TAMIL
NADU after the tsunami is the third time I’ve visited where a major
natural disaster has struck: Orissa after the 1999 cyclone, Kutch after
the 2001 quake, and now here. Something draws me to this, and by now,
I often wonder what it is. I’ll admit, a certain level of voyeurism
is part of it all: a fascination for the fantastic damage nature can
do to us.
But only
part. In the end, I think my greatest curiosity is for the truly spectacular
human spirit you see in these situations: the way all manner of people
from every part of the country – indeed, the world – spontaneously offer
mind and muscle to helping the victims of calamity.
The personification
of this spirit, for me, remains a young man called P.K. Gupta, whom
I met in Orissa in 1999. Not so much for the work he did... but read
on. At the time, PK worked at Citibank in New Delhi. As far as I could
tell, he read the news about the cyclone, got up from his desk and caught
the next train out to Orissa. With just the clothes on his back and
a towel, he turned up in Erasama, the worst-ravaged district of the
state, and asked to be put to work. And how he worked: for the next
week, he tramped tirelessly from village to smashed village, collecting
information, taking relief materials out, helping burn dead bodies,
on and on. Then he went back to Delhi, to his desk at the bank.
Something
about what drives a man like PK touches me somewhere very deep. And
where great disasters happen, you see it every time, all the time. Young
and old; Hindu, Muslim, Christian and everything in between; rich or
poor; whoever it is, whatever their differences, for a few days they
sink them all in the effort to help their fellow human beings who are
in terrible distress. It’s moving and inspiring, and it’s why the days
I’ve spent in these areas are some of the best days of my life.
But there’s
another point here. My days in Orissa and Kutch taught me a lesson that
I learned once more in Tamil Nadu: if that word patriotism means anything
at all, it must mean the kind of selfless dedication I saw in people
like PK. The simple urge to do something for your fellow human being,
for no better reason than that he is your fellow human being.
ONE late afternoon in tsunami-hit Tamil Nadu, we are struggling through
a wasteland. There’s no other word for this vast soulless nightmare-scape
of rotting slush, debris, ghastly smells, mud, nets and dog and cat
and human carcasses. This is in Akkarapettai, outside Nagapattinam.
It has taken us over an hour to negotiate the slime and stench to where
Lakshmi Narasimhan – a tall, gently-spoken Salem doctor – greets the
dusk with his team in the only way that makes sense in this post-tsunami
miasma.
They pick
up and burn the bodies.
This is
only 500 metres from Akkarapettai – 500 hard-earned metres, yes, where
we have never once been sure of what we are stepping in, rarely been
sure it will take our weight. Nevertheless, it is just a small distance.
But apart from this team that wears badges of the Democratic Youth Federation
of India (DYFI), a CPM-affiliated organisation – apart from them, nobody
is out this far to do this unforgiving work. Nobody. From what they
tell us, there are dead bodies strewn all the way to where the sun finally
sets. Well, five kilometres in that direction, anyway. Forget the five
kilometres, nobody wants to come out even the 500 metres to this spot.
If that’s so, what will happen to those other bodies?
Just getting
here, we’ve seen at least three bodies on smoking pyres, at least five
others just lying around. One’s a little form, sex, age and even humanity
wiped away, lying in a carton. How did it land in there? Sprawled in
the muck nearby is another. Brother? Mother? Who? In front of us is
a collapsed hut; one body lies on the thatch roof as if asleep. Two
men lift the timbers and branches of the roof; there are bodies below.
Nearly gagging from the smell, struggling with the weight and difficulty
of this work, they pull one body out. A boy? They put him on top with
the other one. The others, they decide after conferring briefly, are
impossible to extract. Two men bring the two bodies from behind us,
lay them on top as well.
Then they
set fire to the roof.
