1
TSUNAMI – DECEMBER 2004
Some recessed light entered through the white curtains of the French windows. She could see blurry green shades of the shrubbery outside in the white sandy lawn and by the white boundary wall. White walls in diffused light and a white ceiling that cast over, white tiles and bedcovers glowed out of the darkness. Doors and windows painted white and few furniture pieces finished of white Formica mat. White was cheap around and the new paint still stinking in air. She was told this little room belonged to her and not the kind of setting she used to sleep. She was comfortable to lie down with four pieces of pillows and no robe. She closed her eyes.
Only eight days ago, she took a flight from Malé International Airport to land again so low, just a metre above water, at an empty and quiet domestic airport on the island of Kaddeu. No more than four aeroplanes touched down on a daily basis. She was accompanied by a cousin she met for the first time, nine days ago.
In a while she was introduced to a tall man in the Beach Rest canteen waiting for a boat to take them to her mother’s island. He was her stepfather. It wasn’t so unusual to find a knitted group of family members and a maze of relationships on islands like these.
It took four long hours, listening to deafening noise made by the boat engine, to cross the channel to Kol Madol Atoll. The aeroplane took some forty minutes to reach the nearest airport in Haddummathi Atoll from the capital of Malé. The boat moved slowly into the colossal lagoon of green waters, so quiet and calm, the sound dead as the engine cut off.
Peaceful quiet was boring sometimes as she felt nothing moving and nobody talking. Sometimes those invisible breezes teased her hair. A hot sun burnt her skin to olive tan in a matter of hours. Her lips turned dry. She came without proper necessities and nothing Maldivian. Her dresses were Indian. She was born and raised in Gujarat. She gazed with hurting eyes at the distant island growing bigger as the boat approached the breathtaking paradise of her mother.
Islanders were mending the planks on the wharf that she thought was torn by the wind. Later she learnt that it was vandalised by the very islanders to hinder government officials climb the island of Vilufushi. The Maldives was going through political reforms.
The island of Vilufushi was typical in size and only a thousand people lived here. Some of the houses looked brand new, whitewashed, some painted and modern, with Dish Antennas standing in the narrow terraces. People who belonged to this little island earned good income and it seemed to be a hard working community.
In the Maldives, everything was so different and unique, apart from its geography of isolated islands; socio-economic standing was reasonably high compared to the region. Nobody lived under one dollar a day earning. 100% student enrolment practised in primary schools and literacy rate above 98%. Girls outnumbered boys in lower-secondary education. HIV and AIDS recorded relatively low, marriages and divorces record high, improvement in achieving targets of access to safe drinking water, mother and child care, control growth and mortality rates were remarkably favourable. No dangerous diseases shed the nation – eradicated malaria and polio. Power generators installed on every island and advanced technology applied in communication. This country was recognised as a strong advocate for global environmental protection and one of the first signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. All benefited from the massive growth of tourism, fishing to some extent, these islands looked for better life and nowhere near to anything you find in the South Asia region.
The Maldives was recommended for graduation from the list of Least Developed Countries by the United Nations.
Soon she was greeted by a youthful mother, thirty-six years old, with three kids; half-sister and half-brothers. She met her grandparents for the first time. Not that they conversed in a language understandable so she preferred to use a bit of English shyly to talk with her mother. Her mother knew a bit of Hindi fortunately. The rest preferred to speak native Divehi and she applied body language to flick back in response.
It was frantically a surprise to find her mother still more active and attractive than Ibthisham Gir. Her mother was beautiful and dating the local fishermen, played volleyball, bashi and bibala with the island girls. Her mother was boisterous and hilarious, running up and down the narrow lanes, no fear of four-wheeled traffic. Children ran out of the gates imitating themselves as aeroplanes flying like freewheelers. It was life that mattered not but life only to live because you were born. Only three things seemed to matter: sleeping, eating and spitting.
In a week, Ibthisham learnt about her mother and other relatives. In a couple of days she made picnic to nearby Fahala Island, the lagoon of emerald green stretched out on the deep blue ocean. Magnificent! This was paradise. She was able to use telephone booths or her mobile phone to call her father and friends back home and that was a relief. She got an aunt who was a school supervisor and that permitted to use the computers in the island school and slow access to the Internet. Minutes passed like hours and hours like days, she sat in the shade outside her house, reading books.
