Chennai: “I wish I had died in the tsunami. My family would then have got some money from the government as compensation. It’s our bad fate I survived”. Fisherman V. Shanmugavel of Kanathur Reddikuppam comes out as a very bitter person. The 47-year-old tsunami survivor must have petitioned every conceivable state official in his decade-long battle with the notorious red tape but is yet to get the promised rehabilitation relief three cents of land and Rs 25,000.
“Chief Minister Jayalalitha amma had announced quick relief for all the survivors after visiting us in the Rajiv Gandhi general hospital the day after the tsunami. While she was so kind, the officials turned out to be insensitive, even cruel. They tossed me from one office to another. I haven’t got anything yet”, Shanmugavel told DC, while spreading out the various petitions he had written and the huge media attention that his tragedy attracted over the years.
Shanmugavel had just stepped out of his seaside shack at Kanathur that fateful morning on Boxing Day of 2004 when giant tsunami waves hit the coast. “The waves tossed me up to the height of a palmyrah tree and I fainted”, the frail man recounted. When he regained consciousness, he was being wheeled into an emergency operation theatre at GH and it took several days afterwards for him to fathom his tragedy. His wife and three children had been summoned from native Madurai to be by his bedside, warned by doctors to expect the worst.
‘They told me that relief workers searching the beach for survivors and dead bodies found a hand jutting out of the sand. When they pulled me out, I was limp and cold, so they thought I was dead and laid me in a row of bodies.A little later, a volunteer discovered life in me and I was rushed to the hospital. I was vomiting blood as I had swallowed a lot of sand and the tsunami debris. The surgeons removed a good part of my intestines to save me. I was told I would die if I take on any hard labour”, said Shanmugavel, pointing out that for a fisherman coolie, that meant starvation and slow death.
Some locals took pity and gave him food and shelter, but then, his family back in Madurai, was starving. “At one point of time, we were so shattered by the pain of poverty that my wife and children tried to kill themselves. Neighbours saved them”.
Shanmugavel’s children appear to be intelligent and hardworking, though in permanent distress due to poverty. The eldest girl, Mahalakshmi, 20, is doing her first year M.Sc in microbiology while her sister Manjula Devi is in the final year B.Sc in Information Technology. “My son Balaji had scored 438 marks out of 500 in tenth class and is in the first year of LME in Erode. But he stopped going to his polytechnic a couple of days back because we could not pay the term fee”, Shanmugavel mumbled.
