On December 25, 2004, the Director was in Port Blair, on his way to New Delhi. Since he was traveling for official reasons, he had left his family in Malacca. He spent the night of December 25 in a government guesthouse — the Haddo Circuit House, which stands close to the water. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he was woken by the shaking of his bed. He stepped down to find the floor heaving and realized that an earthquake had hit the town. As he was running out of the building, his mobile phone rang. Glancing quickly at the screen, he saw that his wife was calling from Malacca. He guessed that the earthquake had struck Car Nicobar too, but he was not unduly alarmed. Tremors were frequently felt on the island, and he thought his wife would be able to cope. The guesthouse, meanwhile, was still shaking, and there was no time to talk. He cut off the call and ran outside; he would phone back later, he decided, once the tremors stopped.
He waited out the earthquake outside, and when the ground was still at last, he hit the call button on his phone. There was no answer, and he wondered if the network was down. But he had little time to think about the matter, because a strange phenomenon had suddenly begun to take place before him: the water in the harbor had begun to rise, very rapidly, and the anchored ships seemed to be swirling about in the grip of an unseen hand. Along with everyone else, he ran to higher ground.
The islands of the Andaman chain rise steeply out of the sea, and the harbor and waterfront of Port Blair are sheltered by a network of winding fjords and inlets. Such is the lay of the land that the turbulence that radiated outward from the earthquake's epicenter manifested itself here not as an onrushing wall of water but as a surge in the water level. Although this caused a good deal of alarm, the damage was not severe.
It was not long, however, before it occurred to the Director that the incoming swell in Port Blair's harbor might have taken a different form elsewhere. The Nicobar Islands do not have the high elevations of their northern neighbors, the Andamans. They are low-lying, for the most part, and some, like Car Nicobar, stand no more than a few yards above sea level at their highest point. Already anxious, the Director became frantic when word of the tsunami trickled down to the waterfront from the naval offices farther up the slope.
The Director knew of a government office in Car Nicobar that had a satellite phone. He dialed the number again and again; it was either busy or there was no answer. When at last he got through, the voice at the other end told him, with some reluctance, that Malacca had been badly hit. It was known that there were some survivors, but as for his family, there was no word.
The Director kept calling, and in the afternoon he learned that his thirteen-year-old son had been found clinging to the rafters of a church some 200 yards behind their house. Arrangements were made to bring the boy to the phone, and the Director was able to speak to him directly later that night. He learned from his son that the family had been in the bedroom when the earthquake started. A short while later, a terrifying sound from the direction of the sea had driven the three of them into the drawing room. The boy had kept running, right into the kitchen. The house was built of wood, on a cement foundation. When the wave hit, the house dissolved into splinters and the boy was carried away as if on a wind. Flailing his arms, he succeeded in taking hold of something that seemed to be fixed to the earth. Through wave after wave he managed to keep his grip. When the water receded, he saw that he was holding on to the only upright structure within a radius of several hundred yards. Of the township, nothing was left but a deep crust of wreckage.
"And your mother and sister?" the Director had asked.
"Baba, they just disappeared…" And now for the first time the boy began to cry, and the Director's heart broke, for he knew his son was crying because he thought he would be scolded and blamed for what had happened.
"I was strict with him, sir," the Director told me, his voice trailing off. "I am a strict man — that is my nature. But I must say he is a brave boy, a very brave boy."
Having spent thirteen years on the island, the Director was well acquainted with the local administration and the officers on the air base. Through their intervention he was able to get on a flight the very next day. He spent the day searching through the rubble; he found many possessions, but no trace of his daughter or his wife. He returned to Port Blair with his son the same evening, and the two of them moved in with some friends. Every day since then he'd been trying to go back, to find out what had become of his wife and daughter, but the flights had been closed — until this one.
"Tell me," he said, his voice becoming uncharacteristically soft. "What do you think — is there any hope?"
It took me a moment to collect my wits. "Of course there is hope," I said. "There is always hope. They could have been swept ashore on another part of the island."
He nodded. "We will see. I hope I will find out today, in Malacca."
With some hesitation I asked if it would be all right if I came with him. He answered with a prompt nod. "You can come."
I had the impression that he had been dreading the lonely search that lay ahead and would be glad of some company. "All right then," I said. "I will."
At the airfield in Car Nicobar, the Director arranged a ride for us on a yellow construction truck that had been set to the task of distributing relief supplies. The truck went bouncing down the runway before turning off into a narrow road that led into a forest. Once the airstrip was behind us, it was as though we had been transported to some long-ago land, unspoiled and untouched. The road wound through a dense tropical jungle, dotted at intervals with groves of slender areca palms and huts mounted on stilts. Some of these had metamorphosed into makeshift camps, sprouting awnings of plastic and tarpaulin. It was clear that the island's interior was sparsely inhabited, with the population being concentrated along the seafront.
Earlier, while the plane was making its descent, I had had a panoramic, if blurred, view of the island in the crisp morning sunlight. No more than a few miles across, it was flat and low, and its interior was covered by a dense canopy of greenery. A turquoise halo surrounded its shores, where a fringe of sand had once formed an almost continuous length of beach; this was now still mainly underwater. I saw to my surprise that many coconut palms were still standing, even on the edge of the water. Relatively few palms had been flattened; most remained upright and in full possession of their greenery. As for the forest, the canopy seemed almost undisturbed. All trace of habitation, in contrast, had been obliterated. The foundations of many buildings could be clearly seen on the ground, but of the structures they had once supported, nothing remained.