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March 6, 2005 TRAGEDY'S WAKE: FACING THE FUTURE ALONE Torn From Moorings, Villagers From Sri Lanka Grasp for Past By AMY WALDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/international/asia/06lanka.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position= [N] AVALADY, Sri Lanka - This village had been the loveliest of places to live, sitting on a narrow sandbar that extended into the Indian Ocean like a skeletal finger. On one side was a resort-caliber beach, on the other, a lagoon that separated the village from the nearby town. Palm trees dripping with coconuts provided shade. Water glittered all around. But beauty was not why Santosh Chinnathambi Selvam had decided to return. Nor was the draw purely livelihood, although he, like everyone here, had once done well by the water. It was the idea of community that lured him, even though about one-third of his community was dead. This eastern village was one among thousands affected by the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami, which killed nearly 180,000 people across Asia and Africa. Navalady was luckier than some, harder hit than most. Of about 1,900 inhabitants, at least 620 died, the government says. The school in Navalady had 365 students. Only 178 are left. "I am the balance" - the remainder of a family - has become a prosaic self-description here. Today most houses are gone, reduced either to piles of bricks or to their foundations. The only sounds are the wind, waves and birds, and the dogs that survived whimpering for masters who did not. A few men wander through like ghosts, or in search of them, Mr. Selvam, 41, among them. If a charismatic, mammoth man with a flowing black beard can be an orphan, he is, though he calls himself a bodybuilder. He could eat 10� loaves of bread at a sitting. He could hoist 330 pounds of cement, and lift a woman with his leg. But when the tsunami came, with all his strength, he could not save even one of his four sons, or the wife who bore them. He recited the boys' names, oldest to youngest, like a descending scale. Shankar Das, 12. Sadishwaran, 10. The younger the son, the harder the name was for Mr. Selvam to say. At Tara Singh, 6, he began to choke up. By the time he reached King Kong, a 4-year-old who was already trying to lift weights like his father, he was crying. Mr. Selvam was standing before what had been his house, which now looked as if a chain saw had neatly sliced it into geometric pieces. He had come back to bury for safekeeping what little he had left, which seemed to suggest a certain resistance to fate. But as he watched looters - "outsiders," he called them - picking over the bones of his village in the distance, he professed indifference. "My family's not here," he said to no one in particular. "Anything you want, you can take." Most of the 490 families who lived here before the tsunami were related in one way or another, united by blood and shared history, if separated by class. With his immediate family gone, only relatives and neighbors were left. If he got sick among strangers, he asked, who would care for him? Placeless people can find themselves nostalgic even for homes linked with horror. More than the longing for a specific piece of ground, it is the ache for normalcy, familiarity, routine, the ability to locate themselves in a web of known people. Devastation followed by deracination for many survivors was proving too difficult to bear. Perhaps that was why Navalady's residents, all of whom had decamped for a school in Batticaloa, the nearby town, wavered between vowing they would never return here and saying they would come if everyone else did. Mr. Selvam, for one, had made up his mind: There was no place like home, even if home no longer existed. Adrift and Aggrieved If someone would clean the wells and provide tents, Mr. Selvam said, he could do the hard part - persuade even grief-stricken neighbors like Sellamanikkan Manokaran, 43, who lost four of his five children and had vowed never to return, to come back. But even Mr. Selvam's simple wishes seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. More than a month after the tsunami struck, not an ounce of debris had been cleared from here except by thieves. The road to the village, washed out by the tsunami, had not been repaired. That inaction seemed to portend neglect for a region that has always been a stepchild for the southern-oriented government and the northern-dominated rebel group it has fought for two decades, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The area is dominated by Tamils, the bulk of them Hindus, who constitute a minority in Sri Lanka. For these people adrift, then, there was no champion, and they seemed to sense that. At first, the refugees had rebelled against a proposal to shift them from the school to a tent camp under construction outside Batticaloa. The camp had no electricity, said Pillyar Kannamuttu, 61, no markets, no transport. What would they do? Nine days later, he and others were already acquiescing, exhibiting the resignation that is the lot of refugees. "We have to go there - there is no other option," he said. They wanted to stay together as a village, but no tent camp had room for so many families. Their division, too, would have to be accepted with a passive equanimity. Life had a flatness now, which was different from a routine. Going forward, it was becoming clear, would not be the same as going back. Methodist Central College in Batticaloa, where the people of Navalady were now living, was founded in 1814 by an English missionary. On the ornamental fence outside the college were slogans of uplift. "Determination in tasks can even make storms go back," read one. "Social happiness depends on the ability to bear up," said another. Social happiness, in the school that was housing 1,132 refugees, also meant the preservation