This Day That Date –Tsunami Memories

This Day That Date –Tsunami Memories

This day that date- I was there. I didn’t want to be. I didn’t even know what I was getting into. They didn’t ask for volunteers, they just asked “coming?”. So I went. Many are the day, nights especially, when I had wished I had had the courage or the presence of mind to say “No, I wont come”. But I went anyway. I went as a group with my classmates from college. All the way down we talked about it but we didn’t realize. We didn’t realize what we were going to see there. No one had any idea. A good thing I might say. Even our wildest nightmares wouldn’t have prepared us for what we saw. We reached late- after all Cuddalore is quite a distance from Chennai. And by the time we got there it was all over- except to line up the bodies for identification and then burial. That’s all we did- checked the bodies to make sure they were dead. All the bodies which the sea washed back to us- back to land. The same cruel sea which had come in to take them away that morning and buried them in one huge mass of water in seconds. Yes, I was there. I was there on Tsunami Day- 26th December……a day etched in memory forever.