The people of Pattinacherry have known the sea all their lives and have no illusions about it. But after the tsunami struck, what would be tough to handle is the trauma and restoring confidence in their vocation, says SUBASH JEYAN.
(Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on January 9, 2005.)
THILLAI RAYAR PATTINAM, shortened in wayside boards to T.R. Pattinam, is like any other road-front small town on NH-45A between Karaikkal and Nagapattinam, in Tamil Nadu. As you come down a bridge and the highway makes a sharp turn to the right, you almost miss a small access road leading off in the opposite direction to a village by the sea you can see a couple of kilometres away. I notice it because there is a youth on a moped preparing to go down to the village.
Destruction in Pattinacherry
His name is Thirumurugan and that village is Pattinacherry, a satellite village of T.R. Pattinam. He is from a neighbouring village and is going to Pattinacherry. It is the worst hit village in Karaikkal he tells me as he adjusts his face mask. His own village, just a kilometre or so along the seashore, has escaped with relatively minor damage, he says. He agrees to me coming along with him but soon our bikes come to a halt because there is no road ahead. Just a 10-metre-wide chasm where there was a road before and where the waves of the backwaters were gently lapping against broken bricks and rubble. This is a new road, Thirumurugan tells me, built within the year.
We come back to the highway and take another road to the village. Even before you reach the village you get a hint of the things to come. Lying incongruously in the rice fields are a boat and a catamaran, a couple of kilometres from the sea. As you enter the village, you notice the destruction immediately. A few concrete structures are still standing and the main street of the village is strewn with trees and rubble. Most of the houses, including concrete ones have been flattened. Boats are strewn around everywhere.
We park our bikes and pick our way among the rubble. A few men from the Land Survey office are going around taking notes. Some men from the Electricity Board are re-laying the electric line in the main street. The village had three streets, says Thirumurugan. There are no signs of the other two. As we walk down to the southern end of the village, we see Lombardini diesel engines strewn around everywhere. There is a ridge protruding a feet above the ground along the beach. That used to be a protective wall to prevent the sea coming in, says Thirumurugan. Huge concrete blocks from the wall are lying all over. Further down are the remains of what used to be a casuarina grove. Just a clutch of stumps now.
The village is totally deserted, like all villages along the shoreline, says Thirumurugan. We come back to T.R. Pattinam, to the temple where some of the people from Pattinacherry have been put up. Others have been taken to unused theatres, schools and kalyana mandapams. In the temple there are a couple of vans from a private aid trust, distributing groceries, stoves, utensils. Almost a week after the tsunami, the people are still dazed, sitting around the temple pond in groups. And there is a smell of arrack in the air as the men talk, the few that are willing to.
Women, the victims
Kaliyaperumal, an elder of the village, says the village has lost around 170 people. A majority of those are women, he says. How come, I ask. The boats had just come in with the catch, he says. And it is the women who take the fish to the market and they were all there. About 20 people are still missing. Quite a few people were in the casuarina grove when the waves struck. Though some houses have bathrooms, lots of people still use the grove, he says.
Dhanapal, a man in his twenties, says his father was in the beach when the waves came. Most young people on the beach made it to safety but my father couldn’t, he says. Lots of people also succumbed to the concrete slabs from the protective wall flying around when the waves hit.
No boats left
Rathinaswamy, a man in his forties, says there were about 150 boats in the village, big and small. The bigger boats were operating from Nagapattinam. Not a single boat left, everything we had is gone. How do we start life from scratch at forty? he asks. We are no longer young and can’t work the way we used to work. We don’t even want to go back to the sea, he says. Dhanapal echoes the same sentiment. It was a total surprise, he says. If the seas are going to be rough or if there is going to be a cyclone, we can usually make out the clues in advance and take necessary precautions. We didn’t have a clue about this one, he says. A lot of houses in the village have TV. Even if we had an hour’s warning, we could have saved a lot of lives, he says. Even in the midst of such personal tragedy, there is a thought for others. We hear it is worse on the Nagapattinam side, they say.
Relief efforts
The relief efforts, though they look unorganised, seem to be taking care of their everyday, short term needs, though they still use the open spaces beyond the village for their toilet needs. The highway, right from Chennai, is full of trucks and vans from all over India, carrying everything from medicines to food to plastic buckets. Not all of it seems to be reaching the really needy though and some private aid groups had brought along video cameras and were as much interested in recording their generosity as in distributing food.
The physical reconstruction, one hopes, will eventually happen though governments can get their priorities alarmingly wrong. On the highway in Tharangambadi (Tranquebar), for example, a dozen men were busy repainting and doing up bridges and road signs. The government has promised to replace all damaged boats and construct new houses in Pattinacherry. What would be tough to handle is the trauma, restoring confidence in their vocation. The people of Pattinacherry have known the sea all their lives and have no illusions about it. They know it can be destructive. But when something that has been the basis and foundation of their lives turns a stranger overnight, the resulting confusion and fear can be paralysing. Till they are helped to cope with that, they won’t be returning to the sea.
