CUDDALORE, India – With the corpses mostly cleared away, some of India’s poor fishing families ventured back to coastal villages Wednesday, three days after a killer wave flattened many of their homes and washed their possessions out to sea.

What they found was grim. Bricks scattered over the beach like flotsam by a receding tide after the tsunami reduced homes to rubble. Fishing nets hopelessly tangled in palm fronds and other debris. And fishing boats – their livelihood – washed out to sea.

Even as workers searched for more bodies and rushed to cremate them to prevent disease, the plight of the survivors served as a poignant reminder of the huge undertaking that lies ahead: rebuilding villages and reconstructing lives.

“It’ll be two months before I can go fishing again,” said Ramesh Parwaraiswami, 32. Odds and ends of clothing, waterlogged schoolbooks and a few other items – all that he was able to recover after the water receded – sat piled up outside his one-story concrete house in the beachfront fishing village of Samiyarpattai.

“I locked the door, but when the wave came, it broke down the door,” Parwaraiswami said, wearing a blue checkered lungi, the wrap tied at the waist that’s commonly worn in south India. “I lost everything.”

Local officials in Cuddalore, a city halfway down the hard-hit coast of Tamil Nadu, said temporary homes were the region’s greatest need.

Already, residents were poking around what was left of their houses in Samiyarpattai, which lies at the end of a two-mile, one-lane road slicing through rice paddies to the sea. The village bustled with activity Wednesday as residents thronged relief trucks that were distributing old clothing, a sharp contrast to Monday, when it was a virtual ghost town.

The first cluster of buildings stood intact, but the damage steadily worsened along the dirt roads that led to the beach. A fishing boat, with the words “Praise the Lord” painted on one end, sat halfway up one road, thrust there by the tsunami.

An acrid smell of rotting fish filled the air, and a white dusting – chlorinated lime powder, spread by workers to combat disease – lined the ground in front of every house. The homes right on the beach were gone, a pile of bricks in the sand amid soaring coconut palms that withstood the tidal beating.

The beach itself seemed eerily peaceful, the surf crashing in the distance, a faint echo of the unsuspected terror that surged in on a quiet Sunday morning.

In the nearby village of Pudukuppam, fishing folk were cleaning their nets on the beach when the wave raced in. One 50-year-old man, named Chinnathambi, escaped with a bandaged foot and some scratches; his wife and two sisters-in-law died, three of 120 deaths in a community of 2,000 people.

Women often fall victim in Indian disasters, because their saris make it difficult to run.

Aid agencies and the government have distributed ample food and clothing, survivors said. Asked what he needs most, Chinnathambi echoed many of his neighbors. He wondered how he would come up with $1,600 to buy a new fishing boat.

“My immediate need is a boat, nets and an engine,” he said.

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For many, fishing is the only profession they know. “A boat is a necessity for them, like water for a fish,” said Sudhansu Singh, a senior program officer at DanChurchAid, a Danish Lutheran assistance group.

“Unless they have a boat they cannot stand on their own feet,” he said. “So this changes their life totally. Perhaps they will have to go into a profession they don’t want to.”

Government officials said it was too early to say how much reconstruction would cost for this part of India but that it easily could take hundreds of millions of dollars.

Money won’t solve every problem. The damage is psychological as well as physical.

The tsunami took out the front door and a big chunk of the back wall of Raju Mutukrishna’s concrete house in Pudukuppam, so that one can look through the house and see the bushes and trees out back.

But even if his home were repaired tomorrow, the 40-year-old fisherman wouldn’t rush to move back.

“I’m afraid to come here,” said Mutukrishna, who lost his mother to the tidal wave. “People have died here. It’s a bad feeling.”

As night fell, villagers clambered into the backs of trucks for return lifts to their shelters. They weren’t ready to move home yet.



(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): TSUNAMI

GRAPHIC (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20041229 TSUNAMI INDIA map,

AP-NY-12-29-04 1718EST



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