A few moments was all it took...

Someone has wisely said, ‘All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. The funny side of change is that it strikes you when you’re least expecting it, when you are in complete sync with life. Then change slithers down jolting us from behind and somehow we are never the same again. It happened to me when the tsunami of 2004 struck our shores.



It had been my first trip away from home, representing a painting workshop for my school at Wayanad hills and we had boarded the train on Christmas day, my thirteen year old self quivering with excitement of being on my own. I bid a hasty goodbye to my anxious parents who were spending Boxing Day at Mahabalipuram beach resort with friends. Too excited to sleep, I remember waking up at the wee hours of the morning. When the clock struck eight the train began to swerve madly causing passengers to fall from their berths. In a few moments we were back to normal and the train stopped. Feeling scared I rushed to my teacher who soothed me saying it was nothing. Feeling reassured I remember spending the rest of the morning in bliss completely unaware of the damage those few moments had caused to tons of people including my parents. On reaching my workshop late in the evening I was greeted with anxious phone calls and messages from my parents who had been worried out of their minds. They had experienced a narrow brush with death and come face to face with the giant waves that hit the Marina. It was only with a stroke of luck that they managed to hold on and not get swept away unlike several of their friends who lost their lives. It was only then that I realized that trains had derailed due to the quake and I could have been in one of them, that my parents could have been one of those millions who actually got swept away by the killer wave and she raged her way up the shores. In a lot of ways the tsunami changed the way I looked at life . The beach visits I longed for were replaced by a creeping sense of dread at the chunk of human life it had sliced away in one sweeping wave. The tsunami changed me. I began to realise the value of every moment, the value of the present because tomorrows could never come and we’d never know if this was our last day left on this planet.


I took up tsunami relief as a cause in my school and we took up ventures to collect money for the ones who lost everything near and dear to them, to put ourselves in their shoes and help them to pull themselves together after the trauma. The tsunami came as a wakeup call to me , that we cannot compete with nature’s fury , and it takes only a moment for the castle that man has so painstakingly created to come crashing down like a deck of cards. !


I also realised that while we brood and fight over communal issues , hatch plans to wage wars, foster grudges among neighbour countries and device strategies of mass destruction nature is hatching her little plan too. And the tsunami taught me that we should put our differences aside and unite as a whole , because when nature raises her club and strikes we are left with only our ‘foes’ to turn to.


The fatal day of the tsunami chimes in my mind when I read up on the issues that the world is fighting over , I am reminded of that morning that started out as any other until earth ‘shook’ things up... a few moments was all it took , but sadly it took all...!

One more time

One More Time...



Looking back at the moment that changed my life, I wish life actually did have a remote that I could rewind back to the day my best friend bid goodbye to me and the rest of the world. Having spent the best part of my middle school with Anne be it groaning over math and crushing on the cutest guys , I was quite taken aback when she came to tell us that she was packing her bags to leave for Cochin that fall. All our plans of taking our tenth grade tuitions together and doing guitar classes (Anne was a guitar addict) fell in a hazy heap in front of me as I realized that my best friend was leaving the city for good. I remember sulking around for days avoiding her and giving snooty replies to her gentle words. I befriended others and began to build a shell around me, to cut her out of my life. She soon left for Cochin and all strings snapped. I plunged into my tenth grade life, and even though I thought about Anne on and off and wondered how happening her life was , the thoughts soon ceased to be and she became a memory , carefully tucked away in a vault which I did not intend on opening for a long time, and probably never would.


I still recall that The phone call on October 16th two years later. Having rushed back from after school activities I remember recognising the familiar voice that brought back those memories of my former best friend. I remember feeling the world stop around me when she told me that she’d been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer the previous year and was undergoing chemotherapy. She’d left abruptly as she couldn’t come to terms with the condition herself and had not wanted me worrying about her when my boards were round the corner. She reassured me that she was on her way to getting better and wanted me to come and visit her as soon as I could. I took the next flight to Cochin and spent the day with Anne, the frailer thinner Anne who sported a pink bandana. ‘From then on there was no separating us’ she’d said, but as a twelfth grader now balancing academics with a full social calendar I found it hard to strike a balance. I loved her like crazy but there were moments when she took the backseat to my Friday movies and school culturals. ‘She’ll be here soon ‘I told myself. ‘What could go wrong if I put her on hold for a couple of days more’? I remember having this nasty fight with her when she begged me to come visit her over the weekend. I had refused as I wanted to shop for my school farewell. I snapped at her telling her to ‘go get a life because she did not seem to have one’. Little did I realise the irony of my words back then. Anne passed away a week later.

Now, 4 years later those words haunt me like a ghost, reminding me of the choice that I had to have visited my best friend before she drew her last breath. If only had I known that her chemo was taking a turn for the worse, If only I had had the time to listen to her pour out her worries, If only I had put my selfish needs aside to give a hug to my best friend when she needed me the most. Life’s like that. You wish you had that ‘one more time’ to set things right but sometimes there’s never a tomorrow. I’ve become a different woman after Anne. She’s the reason for who I am today. When I see relationships break because people take each other for granted I remember her , when I am the first one to say sorry and fix a fight I remember her, When I take time out to listen to a friend’s worries I remember her, when my friends come to me when they want a hug I am reminded of her. I see her smiling down on me because I’ve understood that ‘ tomorrows’ probably never take life. I directed a movie ‘One more time’ dedicated to Anne hoping it would bridge the gap between two former best friends, or work its magic on an egoistic couple, to remind us all that it is not a sin to say sorry, to tell a person that you love them and to give people second chances because you never know what tomorrow has in store for you.


This article again is a tribute to Anne, to tell her that she is still my best friend wherever she is ,that I¬‘ve never strum the guitar after she left , that I still visit her first when I land in Cochin and most importantly that I never take my friends or foes for granted and make it a point to be there whether they need me or not , that I remember her in my prayers every night until we meet again on that beautiful shore.