Revisiting the Indian Ocean Tsunami 20 years later

Rijuta Dey

How does one recalibrate their place on earth when the ground beneath them shifts? It has been just over 20 years since a vicious earthquake shattered the seabed in the Indian Ocean and set off killer tsunami waves that destroyed lives across much of Asia. But the catastrophe’s particular impact on me lingers on, decades later.

I was part of a group of 50 school students from Loyola School, Jamshedpur, visiting Port Blair (now Sri Vijaya Puram), the capital of the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in December 2004. That trip, the first one away from parents, turned out to be more memorable that any of us had bargained for.

The morning of December 26 was supposed to be the day we would take a ferry ride to a neighbouring island. I often think about the vagaries of fate, and what would have happened if the earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale had hit just an hour later.

When the earthquake struck, my roommate and I were jolted awake, and we ran down the stairs of our hotel as the building continued shaking ominously. Such was the terrible rush that most of us hardly had time to wear proper clothes or footwear. I had fled sans my eyeglasses, and it was doubly discomfiting to be unable to see the contours of the buildings or even the road that we were standing on.

It is that sense of being rudely awakened, the amorphous terror of realising that I am not safe, that has continued to haunt me, literally and metaphorically, for the next twenty years. For a few years after the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami, I would approach a beach tentatively, and feel uneasy looking at the unending maw of the seemingly calm ocean.

I overcame my fear of the open ocean only when, coaxed gently by my university friends, I swam off the coast of England. My feet cut into the pebbly beach of Brighton after my swim, but I felt invigorated by the realization that the vast ocean had held me and let me explore as my heart desired. The waves were ceaseless but remained in a form I could rely on.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. Roads had cracked open, and we heard that the runways in the small airport were not in a condition to support rescue flights. I called my mother from a phone booth two days later, blithely informing her I was ok, and complained that the ferry ride was never rescheduled. She did not tell me that the earthquake had unleashed monster waves that had wreaked havoc in multiple countries. Instead, I heard her sobbing quietly, and I assured her I was unharmed.

After the initial shock had worn off, we students mostly had fun, camping under the open skies in a local park, as the hotel buildings were too damaged for us to sleep in. We were the first ones to be evacuated, after Jamshedpur-based Tata Steel bigwigs had a word with authorities at Indian Airlines that a bunch of their employees’ children were stuck in a disaster zone.

It was only after we had been rescued off the beleaguered island, and I rested my head on my own bed, that the recurring nightmares began. The morning after I was back in my childhood home, I got up in a panic, feeling the bed shake, and realised after several agonising moments that it was all in my head. I was safe on terra firma, and when I glanced at the clock on the wall, it was just after 6.30 am, right about the same time that the earthquake had struck on December 26.

Over the next two decades, this recurring nightmare took on an insidious life of its own. After the first few months, I was no longer woken up in the mornings by apparitions of an earthquake. The time shifted, as did the frequency. It could catch me unaware at any time of night, my body holding onto the trauma of that December morning with a stubbornness that continues to surprise me.

Anyone who has shared a bedroom with me has witnessed it; me waking up in absolute panic and asking for reassurance that the earth was not shaking – be it my college roommates or later my partners, they all had to tell me decisively; “No, it is just in your head.”

But just because it was in my head did not make it less real. The crippling fear I feel is the same, and though this does not happen every night, I have become used to self-soothing, opening my eyes wide and willing it to see beyond what my brain shows; that the world is not spiraling out of control. “It is not real,” I have told myself repeatedly, be it in New Delhi, London, or New York.

I have gone months without the nightmare, but it seems to have seeped deep into my bones, because it always resurfaces, like a monster of the deep which awakens every time something is awry with the state of the world.

I was driving across Sri Lanka’s sun-drenched coast in the summer of 2023 and came across a memorial of a village that had been devastated by the cruel waves that had appeared out of nowhere and left unimaginable destruction in its wake. I remember taking in the quiet calm of the honey-hued beach, and then walking into the azure sea with a smile on my face. Our tremendous tenacity in the face of precariousness is what keeps us going. The normal and the quotidian can turn terrifying in a moment, but our resilience forces us to find our footing every time, even the ground beneath us insists on shifting.

(Author is a business journalist who has worked across three countries and multiple trade publications. Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Times of India, and The Hindu. She lives in New York City.)