For Tamils, "the ocean takes on a life of its own," as a villain, mercilessly land-grabbing, with a vengeance.
"O Indian Ocean! Where did you conceal our Tamil Nadu, our ripe old land? Why did you plunder the 49 Tamil territories thousands of years ago," wails a 1945 quote of A.M. Paramasivanandam.
"The battle lines are clearly drawn in the Tamil country where labours of loss are also labours of grief, in which the ocean is the principal enemy of the Tamil people and of their drowned ancestral homeland," declares Sumathi.
When tsunami appears transliterated and not translated in the vernacular press, one wonders if there's no word for it in Tamil.
Would katalkôl meaning `seizure by the sea' be apt? "All of Tamil devotion's ocean fears and fantasies turn around this word," observes the author.
It may sound creepy, but she cites K.P. Aravaanan's suggestion that Tamizh has amizh meaning `to submerge'.
"In his reckoning, Tamilians are those people who survived submergence by the sea: they were named as such by their ancestors so that they might remember this original catastrophe."
Perhaps that explains to Sumathi why the typical Tamil "lives a life of loss, forever in exile from an imagined state of plenitude and perfection, of which he can only dream but never ever attain."
