Chengelput

Chengelput -



Krishnammal my mother meets us at the 

Madras airport. There she is - looking 

exactly the same as she has for the entire 

27 years I have known her. When she was 

51, she looked old; now that she is 78, 

she looks spry. The usual dress - cotton 

sari (likely a hand-me-down from her 

daughter.) No jewelry. No shoes. You 

would never pick her out of a crowd until 

you confronted her enormous, all 

encompassing energy.



She is, to my way of thinking, surprisingly 

serene, but then nothing surprises me 

about her anymore. She gives a big hug, 

and ushers us to the car. "Sathya (my 

sister the pediatrician) told me just to 

send the driver, but I must greet all my 

children," she says, I knowing that if 

you ask her how many children she cares 

for, she'll ask in return, "How many are 

there?"



Turns out she is in Madras, having just 

returned from her center in Kuthur, in 

Nagai District, the area most affected by 

the tsunami, distributing flood relief 

aid. "The floods were terrible this year,

" she says, and explains that she has 

spent the last two months trying to 

convince the state government to act with 

greater speed, as there are several 

hundred thousand people close starvation. 

"There is no food and houses are falling 

down." For the past two weeks, or so it 

is reported in the press, she has been 

going door-to-door in the neighborhoods 

of the rich - singling out those in which 

government ministers live - in order to 

collect voluntary donations. She has 

collected 50,000 rupees (roughly $2,000), 

but the main purpose is to shame the 

government into action, which she believed 

she had done before the tsunami hit. On 

the evening of Christmas Day, she completed 

distributing rice and blankets among the 

poorest of the poor.



"The land will not hold water any longer 

she says," attributing the problem to the 

destruction of the green belt brought on 

by the spread of prawn aquaculture. "Every 

year it is worse; first drought, then 

flood." About the tsunami, she notes that 

many, many have died, and she likely knows 

the majority of them, at least in Nagai 

District. "What to do?" she says, throwing 

up her hands, "we will do what we have 

always done. There is no point in crying 

on the battlefield." She doesn't have to 

say more. Many of her workers have lost 

family members. She has 67 nephews and 

nieces, and at last count, perhaps as 

many as 360 grandnephews and nieces, and 

somehow she seems to know where they all 

are. And there are hundreds of thousands 

of people who call her "Amma" (mother), 

and she knows them all.



There are ironies - so many! At Cuddalore, 

many more died than would have even 5 

years ago, because only a fraction of the 

fishermen were at sea. Of all the 

fishermen who went out that day, not a 

single one suffered even a scratch. But 

the destruction of the local habitat, of 

the mangrove forests, had destroyed most 

of the fish breeding grounds, and the 

daily catch has dropped by as much as 

80%. As a result, the fishermen have been 

rotating their time at sea, so as to 

prevent overfishing. What will happen now 

is anyone's guess.



She says all the children at the youth 

hostels are okay as far as they know, 

though many have no idea what has happened 

to remaining family members. But water is 

already very dfficult. Where children 

have some remaining family connections, 

Krishnammal is trying to send the children 

to them, to renew family ties in a time 

of grief.



My father, now 91, is virtually blind 

(we wrote about how he lost his sight in 

the battle against the prawn farms in 

"The Color of Freedom"), and deaf in one 

ear, and sleeps a lot. But he too is in 

relatively good humor. The press has been 

calling him - he has been preaching about 

the need for a green belt near the shores 

for more than 10 years, and has been 

imprisoned numerous times to try to 

protect what little remains of a 

livelihood for the rural poor. His 

demons have been exorcised. "The prawn 

farms are all gone," he says gleefully, 

but then will cry himself to sleep about 

all the people lost to the great wave.



He is prepared for battle again, though 

he doesn't yet see clearly which one. 

"The government will compensate the 

companies and the hotels and the 

businesspeople," he says, "but who will 

care for our people when the relief 

organizations go home?" Krishnammal 

shrugs. She knows that while he sleeps 

intermittently in the day time, he will 

stay up all night wrestling in his mind. 

He is a prophet, and will await his 

voices. When we tell him the name of the 

book about his life "The Color of Freedom", 

he says, "Bright color, no?"



My brother has come in from Cambodia. He 

helps run the country's only mental 

health center for children, where besides 

working with children, he trains 

psychiatric nurses and social workers. 

He says most of the country's doctors and 

nurses and social workers were killed in 

the 1970s, and it has been slow-going to 

recreate the needed infrastructure.



We are not headed immediately to Nagai 

District. There is nothing as yet to do. 

