was of water in a bucket. He spotted the sun being reflected in it as he was walking across the waste ground behind the hostel. He knew immediately that he wanted to take the shot.

This picture was taken by Santosh who is twelve. He has an elder brother and a younger sister. His father was a fisherman but his boat was destroyed in the storms and he cannot afford to buy a new one. He has been given some land to cultivate rice from the government. Because his family live 360 km away from Chennai, his mother has only been able to visit him once. His favourite picture is a frog. He told us he has always liked frogs, and the way they jump. Many students enjoy taking pictures of plants and animals, reflecting their village background and a life spent close to nature.

Rajadurai is sixteen years old. He remembered that on the morning of the tsunami he was sitting outside studying. At 8.26 am the first wave hit him without too much force. But the second wave completely overwhelmed him and he spent ten minutes in the water swimming to safety. At one point he saw a dead baby caught up high in a tree. He took a lot of pictures of a weir, as though hypnotized by this part of the canal system near the hostel. When we asked him why, he answered simply, "Water will destroy everything."

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