On a not-so-fine morning, I was woken up by a call from my cousin who was yelling that ‘the ocean has entered the city’. That’s the verbatim message of his call to me at about 7am in the morning – ‘The ocean has entered the city’. My response apparently was ‘What? Are you joking?’. ‘I saw it with my own eyes’ he screamed. I still didn’t believe him. I asked, ‘Is this like the ‘milk-drinking-Ganesh’ episode?’. He was yelling on the other side impatiently, ‘Come and see it yourselves’. He sounded more excited than worried. Living in the coastal locality such a thing must first create fear and chaos. Like always, we don’t think these things ever happen to us. When such things happen, when you see things like ‘ocean entering the city’, the overwhelming feeling is that, ‘My oh my, I’ve never seen and I don’t think I’ll ever see such a thing’. I rushed to the beach. After all, I was one of the people who experienced the tremors in Chennai earlier that morning.

We want to witness these things so we can get that original experience and probably tell stories. That’s what exactly I’m doing now. On the tsunami day, if you’re a Chennaiite, you must have been in Chennai. I would have been hugely disappointed to find myself miles away from the coast on that day. When such things happen there is a tendency to witness and experience these things. That’s the top-of-the-mind feeling. That’s more to do with the natural calamities because we haven’t still figured them out yet. They are huge, they are powerful, they are unstoppable, they’re mysterious, they prove that they’re bigger than you and your scientific achievements all put together.

Being undecided on whether to believe or not, I took my motorbike and rushed to the beach. The beach was just a mile from my home. The moment I came out of my home, I realised that it had to be true. There were so many people on the road in groups, talking about what they saw, why the tsunami has come, the end of the world and all that. It was awfully unusual to find so many people on the road. When you find so many people on the road, they must be walking or moving or they must be in a procession. These people were not walking or moving. They were simply standing on the roads and talking in groups. May be, they felt more comfortable in the company of fellow humans. Natural calamities do unite people.

As I got closer and closer to the beach, I could see that there was a huge mass of people facing the beach, watching the damage and the proceedings. I parked my bike somewhere. Nobody cares about ‘no parking zones’ in these times. Such times are when no one would bother much about law and order or discipline. Discipline is for orderliness among the humans. But the humanity was under threat. At least that’s what most of them thought. Many thought tsunamis were happening all over the world on that day. Many thought there would be more tsunamis on the same day. Many thought that that would be the end of the world. It was impossible to ignore that, as per Hindu cosmology, the end of the world had something to do with water.

I managed to find my way through the mass of onlookers to get a peep at my beloved beach. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t see the beach at all. It was all filled with ocean water. The ocean had broken its boundaries and had truly entered the city. What I saw was ocean and after the ocean the main roads of the city. The ocean had come closer by more than half a mile. The beautiful sand beach was not to be seen at all. I could see the huge boats on the main road. They were washed away to that extent. The rescuers were still busy rescuing people and retrieving the dead bodies.

The marina beach had a crucial part in my life. Marina was never too far me. For about 25 years, we had stayed less than a kilometre distance from the beach. It’s hard find a Chennai boy not have played cricket in the beach. I too have played in the beach. Now I wonder how we managed to play there. There were so many teams, players, pitches and balls completely overlapping each other but still there was some method in the madness. May be it was the chaos that we liked and enjoyed. Me and my friends used to spend so much of our time in the beach also chatting, discussing, arguing and debating. During my college days and later, we used to be there almost every other evening with some or the other topic to talk about. It could range from mild-ragging one of our gang or to some serious social issues. I have some fantastic memories from the Marina beach.

I returned home dumbstruck and awestruck. That was one day when all the households were watching nothing but news channels. All those ‘I-told-you-so’ astrologers were having a field day. More doomsdays were predicted. Scientists had their say. Nostradamus was referred and every effort was made to interpret him in such a way he predicted this. I was in shock though I didn’t quite express it. It wasn’t just shock, it was some kind of unexplainable fear. There was some pain too. It was very painful to see the beach like that. It was like seeing the rubble of your house where you lived for decades. We didn’t know the beach would be back to its beauty. We didn’t know when we would be able to visit the beach again. We didn’t know if the fear of tsunami would play a part in our relationship with the beach going forward. For many days the beach was completely deserted, partly due to the police restrictions and mostly due to the fear of more tsunamis.

My father tells me that when there was a attack threat on Madras during the second world war, many landlords sold their property for throwaway prices and fled from the city. Similarly, tsunami brought the real estate prices down in the coastal regions. When there is a threat on life, money becomes a non-issue. Life is uncertain. But we go on living as if we’re very certain about our lives. We keep saying life is uncertain but don’t actually live our lives like we mean it. We realise soon enough that life being uncertain is the most certain thing.

I told you that I don’t get dreams or nightmares. But the few days since the tsunami, I got so many nightmares. The one I still vividly remember is this. I’m in the terrace of my friend’s two-storey house. The road in which this house is, is very broad and is perpendicular to the beach. From the terrace, you could see the beach and the ocean very easily. While I’m standing there road-watching, I suddenly see people running haywire on the road. There is suddenly chaos and terror. And the next thing I see is that of huge wave of water entering that road. The water level is so high that standing in the terrace I could reach out to touch the water. That image of ocean gushing towards us in that broad road submerging all the houses was the most horrific nightmare I’ve ever had. It chills my spine when I write this now!

This is a fake picture but this the closest we’d get to see a true tsunami scene. Imagine being able to see such massive waves gushing towards you and you’re watching it from the beach! Nowhere to run. Surrender and accept the truth.

If we claim that we learn from experiences, events and incidents such as these must have also taught us something. That tsunami was a clear reminder to humanity. A reminder that there is very little under our control. A reminder of how uncertain life is. There are many such reminders. They have and will come in the form of tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, fires, typhoons or even with those little things we can’t control. Let’s be aware, be reminded.