Akash Kapur's epistle from Kalapet tells us with some telling details how loss and relief are both difficult, but it also explores in some passages how important movies and DVDs are to people in Kalapet.
His letter is published in the 10 Jan 2005 New Yorker, a quick and worthwhile read. If you receive the magazine, you'll find his post in "The Talk of the Town" section.
Below are some descriptive and insightful snippets from the letter that should give us a more human sense of the difficulties during and after the tsunami, while challenging us to realize how powerful film and video have become in the lives of all humans, rich or poor, Ameri-European or Indo-Asian.
Kapur was visiting his boyhood town,
Auroville, an international utopian city that envisions itself as the "city of the future" on the morning the tsunami hit. Auroville is outside the Old French colonial city of Podicherry. Kapur reminds us that most people in the world, including himself, experienced the tsunami as a "media spectacle" unfolding in a distant land. Though so close to disaster, Kapur first read about it while surfing the Internet.
Snippets from the Letter
The fisherman and villagers who live along the coast, whose homes and livelihoods were swept away, speak of a "wall of water." The wall came without warning, rising suddenly to more than fifteen feet, and along with cars and refrigerators and cattle and jewelry, claimed a death toll that defied comprehension as it escalated through the week.
Kapur tells us that the "wave" came later, "a wave of people, crawling inland with babies and baskets piled high on heads and shoulders."
Three men, one absent-mindedly delousing a child in his lap, sat on the remains of a boat and, glassy-eyed, surveyed the destruction. A few days before, the beach had been littered with corpses: at least twenty people had died in this village, and another fifty in surrounding hamlets; several more were missing. Now the corpses were in the morgue and the beach was a tangle of fishing nets, television sets, and punched-out cupboards.... Motorboats that had been thrown up against coconut trees were back on the ground, their engines wrenched out and lying a few feet away.
I imagine Hollywood eyeing each scene with envy, planning its next blockbuster or made-for-tv movie.
Families of the dead were each to get a hundred thousand rupees ($2,300), a princely sum in these parts. But, in order to claim the money, families had to produce a corpse -- and many of the dead had been swept out to sea.
Prohibitive -- but in this disaster?
More than a thousand refugees, primarily children but also their adult relatives, were crammed into the classrooms, and the walls were draped with clothes hung up to dry. The toliets were overflowing. In parts of the school, the ground was strewn with feces and plastic bags and clumps of fermenting rice. A sanitation worker threw handfuls of bleaching powder on piles of waste.
And so the second wave of public health disaster begins.
[S]ome boys were chewing sugarcane and acting out roles from Tamil movies. One teenager climbed over the parapet and jumped to the ground, a drop of more than a dozen feet. "What are you doing?" the girls yelled. "Youll break your legs."
"People lost their lives -- what do I care if I break my legs?" the boy shouted back, and he sauntered off, swinging his hips and singing a song from a movie.
Imagine. In faraway and poor Kalapet, movies influence a young person's motives and actions.
Most of the shops were shuttered, but for the local electronics repairman business was brisk. His storefront was piled with television sets and video-cassette players. A couple stood watching as the shop owner took apart a DVD player. The DVD was still inside, and the components were caked with mud.
"Go home," the owner told the couple. "We'll call you if we can fix it."
"Where should I go?" the woman said, laughing. "I don't have a home."