There were many members in her mother’s family and they owned a fishing boat, a carpentry workshop and some retail shops. Her mother, Layla Thoif, did schooling up to the eighth grade. Mother’s schoolteacher from India converted and married her. He was Ibthisham’s father. Six years later they got separated and she returned home, married a Maldivian, got rid of complicated fashion and now Layla wore traditional clothes that simply required a bottom wrap and a bodice; kandeki and libas – like the rest of the islanders.
Sometimes Ibthisham loved to wear traditional clothes, a black wrap and a top, simple as that, but she never appeared in the playground in these insufficient clothes whereas her mother got involved in the games wearing traditional clothes and tucking her kandeki too high and awkward. Ibthisham’s grandmother gave a silver girdle called a fattar to wear around the hips. She did wear them and removed when she wanted while other girls never remove them in their lifetime.
This house contained four bedrooms, none with attached bath, new tiles and a new kitchen that cost a fortune. Her mother and aunt with families lived here, grandparents too, so it was crowded. The open-air bathe expanse, or the shower garden called gifili on white shingle sand and mangrove plants, located in the rear of the house, got a hidden access to the beachside road. After a little incident she was not familiar with, when a guy popped his head over the fence while she was in shower and later learning from other girls, she got used to take shower in full clothes. She noted island girls took shower in kandeki wraps, go swimming, eating, sleeping and spitting, get wet and dry in the sun wearing the same piece of clothing. How uncomfortable could it be to dry clothes in the sun – wearing them?
Her mother planted plenty of roses and orchids in pots and decorated the gate. Bright red flowers of hibiscus and bougainvillea everywhere against the tropical green and the bright blue sky created a contrast. A Dish Antenna erected in the foreground required manual tuning by pulling the supporting wires connected to hold the globe. Apparently it was not in use for sometime until Ibthisham arrived. Now during the nights, she got some island friends in her house and watched some channels from a South African package.
She was still uncomfortable to mix with island girls. They watched any kind of movies with children around. Some got cringes and shrills to express feelings in sheer contentment to the candid eye; shy, impersonal, outspoken, indiscreet, indigenous and hysteric – ignorance or blunt morale values. There was a night when a schoolgirl spilt to her kandeki while watching a sex movie with family crowd and aunt who was the schoolgirl’s teacher. The ticklish girl sat with her legs clamped together, tittering and titillating, until she came out spilling to her kandeki. She got no brain or nerve to get up and go away. More to the point, she was far too interested to watch the movie, not because it was a blue movie but because it was any movie. Then someone uttered to go and wash the spill using such unrefined language.
Every issue appeared to be a personal matter but everything done was impersonal. Relationships linked with concatenations regardless of age, sex, money, property, kind of issue or even self – the body. Islanders put a hand on private parts while on public roads. They treated his child like my child, his matter my concern, his money I decide, his problems I solve and his spouse envies what I do mine.
Issues grew contentious and bickering by the gates. Lifestyle was so contiguous that in most houses they slept in one deck of bed usually called an ashi and shared their clothes. Ibthisham also learnt that her aunt borrowed a vibrator for overnight use from a neighbour. It ended up in a bicker argument when the owner arrived to fetch it in the midnight hour. It was proper for the rightful owner to pick it anytime and aunt argued that she borrowed with the owner’s consent and the owner should know she’d be occupied with it once it was borrowed and the owner should cope one night without it and call in the morning. The owner claimed that others were having more fun with it though it belonged to her. Aunt removed the alkaline batteries she bought before she threw it in the sand, perchance, to borrow it again.
When they watched television in the sitting room, all flock together on the floor, lying side by side, so tangible, including the grandmother. The sofas left empty, only Ibthisham and visiting fishermen sat on them.