After three years I went back to Pattinacherry again and wrote this report:
A village revisited
Three years after the tsunami struck, a look at the way relief measures have shaped up in Pattinacherry, the worst-hit village in the State of Puducherry. SUBASH JEYAN
(Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on December 23, 2007.)
The people of Pattinacherry have known the sea all their lives and have no illusions about it. They know it can be destructive. But when something that has been the basis and foundation of their lives turns a stranger overnight, the resulting confusion and fear can be paralysing. Till they are helped to cope with that, they won’t be returning to the sea. “A village by the sea”, The Hindu Sunday Magazine, January 9, 2005.
The people of Pattinacherry eventually did return to the sea, though it took them six months to get their boats sailing again. Six months, when they went through life dazed, six months when even their food, they gratefully remember today, was cooked for them by the volunteers of an Italian NGO.
The memories are still vivid. Against the huge losses that took them by surprise that December day, people still remember small details with clarity: the water level creeping up inside a house but stopping just short of the TV; people waking up in the nick of time… and death of loved ones that still brings tears. And though they have become a little stoical and philosophical (“When something like that happens, what can one really do?”) there is that lingering trace of bitterness that even an hour’s notice on the TV could have saved so many lives.
So, three years after the disaster, what’s it like on the ground today?
Government’s efforts
Immediately after the tsunami, the government gave each family Rs. 2,000 as interim relief and Rs. 10,000 a little later. The government also compensated them for the loss of their boats. While the owners of bigger boats anchored in Nagapattinam, around eight of them, got about four lakhs, owners of smaller fibre boats lost in the village got Rs. one lakh each, while owners of catamarans with outboard engines got Rs. 50,000 and those without engines got Rs. 25,000. And that’s about the extent of the government effort as far as Pattinacherry is concerned, apart from donating land nearby for building new houses for the villagers and building an embankment wall.
And, though they are aware that for many organisations the disaster was just another occasion to make money, they do remember that more than government presence, it was the NGOs that made them cope with the immediacy of the many losses. They particularly remember an NGO from Anantapur which gave the village 24 fibre boats fitted with engines and fishing nets. And another Nagapattinam-based NGO, Sneha, compensated each family Rs. 10,000-30,000 for damage to their houses, depending on whether they had mud houses or tile houses and the extent of the damage, say A. Thangadurai and M. Arumugam, members of the Panchayat, which has 11 members, and, remarkably, there is no president or any other office bearers. Every decision is taken collectively by all the 11.
As we walk around the village, one notices that there is a public reading room with a TV with satellite channels. An initiative of the village youth, says Arumugam. Another thing that immediately catches your eye is the newly-constructed embankment wall. Pattinacherry had been susceptible to the sea washing in often so there had been a wall there previously. When the tsunami hit the village, some of the deaths had been caused by concrete slabs from the wall flying around due to the impact of the waves. The new wall, about 10-feet high and made of reinforced concrete and designed at the IIT, Chennai, the villagers hope, will fare slightly better. It’ll be much more effective than the previous one in preventing the sea coming in though they are not too sure how effective it’ll be against a tsunami. But it does make them feel a little more secure at night.
What does not make them feel so secure are the houses that have come up on the government donated land nearby. A total of 454 houses have been built, out of which 230 have been financed by the Mittal Steel Company, N.V., The Netherlands. These houses were handed over to the government in April, 2007. At the time the villagers moved in, in June 2007, they didn’t have electricity or water supply. Electricity came only in November. Six months later, sewage facilities are yet to come. Everything just flows onto the street or into the neighbour’s backyard.
Glaring errors
All the houses have the bathrooms sealed up and closed because the septic tanks have been built (unusually, buried three feet under ground level) without the air ventilation pipes, making them unusable. More alarmingly, not even six months old, huge cracks have appeared in many houses, on the walls, near the foundation, on the roofs. We were taken to see a house where a huge part of the roof, the concrete plastering, had just collapsed, falling within metres of an elderly woman sleeping inside. A lot of them now prefer to stay in their old mud houses because they say it feels a lot safer and friendlier. Were the villagers even consulted about the type of houses they would like to have? Of course not.
The other lot of 224 houses, financed by Secours Catholic, France and executed by the Pondicherry Multipurpose Social Service Society, seems better designed and better built. These houses, handed over in September 2007 to the government, are yet to be allotted or occupied though.
Uneasy balance
No doubt about it, a lot has been done. Since life’s claims cannot be denied, the people of Pattinacherry have picked up the bits and pieces and moved on, attaining at least a semblance of balance. Dozens of children alight from autos on their way back from the school in T.R. Pattinam. More are cycling back. The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation is building a two-storeyed school, almost complete, in the village itself. But even today, that hard-won balance lies a little uneasily on the shoulders of the villagers because much of what has been done has also been done a little too casually and cavalierly. And that is something they don’t deserve, not after what they’ve already gone through.
Tales I tell myself 