We lost dozens

Morning, 26 December 2004. I was in Madurai on holiday with my parents and well away from the eastern coast of India when the tsunami struck. As each hour passed bringing more and more bad news, I was frantically calling my friends and relatives in Chennai, where we lived, hoping that the scale of the disaster was not as bad as the local media portrayed it. I was to understand otherwise.

By evening, when the scale of the devastation had become clearer, I expressed my desire to leave for Chennai the next day. My parents firmly refused. Being an only child in an Indian family is, more often than not, a …