of a certain social order. Navalady had had rich men, who owned large boats and brick homes. And it had poor men, with small huts and paddleboats who often earned just enough to eat. In the refugee camp, rich and poor quickly segregated themselves. Paddle-boat owners took certain rooms, big-boat owners took others, even as their children mingled freely. Rich people tend to have rich relatives, and so it was that even though all of the villagers came with nothing but the clothes on their backs, now, once again, the rich had more. They often bought their meals from outside, or took food from relatives, largely disdaining helping in the communal kitchen. More reliant on the supplies from the Tamils Rehabilitation Organization, the aid group, closely linked to the Tamil Tigers, that was supplying food, the poor were thus more inclined to help cook for everyone. Maheshwaran Nageshwari, 44, was among the poorer class. She helped in the kitchen as much as she could. She said it was the only thing that kept her from losing her mind. A diabetic, she could not even eat the food she cooked. Seven families were sharing the classroom she now called home. How did they all fit? Two families spent most nights at the homes of relatives. But mostly, it was that they were remnants - every family down to one or two survivors. In the classroom, she and Ravindran Sivakulundu, 43, sat together looking for all the world like husband and wife. It was an illusion: he had lost his wife and four children, ages 6 to 18, she her husband and 25-year-old son. Once neighbors, they now seemed an awkward match, each reckoning with an uncertain future. He feared the sea and did not want to return to it. Perhaps he would do river or lagoon fishing, he said. Like many mothers, she wanted to withhold her surviving son from a ravenous sea. She would send him abroad, she said. Fishing was all he knew, but she did not want him fishing in Sri Lanka. The men had never gone so long in their adult lives without going to sea. They dozed, chatted, at night sometimes drank, but mostly did nothing - because there was nothing to do. The women did laundry, or cooked, or did nothing themselves. Families bathed at the homes of neighbors, and filled out endless forms, detailing their lost possessions, lost children, and more. "They have come and written and written and gone," Ms. Nageshwari said of various officials, as a reporter wrote still more. "Everybody's writing endlessly." At night a quiet murmur burbled through the school. The smoke from mosquito coils drifted upward. Bare light bulbs, centrally wired, stayed illuminated in the classrooms-turned-bedrooms throughout the night, creating the illusion of a detention center. Psyches were on edge. One night a man trying to work out some muscle kinks had banged on a metal waste can at 2 a.m. The noise had sent all the refugees running from their beds, even though they were nowhere near the sea. Tempers were fraying. A fight broke out over whether people were secretly taking supplies from the storeroom and selling them. The communal spirit was dissipating. With time, it was getting hard to find anyone to cook at all. The common spaces were becoming dirtier. People cleaned their own classrooms, and that was it. The filth worried Velmurugu Nasaraja, 34, who had lost his wife and three daughters. Only his 13-year-old son, Danujan, the oldest, had survived, and the father was all the more protective of him now. What would he do if Danujan got sick? He had other concerns. Young people played games for money in the camp; he worried that such games would turn children into gamblers. "Here he is always playing. He is not thinking about studies," Mr. Nasaraja said. "My son is obedient. He listens to me, but when he sees others playing he is also tempted to play." Other parents gave their children money to bet. He disapproved, at least in theory, but it was not easy to be strict with a boy who has just lost his mother and sisters. Mr. Nasaraja gave his son a 10 rupee note, and soon Danujan was playing marbles with a huge smile on his face. By one estimate hundreds of children in the camp had lost at least one parent; some were orphans. Leela Vadi, 56, watched her daughter drown in a fishing net during the tsunami and was now caring for her three granddaughters, ages 13, 12 and 4. Their father had been hospitalized, with wounds to his legs and holes in his memory. In the room next door lived a cousin, Sumitra, 15. Her mother and father had died, with two baby siblings. That left just her and her brothers, Suvendra Raja, 12, and Yanasevaran, 8. Technically, their aunt was caring for them. But she had lost her own daughter and grandson and was gripped by her own grief, too sad to properly comfort them. Sumitra was not inclined to play. Besides, what was play without playmates? At least 10 of her friends had died. 'Who Now Calls for Dada?' The force that swept away houses worked the same sort of obliteration on families, taking their women and children most often. The men left behind seem as lost as children without parents. Mr. Selvam, the bodybuilder, re-enacted with extraordinary vividness the experience of the tsunami, showing how when the "boiling" water first came he had tried to swim, with the arms of his wife and mother-in-law wrapped around his neck. Then, as the water surged in again, he heaved them upward in a vain attempt to save them, hit a wall, blacked out, awoke to see a naked woman, remembered his family and swam in search of them before being carried inland by another wave. He still limped from his brush with the tsunami. Four of his nine brothers and sisters also had died, but it was the mental and physical torment his children must have endured that haunted him most. "My wife and children must have thought, 'Father is here, he is a bodybuilder, he will save us,' " he said, crying. "I couldn't do it." He told how when