Eye of the Storm

by Sinchan Chatterjee (India)

A leap into the unknown India

For the past three years, I had been complaining at home about all my college friends going out on tours, while I was made to live like a prisoner in the house. My mother and sister loved travelling, but my father, who claimed to be genetically lazy, was not very keen on leaving the house except when it was absolutely necessary. We had a terrible fight at home that ended in all of us screaming, and I decided just to pack my bag and leave. My parents were shocked watching me walk out, and asked where I was going. I hadn’t thought that far; all I knew was that I needed a change of air. I boarded a train bound for Puri, a very popular tourist destination with beautiful beaches and temples and shrines. Once I got down from the train at the break of dawn, everything seemed new to me. I felt like a nascent baby opening its eyes for the first time and curiously staring at the beautiful world around, trying to soak in all the light and colour. With the pocket-money I had saved, I could easily spend a week in a cheap hotel. The first few days were ethereal --- I walked barefoot on the beach, ate delicious seafood, flirted with the waves, wrote names on the sand that the sea swallowed up, and sat back and watched the sunset. I felt so free all of a sudden, like anything was possible. Like an epiphany that must have occurred to Ulysses, life revealed itself to me as an infinite array of adventures with endless potential --- travelling to exotic lands and sharing stories and making friends with new people. I realised that I had forgotten the art of breathing, cooped up in the same rotten neighbourhood for years. I went to a phone booth to inform my parents where I was. When I came back to the hotel that night, everybody was running helter-skelter. Many families were leaving in a hurry with their luggage. Bewildered, I asked the receptionist what was wrong. Too dumbfounded to speak, she pointed to the television in the corner of the room. In the news, they were talking about the approach of a deadly Super Cyclone of unprecedented intensity. People were asked to vacate the seaside. I wanted to leave, but they said it was unsafe outside. We shifted to the top floor, from which we looked outside through the windows. The water-level had risen visibly. I saw an old man with ragged clothes go around banging from door to door. I wanted to go down to let him inside our hotel, but the manager would not allow me to. The wires were all severed, and sparks went off in the water that had drowned the streets. A dog tried to swim helplessly but the water was too deep for its tiny feet. Poles and cardboards and tyres came floating around, swirling rapidly in the water. For the next three days, we stayed huddled up in that corner of the room, without any food and barely enough water. All of us were terrified, and somehow we felt connected to each other through that misery. Five days later, on 5th November 1999, we were finally told that the cyclone had ceased. That very day, I somehow managed to walk to the station through the knee-deep water, boarded a train back home and called my parents. I was afraid of nothing anymore, and something had changed inside me --- the one who walks out of a storm can never remain the same person who had walked in. The news reported that 7,000 people had been killed, and hundreds of houses had been destroyed. I thanked my lucky stars to have seen the ravaging claws of death from so close and yet have escaped alive. Although the train reached late, my parents were waiting for me at the platform. They did not scold me or ask a question, to my utter surprise. My mother, her eyes swollen from crying, hugged me tightly. On the way back home, it was decided that wherever we went from then on, all four of us would travel together.