14 years after losing her family in the tsunami, Meghana Rajsekhar finally tasted her mother's rasam when her childhood cook invited her for a meal.
'All my life I had looked for it.'
'Life came full circle that day and I knew all will be ok.'
Meghana Rajsekhar, 12, had spent Christmas afternoon at her schoolmate Beula's home in Malacca village in Car Nicobar. The girls were in the same class in the Kendriya Vidyalava located inside the air force station in Car Nicobar island where her father was posted as an Indian Air Force officer.
It was the first time that Meghana's parents had allowed her to visit a house outside the air force station on her own. She had a wonderful day with her mate's family over a nice Christmas lunch.
That evening her parents gifted her younger brother and her night suits as Christmas presents. Thrilled with their gifts, the children wore them to bed in what tragically was their last night together as a family.
Early next morning, giant waves from the sea destroyed the air base and took away 111 IAF personnel and families as they slept.
Meghana miraculously survived by clinging on to her bedroom door as it floated violently in the raging sea.
The next day, the waves threw her back ashore on a deserted part of Car Nicobar island. Still dressed in her torn night suit, the distraught, disoriented child unsuccessfully tried to catch the attention of passing aircraft by waving flags made out of clothes found in a washed-away suitcase belonging to a newly-wed couple.
After two days, she finally spotted Basil, a tribal man and ran towards him. He took her to whatever remained of the air force station. Meghana was put on the next flight to the mainland - still wearing the night suit top.
It was the most precious gift she carried back with her.
On being handed over to her next of kin, her grandparents in Hyderabad, she told her nani not to wash that top ever and keep it as it is.
"As a kid I didn't get to grieve. I had to usher myself into education and never really got to process the loss of my family."
"To be able to truly grieve, to have the time and space for it, is also a blessing," says Meghana, now 32.
It has been a hard, long and ongoing journey to process the magnitude of loss. She encounters it every day and has been bravely taking one step at a time.
One giant leap came fourteen years ago when she went back to IAF station Car Nicobar, the last home she knew with her family.
Everything was unfamiliar because the air base had been rebuilt from scratch. The debris was mostly under water and surfaced during low tide.
Nothing was relatable but, yet, there was.
Beula, her school friend with whom she had spent Christmas 2004, was now a government doctor posted in the Nicobar islands.
"She was married with a baby and I spent time with them. She had contacted me on Facebook a few years earlier and I finally met her," says Meghana who also visited her former school.
The school building had magically survived the wreckage of the tsunami and had been converted into billets for airmen. She peeped into classrooms where she once sat as a student.
Yet what brought immeasurable consolation was Kaali, the man who ran a canteen in a corner of the IAF station.
Hope pierces through the darkest of moments and ironically for Meghana it came through in the place where she had lost so much.
"He came to my door and introduced himself as the chef in our home when I was a child. My mother had taught him to cook many dishes," remembers Meghana.
Kaali invited her for a meal to his canteen.
"Among the dishes was a small bowl of rasam looking at me."
Over the years after eating it in so many households and repeatedly trying to make it herself, Meghana had never been able to make it like her mother did.
But when she ate that rasam, it tasted just like her mother's.
"All my life I had looked for it. Life came full circle for me that day and I knew all will be ok."
Thirteen years ago, the same gentleman had given her a photograph with her brother found in the debris of the tsunami. It was miraculously intact and is among the few pictures she has of her family.
In that simple rasam meal, she found healing in a deeply intimate and profoundly comforting way.
"I will be forever grateful to him for inviting me for a meal that day," she says.
"He taught me how to make it -- and feel like a whole person now."
Next: 'Everything I have ever loved is in water'
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