Stories From My Travels: The Day The Tsunami Hit

The Tsunami Part I: the calm before the storm

“Sal, wake up!”

I was roused from sleep by an urgent voice in my ear. Not the most welcome thing at 6.40 am to the mother of a highly energetic toddler!

It was Boxing Day, 2004, and we were staying at Amritapuri Ashram, the home of Mata Amritanandamayi, known by many as Amma, or The Hugging Mother.

The ashram is located on a narrow strip of land, around 100 metres wide (from memory) between the sea and the famous Keralan Backwaters. Our room was in a building much closer to the edge of the Backwaters than to the sea and the windows faced away from the sea.

The previous two days — Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — had been high energy, contrary to what one might expect in a Hindu ashram in South India, and I had been looking forward to my two-year-old possibly allowing me to sleep in a bit this morning.

As I opened my eyes I saw her still sleeping soundly beside me and, on the other side of me, my partner was sitting up, alert and concerned.

“Can you feel the bed shaking?” He asked.

I sat up and, indeed, felt as if the bed was trembling violently, but I still didn’t quite believe it.

I looked over towards the portable bathtub that I had bought for my daughter, still full from the previous evening. The water sloshing from side to side confirmed it for me.

We were feeling the tremors of an earthquake.

I leapt out of bed, flung a dress over my head, threw our passports and travellers cheques into a bag, along with a few disposable nappies, and grabbed the baby sling.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Let’s go!”

We made our way downstairs and out of the building. Our room was on the top floor of a fifteen-storey building and, as it turned out, no-one on ground level seemed to have noticed a thing.

Well, that’s physics for you. When an earthquake happens, there’s clearly going to be greater movement at the top of a tall building than at the bottom.

However, I needed someone to tell me they had felt it too.

I asked people we met, milling around outside. No one had felt a thing.

We went to the nearby chai shop, run by an elderly woman and her two daughters. The tall daughter wearing the neck brace served us. She had injured her neck by being hit on the head by a falling coconut — a seemingly more common occurrence than any other dangers in these parts. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head when I asked her if she had felt the tremors.

This only served to make me feel even more adamant to alert people to the earthquake. My gut was telling me that it was just a warning for something bigger. I had no idea what, but something…

I spoke to more and more people, even going to speak to the Western Office (where tourists registered to stay in the ashram), but they also shrugged and said:

“What are we supposed to do with this information?”

No one seemed to be taking me seriously!

One lady even asked me if I hadn’t been having a deep, spiritual experience in meditation. As much as my ego would have loved to lay claim to an elevated spiritual awakening — and be privy to those conversations comparing deep meditative experiences I would hear around the place — that wasn’t going to help my cause.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

We moved on with our day.

I continued to tell people about the tremors, even finding some others at our breakfast table who had felt them, but I stopped talking about the niggling feeling stirring in my gut.

The ashram began to fill with people. It had been announced that Amma would be holding a Devi Bhava that evening (literally translated as ‘in the mood of Devi’ or ‘the divine mother’), where she would perform rituals during which she assumed the most compassionate and divine persona from the godly realms, and welcomed people into her arms through the night.

These nights had become more and more popular over the years that she had been welcoming visitors into the ashram, but they had, by then, become few and far between. So, not surprisingly, by late morning the ashram was the busiest it had ever been.

It was estimated to have around 20,000 people there in total on that day.

By midday, I started to feel tired, and my daughter was showing signs of needing her nap, so we started heading back to our room. As I headed towards the building in which we were staying, I looked around with this strange feeling arising again. That something was coming. And soon.

As I entered the building, I realised that we both had bare feet; we had taken our shoes off at the entrance to the temple and then forgotten all about them. It was easily done, since the ground was all sand-covered, and it didn’t feel unnatural to walk on in bare feet.

“Oh well,” I thought. “I will find them later.”

Little did I know that I wouldn’t get the chance and that of the four sandals left by my daughter and me on the temple steps that day, only one of mine would later be recovered… half-buried under sand that remained damp for weeks.

We settled ourselves down to sleep for a bit. My daughter fell asleep quickly, while I lay with my eyes closed, drifting off gradually as I took in the sound of the water in the shower that my partner was taking and, through the window, of the motorboats ferrying people to and from the mainland.

I was just starting to slip into dreamland when I was jolted awake by the sounds from outside the window turning into the screams and shouts of panicked humans!

I jumped up from my bed and ran to the window. Outside I could see a woman standing knee-deep in water and crying out to someone. I saw water gushing fiercely around either side of the building, and a local fishing boat floating by.

“The sea is rising!” I thought. “We need to get out of here!”

Ready for the next part? Here it is…

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