Look, Ma, I'm Alive

However, for the other 35 orphaned or motherless children in Cuddalore’s newly-opened two-roomed children’s home—littered with the incongruous gifts of party clothes, new suitcases, toys and crayons still pouring in—erasing grief and memory is not so easy. The trauma they underwent three weeks ago is evident in their blank eyes and the mute, dazed way they sit, eat or lie down at the staff’s bidding.

Three weeks after the tsunami disaster, many of the children seem to be feeling a newer, sharper pain than losing one or both parents—their shift from the custody of surviving relatives into the government-run homes opened specially for the tsunami orphans in Tamil Nadu’s three affected districts. Twelve-year-old C. Geetha, for instance, sits silently on a plastic chair, asking every now and then whether it’s time for her to go home. Geetha’s widowed mother, a construction worker, was swept away by the tsunami, and she is now waiting for her brother to take her to the ravaged village near Cuddalore Old Town where the family lived and where she went to school. Hope gleams anew on Geetha’s face when her brother, Kumar, eventually arrives to take her to their destroyed home for their mother’s last rites. "But I’ll bring her back here after the ceremony," says the brisk 16-year-old high schoolboy. "What will she do alone at home while I’m at work?" Geetha’s tentative wish to live with her aunt and cousins in their village dies on her lips.

Social welfare officer Annabhai concurs with Geetha’s brother. "There are so many greedy relatives and child traffickers around, the orphans are safest within the government homes." A three-year-old child, for instance, rescued from a floating car within hours of the disaster by the Cuddalore SP, disappeared without a trace. The child was travelling with his parents, two brothers and an uncle on a visit from Ooty to the Devanamapattinam Silver Beach when the tsunami struck. By the time another uncle, Farooq, came from Ooty looking for him, the child was nowhere to be found. Even Abhinaya went missing for four days before her grandmother found her and handed her over to the orphanage.

Thanks to early media reports indicating that the TN government, unlike Sri Lanka, was not averse to giving these children up for adoption, there’s been a deluge of offers from hopeful parents. Four well-dressed women—Sri Lankan refugees settled near Cuddalore—arrive at the sentry-guarded entrance of the orphanage, all of them wanting to adopt a girl child each. Annabhai refers them grimly to the social welfare department, saying in an aside to us: "There are no takers for the orphans in the state’s cradle scheme, but everyone wants a tsunami orphan."

Cuddalore’s collector, Gagandeepsingh Bedi, agrees, saying he has been flooded with requests from all over the country for adoptions, including some from those who want only "cute-looking" children. He too is referring them to the concerned department, confident that the protracted procedure for adoption will put off the unsuitable. As a further step to protect the children from both unscrupulous kin and traffickers, the state government has locked the Rs 5 lakh grant to each orphan into a fixed deposit to be given to them with accrued interest when they turn 18.

Only a small fraction—less than 120—of the unofficially estimated 1,744 tsunami orphans in the state are now in the three temporary homes. But officials say that a drive will soon be launched in all the relief camps to hand over the orphans and the motherless. "If relatives are willing to look after them, we have no problem with that," says relief commissioner Shanta Sheela Nair. "The government is not interested in snatching away the children from their relatives, but we have to protect them from traffickers. We had to open the homes within a week of the disaster as there were so many children wandering around dazed, not knowing where to go."

Selvakumar is one of them. The 12-year-old boy from Samiyarpettai village in Cuddalore district says he was sent by his parents to buy fish when the bus he was travelling in stopped and people began running. He returned home a few hours later, only to see a mass burial going on in his village. Selvakumar wandered from the crowded relief centre he found himself in Parangipettai to Chidambaram town and onwards to Chennai’s suburbs in search of some refuge in the local AIADMK office. "I thought they’d give me some work," he recalls. The party workers handed him over to the district collector instead. He is now at the Cuddalore orphanage.

The bright-eyed boy who dropped out of school a few years ago is one of the orphanage’s most enthusiastic inmates, joining in the endless round of meals, washing, oiling hair and powdering face for the incessant round of visitors, many of them volunteers of NGOs from here and abroad. "I want to resume school," he declares, "and perhaps become a teacher." It’s a modest dream that is entirely possible for the state government to realise for orphans like him. As Bedi points out, "There is no shortage of funds for these orphans. Those over 18 will be lodged in service homes and given some vocational training and will be helped to find jobs. The state-run orphanages are tied up with the best schools in the state; some of these homes have even produced doctors and engineers. Social welfare in the state is fairly well-oiled and systematic."