The workers here are already thrown into 

relief operations, and the government 

has closed the area to voluntary relief 

agencies until they figure out some plan 

of coordination. In addition, people just 

need some time to mourn, something that 

has been denied them in the immediate 

aftermath of the event. The local people 

find talk of adopting out the children 

offensive, this at a time when communities 

look to their children as their most 

precious remaining commodity. There are 

several teams experienced in earthquake 

relief in the north that are coming, and 

Krishnammal is on the phone incessantly 

helping them plan. "We do not want them 

to stay in hotels," she says, "but in the 

homes of the rich. This is the least that 

can be expected in this hour of need."



"Meanwhile we must plan to feed everyone,

" says Amma (with visitors having turned 

up repeatedly during the day, and more 

relief workers headed to her place from 

other parts of India. It is not clear 

whether she means the flood victims or 

those who are flooding to her doorstep 

seeking the next thing to be done. Knowing 

Krishnammal as I do, she likely means 

both, and it is not even, in her mind, 

a meaningful distinction. I asked her 

where she gets all the food to feed the 

endless stream, and she shrugs her 

shoulders. "God provides the food," she 

says, "that is the hard part. My only job 

is figuring out how to distribute it."





Dear Friends,



This picks up from the time on the 31st 

when my Dad's last entry left off. We are 

trying to catch up, without too much 

success.



At about 2pm, Sathya arrived  back at the 

house, telling us that she was going to 

visit a fishing village near the ancient 

temple of Mahabalipuram with the 

Ramakrishna mission, a charitable 

organization, to provide medical services. 

She invited us to come.



We set off for the village in the same 

car that had brought us from the airport, 

heading out into more rural areas. We 

exchanged the powerful smells of Indian 

cities for the subtle, sweet scents of 

rice paddies. The colors around us were 

chiefly the rich, bright red of the Tamil 

soil, and the yellow-green of vegetation. 

Cows and goats crossed the highway. Water 

buffalo grazed along the roadside, and 

chickens pecked at whatever they could 

find.



After a while, we passed a tollbooth, 

which, before last week's disaster, had 

extracted money from tourists going to 

visit Mahabalipuram or one of the many 

posh hotels surrounding it. These hotels 

are gone now, washed away by a 40-foot 

wall of water, but the 6th Century Chola 

temple, built right on the shore, is 

still standing. It has probably seen 

many other disasters, and survived them 

all.



After the tollbooth, it is not far to the 

fishing village. As we approach, we see 

people living in tents flimsily 

constructed of palm leaves. Sathya and 

the other doctors go to their work, and 

two men of the village, one of whom speaks 

some English, accompany us down to the 

remains of the village.



The small village of Kookilamedu was 

probably quite picturesque before the 

tsunami hit. The houses, those few left 

standing, are painted in bright pastel 

colors, pinks and greens and blues. Now, 

however, most of the houses are smashed 

to pieces. The first row, of new houses 

built barely 100 feet from the sea, was 

completely destroyed, so that I would 

never have known anything was built there 

if my guide had not told me.



I walk, carefully, around boats smashed 

against poles or carried hundreds of feet 

into the woods (My guide tells me that 

many of these brightly painted boats were 

new, and cost about $1,200, a huge sum). 

Tangled fishing nets, broken tree trunks, 

dead chickens, children's clothing and 

shoes litter the ground. In this hamlet 

of 130 families, 150 people are dead. We 

pass the small village temple, around 

which the water parted, forming huge pits 

in the ground. The temple clock reads 

4:15, strangely keeping the right time. 

A volleyball net stands on the beach, a 

strangely incongruous sight amid the 

wreckage. The sea rushes in an inviting 

music.



Fishing is the only thing these people 

know, yet now they are afraid of the sea, 

and are moving the village to a kilometer 

away from the shore. Before the wave hit, 

one of the guides says, the water receded 

so far that all that could be seen was 

sand to the horizon. As we walk back along 

a ruined road, a woman, sitting in front 

of her badly damaged house where laundry 

is still hanging, begins to harangue the 

guides in Tamil. One of them explains to 

me, "She says I should not have brought 

you here. This village is an embarrassment 

to her." The lives of these people, 

without their boats or nets or houses, is 

very uncertain.



We return to the only undamaged building, 

behind which Sathya and the other doctors 

are giving tetanus vaccinations and 

antibiotics to all of the villagers. 

Drinking water had been piped into the 

village, as it is too close to the ocean 

for wells, but now it must be trucked in 

from Chengalpattu, 30 miles away. Although 

the doctors are only giving tetanus 

injections today, they will return for 

cholera, typhoid, and dysentery.



Two girls, about eight years old, with 

flowers braided into their black hair, ask 

me to take their picture. I ask their 

names, and then stumble over the 

pronunciation. They do much better with 

"Aliyah." Sathya has finished her work 

for now, and we return to her house, where 

Amma, Appa, and Bhoomi are waiting for us.



I will write again soon, when I can find a good way to describe Krishnammal.



In the Light,



Aliyah