The tsunami that hit this coast on Boxing Day of 2004 killed 18,000 Indians and flattened the homes of around 650,000. Thirty metres high, caused by the second largest earthquake ever recorded, it hit this small fishing town without any notice. After the disaster, rescue workers ran out of body bags. Throughout the affected areas of Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the response was swift, and the death toll from starvation and disease, though significant, was not as large as projected figures. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh refused to take much of the $7bn in aid offered by the West, insisting that his country could go it alone. Many Indians even now tell me they have never forgiven him for what they see as nothing more than stubborn pride.The repairs and regeneration since have been slow. Even now the place has the feel of a town reeling in shock; the shop signs that have taken so long to replace; the water stains that have yet to be painted over. People still sleep on the streets. Poverty is more apparent than that seen in neighbouring Pondicherry, just over an hour's drive away. There were reports in the years after the disaster that women in Mamallapuram and the surrounding villages were trading their kidneys for around £500.
Today, Mamallapuram is covered in tie-dye shawls and ying-yang printed fabrics. Australians, Brits, French and Russians sip cappucinos and green tea in the Bob Marley café. In the evenings, they sit on rooftop bars lit by coloured paper lanterns, and drink ‘special tea’ (beer in a painted china pot), eat crepes with nutella (from a black market in Pondy) and catch the puppies and kittens that seem to be dropping, inexplicably, from every tarpaulin roof sheet. They're all sopping wet from the warm monsoon rains which hammer down suddenly, and disappear as quickly as they start. The strains of caribbean music float down from one window and into the Bob Dylan ekeing from another.
But along the beach, where women tidy fishing nets into brightly painted boats, the empty shells of houses crumble, their iron reinforcements sticking out of the rubble, naked and bent. Almost all the hotels here are still being rebuilt, paid for by the tourist revenues that chatter, slurp, and buy small gaudy statues of Ganesh to put on top of their fridges.
The town is full of orphanages, and touts visit hotels looking for tourists to sing after school songs to the children. Teenagers on GAP year placements here line the bars sipping beers after bed time. Along the beach, houses still provide accomodation for tsunami victims who do not yet have the money to reconstruct their lost homes.Today at dusk, sitting in the sunshine by a makeshift swimming pool, debris and dust begin to fly everywhere. A French tourist shouts over, and points at the sky. From nowhere, a grey-black cloud, like a giant scouring pad, looms in the sky. Without time to even grab our soggy belongings and run, rain tips from the heavens, soaking the path and weighing down the palm trees that creak in the wind. When the tsunami struck, there were a great many more casualties than a couple of sarongs and the tedious holiday reading I’d taken out of the British Council Library.
Back on the beach, a large dark object can be seen in the sand. On closer inspection, it’s possible to make out a rusty swing seat, and following the chain upwards, its steel frame, tipped on its side. And underneath, a twisted, grey slide. Both the slide and the frame still have a thick ball of broken cement on their legs, like the end of a cotton bud. No one in the last four years has come to reclaim this piece of playground. And so, the fishermen’s wives pass on by, every morning and afternoon; it's another reminder of the day the town was swallowed by the sea, only to be slowly spat out again. Reggae music or none, the giant wave is not forgotten.
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