Monday, December 26 2005 09:50 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Akkaraipettai (TN) : On the first anniversary of the killer tsunami, the waves have gone silent and the sea near-tranquil. It was all calm, on the same day last year also, until a mighty wave as high as 40 feet lashed this fishing hamlet in Nagapattinam district at 9.17 AM changing the destinies of hundreds of sea farers forever.

Nagapattinam, the worst-hit district in Tamil Nadu alone accounted for 6065 deaths- around half of he total deaths in the country.

Thirty two year old Muthulatchmi remembers the fateful day when her kids were playing in the open while she was drying fish on the portico of her house. The sea was calm and her husband Selvaraj had already set out into it.

She remembers a huge wall of water rise suddenly from the placid sea before it hit the village with a ferocious intensity. She struggled in the water for almost a minute while it pushed her into the house.

"The waters receded with the same speed in which it came.

I clung on to the window pane as the waves washed everything inside my house out to the sea," she remembers.

However, the tragedy was yet to unfold in front of Muthulatchmi. She later knew that one of her kids, Murugan (6), was lapped up by the sea. Three days later the dead body of her husband was washed on to the shore.

The past one year had been a real ordeal for her as she had to take care of her only surviving daughter Meenatchi (4) besides herself. Though she still lives in a humid and leaking temporary shelter in Akkaraipettai, she is thankful to the district administration for speedy grant of compensation and for providing her a livelihood by giving her training in soap manufacturing through Self Help Groups.

For 52-year-old Kuttiyaandi, a helper at the Nagapattinam harbour, the tragedy brings before him memories of the nearly 2,000 dead bodies that lay strewn all over Akkaraipettai and Keechankappam beaches, many of which he along with some volunteers buried in mass graves.

"It was scattered all over, like bloated fish. Some badly mangled, some with their organs dismembered," he recalls.

"Only a few people were willing to lend a helping hand with us in burying them," he says.

"While we were piling up bodies one after the other into the grave, we could hear the heart-rending wails of many women, who recognized the bodies as belonging to their near and dear ones," Kuttiyaandi recollects.

More than 2,500 bodies now lie under an area of 10 kilometre in Akkaraipettai beach and Keechankappam beaches, he says.

Kuttiyaandi is one among the many unsung heroes in this coastal village, without whose help the district administration would have faced the additional burden of battling with an epidemic.

Then there is four-year-old Arun of Annai Sathiya Orphanage, who saw both his parents being washed away by the sea in front of his own eyes.

"For days together, he would not even utter a word. He was so traumatized by the tragedy that we had to employ a lot of psycho-social counselling to bring him back to normal," says S Suryakala, in-charge of the orphanage.

However, Arun has now regained his chirpy nature and was seen encouraging his fellow inmates of the orphanage as they finished a 72-feet-long painting depicting the tsunami in record time, on Saturday.

"It's the resilience of the people, their determination to fight back against odds and emerge stronger that has been brought to the fore after this tragedy," says Nagapattinam District Collector J Radhakrshnan, who has been co-ordinating relief and rehabilitation work in consultation with the community.

"After a whole year of trials and tribulations, their sheer resilience and grit has won at the end, something this mighty tsunami could in no way browbeat," he says.