The
death toll in the Solomon Islands,
It's a word that knocks me stone sober today
whenever I read, talk or think
about it. And yet, just about two years ago if someone had asked
me what it meant I might have taken a wild guess that it was a kind of Japanese
fish delicacy or maybe some kind of woven matting you put on the roof of a
bamboo house. Hmm.
I
suppose it is only logical that I should feel so alert whenever I hear the word Tsunami. I live by the sea.
If I were to stand on the balcony and chuck out some object like a can of soup
or a bottle of coke, with some luck and some extra force it might land just
beyond the garden wall onto the rocks which the waves surround at high tide,
and so, be carried off to be deposited some day on the shores of Dubai provided it weren’t picked up by one of those ubiquitous
trawlers roaming the high seas.
But
seriously, following that gigantic underwater earthquake two years ago which
sent waves thirty meters high crashing onto the shores of a string of countries
in south Asia, I couldn’t eat breakfast without visualizing what would happen if the body of water in front of
our house decided to stage a revolt, and to engulf us all. Would there be a
warning? Theoretically maybe. In actual fact, doubtful. The sea was supposed to
rapidly retreat (some people I met who actually survived the Tsunami in south India said they saw the ocean bubble like a huge cauldron of boiling water
before it started to lash back). Opinions on escaping alive ranged from the
bleak which put your chances of survival at zero to the slightly optimistic
which said maybe you would get a few minutes to pack your stuff and run.
Pack?
Run? And then I see that it doesn’t really have to do so much with a “Tsunami”.
It could just as well be an earthquake, a cyclone, some other catastrophe which
comes at you without warning. I see that the word Tsunami is only a metaphor
for life’s unpredictability. So this is the reason that the word sobers me up
so quickly and catapults me out of any
past or future scenario I happen to be lounging in at the time, right into the present moment. Everything disappears in the
instant that I visualize those gigantic waves lunge at me and my entire establishment.
Sometimes, panic struck, I ask myself, what if it were to happen while
I was in the shower, or sitting on the
pot? How quickly would I be able to switch tracks and run? If I could escape in time, what would I take with me? My laptop? A
torch? If I happened to be undressed would I have time to fling on some clothes
before I went out?!
Then all questions blur and I start becoming aware, intensely aware of my own body, of my hands and legs, of the fact that at this moment I am able to breathe, to talk, to walk, to see and to feel. And I know that this moment is all I can really call my own. It’s a sobering thought.
Uma
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