On a balmy Sunday morning at Marina Beach, Brajita Poulose, 45, her husband, two sons and four other relatives strolled along the shore in the sunshine, enjoying the ocean breeze. Young men were playing cricket, joggers trotted past food vendors, fishermen hauled in their nets. Then, without warning, the placid ocean turned violent.
"I was holding my cousin's hand, my two sons were walking behind me, and suddenly . . . we saw a huge wave coming at us," said Poulose, who lay exhausted in a hospital bed, as her eldest son, Jiyo, sat weeping at her side. "We did not have enough warning."
The water quickly rose to Polouse's shoulders, she recalled, and a torrent caused by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean swept her inland, across the main road along Marina Beach, a broad ribbon of golden sand at the edge of this bustling commercial city in the state of Tamil Nadu.
Jiyo, 29, tried to keep his mother in sight, but the surging current pushed them apart. "In no time I was alone, and I couldn't see anyone," he said. "It was one continuous wave."
He caught up with her hours later at a government hospital. The bodies of his father and younger brother Sebastian were in a nearby morgue. The rest of the family was missing.
Indian authorities said Sunday night that more than 3,000 people had died in the tsunami, generated by a massive underwater earthquake early Sunday off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean along an 1,100-mile stretch of India's southeastern and southern coast, with a heavy toll in Tamil Nadu, on the Bay of Bengal. Among the dead were fishermen and other residents of coastal villages, as well as city-dwellers and visitors out for morning walks on the oceanfront of Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Hundreds of fishermen and others were missing Sunday night.
Authorities in Tamil Nadu put the death toll in the state at 1,750. India's private NDTV television channel reported that 1,000 people had died in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian territory between Sumatra and Burma.
In the state of Andhra Pradesh, more than 200 were killed, according to Indian Interior Minister Shivraj Patil, and local officials said some 280 had died in Pondicherry, a former French colonial outpost on the southeastern coast. In the state of Kerala, a popular winter destination for foreign tourists on India's southern tip, more than 120 people were reported to have died. Seawater flooded villages more than a mile inland in the state, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Waves also caused devastation in Sri Lanka, surging across roads and railroad tracks and pouring through coastal villages, markets and beach resorts. Authorities said late Sunday that at least 3,500 people had died. Elsewhere, the dead included more than 4,000 people in Indonesia and more than 300 in Thailand, where more than 5,000 people were reported injured.
Hoisted by helicopters
Indian television channels carried video footage of helicopters hoisting people to safety in Madras. They also showed turbid waters swirling around stranded buses, beaches strewn with wreckage and women wailing over the bodies of children laid out in makeshift morgues.
Dev Anand, 22, said he had been playing cricket with four friends at Marina Beach when the waves swept them inland. Three of his friends survived. But one, whom Anand called "Sheik", could not be found Sunday night. "He was too thin," Anand recalled after making the rounds of hospitals and morgues with the three other friends to look for the missing man. "We kept yelling out to him to hold on to the lamppost, but he could not."
Ravichandran, a fisherman from Elliot's Beach in Madras, said he noticed something was amiss as he pulled his morning catch from his net. "I saw the waves climbing alarmingly," Ravichandran, 32, told the Reuters news agency. "I rushed back and pulled my wife and two children out of our home. Water had rushed into our hut by then."
Rajani Unni, also from Elliot's Beach, said the tremors felt like being on a train. "I turned around, and I saw that a small glass table with a flower vase was shaking," she said. "We saw people rushing away from fishermen's colonies lining the beach. Women were wailing and crying."
Ekambal Nayakar, 50, who lives with her 75-year-old mother in Pattinappakan, a shantytown on the seafront in Madras, said she waded and swam to safety while others rescued her mother. "The water entered the house this deep," Nayakar, 50, said, pointing to her neck. "Then I heard voices outside -- 'Seawater! Seawater!' -- and people were running helter-skelter toward the tallest building they could see."
Pazhani, a fisherman, told Reuters he was taking a bath when seawater entered his bathroom. "I got so scared that I ran out," he said.
His wife, Lakshmi, said she was having breakfast with her three children at the time. "We had to leave everything and run to safety," she said. "We don't know what has happened to our TV, radio, utensils."
Swept away by the waves
Muthalakshmi, a fisherman's wife, told the news agency that her mother had gone to the oceanfront to buy fish and was swept away by the waves. "It took us an hour to recover her body," she said. "Thank God my husband had not gone to sea, as he was unwell."
Some small boats were swept far inland by the ocean surge, while others were washed out to sea. P. Pamanamurthy, a resident of Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, said he saw fishermen holding on to overturned boats as the receding waters pulled them seaward. "I was shocked to see innumerable fishing boats flying on the shoulder of the waves, going back and forth into the sea, as if made of paper," he told the Associated Press.
In New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered senior cabinet ministers to stricken coastal areas to survey damage and directed army and naval units to help with search and rescue operations. Reports from isolated coastal villages Sunday night indicated that the death toll was likely to rise, Indian officials said. They expressed particular concern about the fate of thousands of people in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.
"About 10 to 20 villages have been reportedly washed away, and it has become difficult to get information from there," Home Secretary Dhirendra Singh told reporters in New Delhi. "We're keeping our fingers crossed."
In Sri Lanka, President Chandrika Kumaratunga declared a national emergency and the military scrambled to mount search-and-rescue operations, although troops were hampered by wave damage to naval installations, officials said.
The port in Colombo, the capital, was closed. Resort areas and villages south of Colombo were heavily damaged, as were isolated communities on the island's less developed eastern side, authorities said.
Sri Lanka, a teardrop-shaped island off the southern tip of India, is known for its lush tropical forests, tea plantations and idyllic, crescent-shaped beaches. It has experienced a tourist boom since government forces and rebels from the country's ethnic Tamil minority declared a cease-fire in 2002.
Coastal areas in the northeastern districts of Mutur and Trincomalee were smashed by waves as high as 18 feet, D. Rodrigo, a Mutur district official, told the AP. "The police station in Mutur is underwater," Rodrigo said.
The Associated Press quoted one of its photographers, Gemunu Amarasinghe, as saying after a tour of the area south of Colombo: "I counted 24 bodies in a stretch of only six kilometers. . . . I saw bodies of children entangled in wire mesh. . . . There were rows and rows of women and men standing on the road and asking if anyone has seen their family members. . . . I also saw people bringing in bodies from the sea beaches and placing them on roads and covering them with sarongs."
Amarasinghe said he had been told that some people were killed when they ran out to retrieve stranded fish after the first waves hit, then were caught by a second onslaught.
'Touching the window'
Roland Buerk, a BBC correspondent vacationing in Sri Lanka, was in bed in his hotel room in Unawatuna, a resort town on the southwestern coast, when the waves struck. "We suddenly heard some shouts from outside," he wrote on the BBC News Web site. "Then the water started coming under the door. Within a few seconds it was touching the window."
He and a companion pushed through the rushing water to a tree and climbed into its branches, but it collapsed under the force of the current. "We were swept along for a few hundred meters, trying to dodge the motorcycles, refrigerators, cars and other debris that were coming with us. Finally, about 300 meters inshore, we managed to get hold of a pillar, which we held on to, and the waters just gradually began to subside."
Buerk described shattered buildings and cars in trees. He said he had counted four bodies, including two Sri Lankans -- an elderly woman and a young woman -- and a Western boy "who looked to be about five years old."
Another eyewitness in Unawatuna, Swati Thiyagarajan, described the wave to an NDTV reporter: "It was literally like the sea stood up and walked to your door."
Lancaster reported from Cochin in the Indian state of Kerala.