Overcrowded, overrun by NGOs tripping over one another to bring everything from pranic healing to painting and awareness classes on sexual exploitation, the tsunami orphanages are nevertheless a solitary ray of hope for most of its inmates. Take 15-year-old Murugeswari, for instance. Dressed in an incongruous bright velvet dress she has picked out for herself from the donations pouring into the orphanage, she is arguing with her father, E. Subramaniam, at the gate of the Nagapattinam orphanage. Subramaniam lost his wife to the tsunami and deposited four of his six children in the orphanage. But now that he is ready to leave the relief camp nearby, he wants Murugeswari to come home to cook for him and his two older children. Murugeswari tries to resist, but in the end, she submits to her father’s need, with tears in her eyes. "If my wife was alive, I wouldn’t need to take her, but my son and I need a woman at home," he explains.

Other girls her age, however, would give anything to leave the orphanage. Like Mahadevi, who holds her dupatta to her eyes and sobs, oblivious of the two score children running around the room, getting ready for the next wave of visitors. "She’s crying because she has only come yesterday," says Sasikala, 17, who is trying to comb and plait the hair of half-a-dozen orphans in a hurry to get dressed. "This place is alright for children but I want to go back and live with my sister," she says. "It’s too crowded and there’s no bathroom here. The relief camps are much better."

Social activists are equally sceptical, especially after the state government’s shifting stand on adoption. After indicating that the government was willing to relax the norms regarding adoption, the government retracted nearly a week later, declaring that "normal adoption procedures will apply for these children". As a senior social worker with the adoption unit of the Guild of Service in Chennai, Sheila Samuel Ravikumar, says, "Any talk of adoption at this stage is ridiculous when it can’t even be determined if the children are orphans. They have to be treated as ‘scattered’ children and the state has to issue ads in the media to see if parents or relations claim back the children."

Dola Mohapatra, India director of Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), agrees. "The number of children orphaned, separated and those deemed missing will come down sharply once people return to their communities from relief camps. Already in Kanyakumari where relief centres are being closed, several families are getting reunited." According to the CCF, which has come out with an estimate based on government and NGOs, nearly 12,000 survivors are still searching for their children. Nearly 15,000 children, including 6,133 infants, are still missing after the tsunami.

In neighbouring Nagapattinam district, officials say families are still being reunited. One relief official, Rajesh Lakhani, gives the instance of four children discovered high up in a loft days after the disaster. "The waves had swept the children up to the loft and they had no way of coming down. Luckily for them, their parents were around when they were rescued."

Activists also point out that the government should not have come out with incentives for the orphans so early. "The government’s packages can act as incentives for unscrupulous elements," points out Sujata Mody of Malarchi, a women’s resource network. Government officials involved in relief operations privately agree that the incentives have in some cases been grabbed by the undeserving. One health inspector working in a relief camp in Nagapattinam’s Keelvanagiri village, where a virtual civil war appeared to be going on over sharing of relief, confided, "Only a few people are grabbing all the relief. There are too many lobbies here. Those who did not get it come and complain to us, but what can we do? It’s the village headman who decides who gets what." Similarly, bank officials who’ve parked themselves in relief camps to collect the Rs 1 lakh cheque the government is distributing to the next of kin of those who died say that few of these are in the orphans’ names. "One grandfather came yesterday with a cheque saying he wanted to open the account in the name of his orphaned grandchildren, others aren’t so caring."

On the whole, say village leaders, the fishermen are a closely-knit community and won’t give up their orphaned to either the state or outside agencies for adoption. Like Jeeva Nadarajan, mother of five, who has taken charge of her husband’s 11 orphaned nephews and nieces. Nadarajan’s two brothers and their wives were swept away by the tsunami, as was another brother’s wife. "If the government wants to do something for them, that’s fine. But I’ll never give away these children to government-run homes. My whole community will laugh at me if I do such a thing." Standing blank-eyed beside her is Arivalagi, the oldest of the orphaned girls, toting her three-year-old sister on one hip. Does she want to go to a government-run home for vocational training and a possible job? She won’t say a word and only stares bleakly at us...

By Sheela Reddy and S. Anand in Cuddalore and Nagapattinam