As we stand
in the dusk, noses covered against the stench but feet slipping in the
slime, Veerappan, his wife Parvati, their daughter Pasupati, their sons
Ganesh, Dinesh and Abhi – the names listed in a sodden exercise book
at our feet – and two others possibly unknown to them but sharing their
pyre, go up in flames.
Dr Narasimhan
and his comrades are done for today. They are already planning where
in the muck they will go, first thing tomorrow morning. We walk back,
and all the way the doctor complains. Not about the work these men have
voluntarily thrown themselves into, but about how difficult it is to
get fuel. ‘Can you help us?’ he asks me. ‘Can you help us get some kerosene
tomorrow so we can continue our work?’
TRAVELLING along Tamil Nadu’s tragically shattered coast after the
tsunami, we heard plenty of stories of how communities had come together
to help the victims. There were stories of discrimination and neglect
too, but enough of the coming together as well. And one afternoon in
Pudukuppam...
Driving
through the village that afternoon, we found a dozen visibly exhausted
Muslim men, all in white caps, resting in a boat and sipping tea. They
had just finished distributing cooked food to the residents of the village.
For the eighth day in a row.
How this
happened was one of those gorgeous stories that great tragedies seem
invariably to throw up. In nearby Parangipettai, a young man called
Rafiq was going to be married at noon that Sunday, 26 December. That
tsunami Sunday, of course. The food was ready, the decorations were
in place, the guests had gathered, the festivities were about to begin.
But they
didn’t. Suddenly, terrified villagers from coastal Pudupettai, Pudukuppam
and other little villages poured into Parangipettai, running from the
tsunami. In the ‘jamaatkhana’, the men from Rafiq’s wedding party swung
into action, though not quite the action they thought they’d be involved
with. They sent the guests into a side room, gave them biscuits and
water, then turned to the desperate fleers.
They brought
out the wedding food and distributed it to them. Then they began cooking
more. And more and more. Eight days cooking, by the time we met them
in Pudukuppam. Eight days that they had quietly and efficiently cooked
for the villages of Chinnur, Pudupettai, Samiyarpettai, Velankarayanpettai,
Kumarapettai, Panjakuppam, Shanmuganagar, Dalbastaikar and Pudukuppam.
On the
menu today: lemon rice, to feed 300 people in Pudukuppam.
It’s lucky,
says Mohammed Hameem who told me this story as he sat in the boat with
his chai. It’s lucky that there was that wedding scheduled that day.
Lucky all
right, but I had to ask. Did Rafiq ever get married? The men looked
at each other in surprise. Cooking so steadily, none of them knew.
IN a noisy community meeting in Parangipettai, we speak to an impressive
young sub-collector called Rajendra Ratnoo. Surrounded as we are by
a minister, his entourage and several community leaders who have come
to discuss relief, aware that he has many more urgent things to do than
speak to us and so we had better be brief, we have a hard time interviewing
this fresh-faced IAS officer. Besides, it is so noisy that we have to
shout: never a good way to interview anyone.
Still,
we hear enough to come away with the sense that Ratnoo is practical,
sensible and, even then – just five days after the tsunami – has the
situation in the district under control.
What’s
more, this is an impression confirmed by various other people we meet
in the area. Most say that the administration here in Cuddalore district,
where Parangipettai is, has responded to the tsunami relatively well.
That’s because of the work of the district Collector, Gagandeep Singh
Bedi, and his officers like Ratnoo.
Back in
Bombay, I call Ratnoo to ask a couple of questions. He answers the phone
in the middle of a birthday party for his son – I can hear the chatter
in the background. He has invited a number of children to the party.
Nothing unusual about that – what’s a birthday party without lots of
kids?
But this
is unusual: his son’s party guests are children orphaned by the tsunami.
THAT PK spirit, I like to think. Tamil Nadu in the time of a tsunami:
a thoughtful young bureaucrat, an indefatigably selfless doctor, and
the men who don’t know if Rafiq got married. Tell me about patriotism.
Dilip D’Souza