some relief money had been handed out - 1,000 rupees for families, 500 for bachelors - he had been given the amount allotted for bachelors. He was now a bachelor, he repeated incredulously. He could find another wife, he said, crying, "but I can't have those children again." Their voices filled the place, he said - him asking for water, a little boy's answer: "Wait, Dada, I will bring it." He was crying again. "Who now calls for Dada?" he asked. "There's not anyone to come and call." Those with at least a wife or one child surviving had something to work for. Those without were at loose ends, waiting for a new purpose. Vallapulai Venagamurthy said he could handle it when he lost his oldest son a few years ago, because the rest of his family could comfort him. Now all the comforters, his wife and four children, ages 12, 10, 8 and 4, were gone with the tsunami. "I am alone," Mr. Venagamurthy, 39, said, holding up a pinky to illustrate. When the tsunami came he had saved other people's children, but he was not home to save his own. He expressed confidence that he could regain his livelihood but also a complete lack of interest in doing so. He had been among the first to be given a new canoe by a Dutch aid group, Cordaid, working to restore fishermen's livelihoods. But where some men quickly attached wooden balances to their canoes and pushed into the lagoon, Mr. Venagamurthy stayed on shore. His mind was not right to go back to sea, he said; he would give the boat to relatives. People who did not drink before the tsunami were drinking now, he said, himself among them. At night, unable to quell memories of what he called that "fateful day," he numbed himself woozy with beers, then lay his mat where he could find space in the refugee camp and curled up like a stray dog. Going Back to Go Forward The present owes a debt to the past, the future to the present, so Hindus believe. Preserving the unbroken line of civilization means honoring that debt before moving forward; preserving peace for the living means satisfying the dead. And so, according to custom, 30 days after the tsunami the people of Navalady returned to their village, which had become a burial ground, to cook a feast for their relatives who had died. In family after family, the guests would be multiple. On the afternoon of the feast, a village that had been utterly bereft of life since the tsunami began to stir with it. Families climbed off the boats that had brought them across the lagoon. They dragged banana leaves as tall as men across the sand, and sat as if waiting for a picnic to begin. As the men watched, the women worked. They chopped coconut ever finer, then squeezed its milk out with their bare hands. They peeled eggs, and sliced onion. They fried fish. Around 6 p.m., the people of Navalady began to set out their meals. Pillyar Kannamuttu would have six lost loved ones at his feast, ranging from a 2-year-old granddaughter to his 54-year-old wife. The table was the foundation of a house he had given as a dowry for his youngest daughter, Uday Lakshmi. Both dowry and daughter were gone. The women cut an enormous banana leaf into six pieces to make plates for the dead, and piled up food. Bananas. Fried yams. Jumbo peanuts. Vegetable cutlets. Rice and curry. Dates. Above the sea, a full moon hung. Above the lagoon, the setting sun was striating the sky and water beneath an apricot-gold. In the gloaming, a woman who had lost her mother and daughter cried out again and again. Another woman screamed: her estranged, drunken husband had eaten the feast she had prepared for their lost child. With time the sky over the lagoon took on the color of a bruise. The women lighted sticks of camphor, and one by one, family members came forward, hands folded in prayer. Night came. Other than where a few dead palmyra trees had been set alight, the blackness was punctured only by small points of light - lanterns, candles, oil lamps. Each pointed to a mourning family, sitting in silence where its home had been. This practice, carried out for centuries, was all the more important with an unnatural death, Mr. Selvam, the bodybuilder, said. He did not want the wishes of his children's souls to go unfulfilled. They would come and eat to their hearts' content. He, the one who had been so sure he wanted to return, was less sure now. He no longer came every day to guard his things. It bored, and even worse, depressed him. He was not certain how to negotiate new rules mandating that houses be 100 meters from the shore. He did not know where he would live next, or what he would do. Back and forth, back and forth - feelings as fluid as water flowed all around. On the morning of the feast, Pillyar Kannamuttu had said he never wanted to return to Navalady. "There is nothing left there," he said. "It is like a cremation ground." Yet at midday, here he was, strolling with his family through the ruins. Home, even ravaged, had an inexorable pull. "Once the atmosphere of fear is removed, the houses are rebuilt, and the tsunami becomes the past, we can come and live here," he said. He showed a smiling, plaster statue of Kadalaxshiaman, the deity who guards the sea. The tsunami had moved it out of its temple and about 110 yards inland. "We installed this deity here," Mr. Kannamuttu said. "She survived, but she did not protect the people here." Nonetheless, people had placed new offerings before her. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company =========+========= FEEDBACK? http://nativenewsonline.org/Guestbook/guestbook.cgi GIVE FOOD: THE HUNGERSITE http://www.thehungersite.com/ Reprinted under Fair Use http://nativenewsonline.org/fairuse.htm =========+========= Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Native News Online a Service of Barefoot Connection Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Nat-International/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
