From where Rajaiah sits, under a cover, surrounded by rubble, clothes, a school bag, a broken television set and a cardboard carton, the sea looks calm. He has come back to his house for the first time after the tsunami waves caught all of them off guard.
"We have to get back to living normally. There is no point in waiting for others to help you," Rajaiah sighs.
His three-year-old daughter Kamali sees us and begins screaming. "She is very scared of strangers now, ever since the doctors gave her injections," Rajaiah's wife, Sundari says.
Pointing to her seven-year-old son Vignesh, she says, "I almost lost him. I got him back only by the evening of the 26th. Ours was the first house swallowed by the waves. I held on to my daughter but lost my son. The whole day I was searching for him all over the place. By evening, I had lost hope. Then suddenly, I found him on the road."
Rajaiah was recuperating after a hernia operation when nature turned against him and the others who stayed there.
"For all of us, this is our second life. I worked hard, and had everything in my house -- a refrigerator, a TV. Everything. Now, we have to start our lives once again. God has given us our lives back. He has given our children back to us.... How many days can we survive on aid? It is time we started rebuilding our lives.... Time is a healer, don't you think?"
Gazing out at the sea, he says, "We could not see the sea from here. After the waves withdrew, it looks closer. But it looks so calm and peaceful now..."
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