At home her mother appeared in kandeki tucked under the crotch in the manner locals called fugelun. She carried her kid and a plate, feeding the child and walk out of the gate – scatter in the neighbourhood. Her youngest child, Arsalan, was almost three years old. He sucked her mother climbing on top of her, pull out a breast clawing with long fingernails and suckle like a dog on his four limbs, while Layla sat on a joli perch outside the gate talking to the fishermen. He knew to bite his mother’s nipple and laugh at people.
These children got intelligent minds to solve an equation and to steal from a pocket. If an outsider carried somebody’s child for the first time, that child would instinctively search the pockets for sweets or money.
When her mother, like other island women wearing kandeki wraps, sat down squat washing clothes or crushing spices, they were completely blunt to indecent exposure.
Someone tapped the door. She opened her eyes. It was daylight, seven-thirty. She hurried to put on a gown before mother came peeping through the French windows. Ibthisham got out of the room with a towel and toothbrush, headed to the gifili for a wash before breakfast. She was back in her room in no time and decided to dress in a red skirt and a white blouse; dress simple as a Maldivian, dress simple as an islander. And she was free of undergarments, wearing only a top and bottom with that silver girdle on her hips.
Ibthisham was nineteen and a tall skinny girl. She could hardly digest a Maldivian breakfast, typically fish curry and tortilla, strictly no vegetables. She could barely eat with the locals because a Maldivian ate less during meals compared to what an ordinary Indian consumed in a day’s meal. She learnt in no time that the islanders only ate white rice, white sugar and white flour and nothing of staple food if tainted in colour. She was told, her grandma washed some sugar with a brownish taint in water to make them white and eventually dissolved them in water. That was downright mulishness and obviously, these islanders were aristocratic.
An hour later, Ibthisham was lying on the white sandy beach under the foliages, by the shrubs coated with thick green leaves and aromatic herbs that blended the scent of flowers, salt and coral. Two girls and Cousin Iffé sat with her. She watched some thick foamy tides creep up the beach and recede fast to catch up with other playful waves blocking their path, collision, rolling over wet and weighty beach sand, making hissing sounds and kissing crabs, keeping busy all day in a motion washing the white beaches already washed again and again. The sun shined bright in the early hours of the day warm and soothing the skin. No kid came down to the beach and normally they would be on the western coast. Some birds touched down seeking for morning bites.
Few blocks away, she could see her house with white boundary walls, rear side and the gifili entrance facing east. She could tell someone was in the gifili as she observed the dani stick over the wall. Every well used a dani which was a long stick attached with a tin container to pull water from the well. How blessed it was, she thought, clean and freshwater available in a metre’s depth from anywhere on an island. In other physical land masses, she knew about; waterbeds are deep and unclean. A row of houses stretched out on the coastal front, palm shade and shrubbery before the beach. Mostly black coloured Dish Antennas stood over the houses. Her house was beautiful with a blue roof and white walls.
Somebody coughed and spat the ground, a usual morning habit of the islanders. He chewed the handmade tobacco bidi and spat again. Workers were getting ready for the morning. She heard the electric saw in the carpentry run for a second and it did again. Someone hammered on making a clanging noise. The islanders were known as fishermen and yet very few made out to the sea.
For a while she observed the swells dying and the distant sea disperse, bright and calm. It was such a beautiful day. The breezes were refreshing. For a while she saw the brown rocks of the outer layer emerge from the clear blue waters most probably in a low tide. Those busy waves and clamours died. It was peaceful quiet.
Iffé stood up. She wanted to move to another position. Any change in the environment naturally brought change to her instinct. So would be for the island girls who couldn’t find a moment at one place. At that point Ibthisham felt an eerie rumble but Iffé was already pulling her up. She got the flip-flops on her toes and rushed into the woods after the girls.
Right there she heard the noises of people and turned to find quite a lot of children running up the beach. Surprisingly, they weren’t there a minute ago. People were yelling to climb and to hurry up, “A big wave! A big wave!”
And she saw through the foliages, the reflection of the sun on green tide that climbed a couple of metres high; the mad sea rolling in. She saw the fish swimming in the waters and the height already curved the horizon over the palms. It came rushing in through the branches and over her, hitting hard with salty water and the book in her hand thrown away. She was washed deep into the undergrowth, many yards away. Iffé flying on the waters, more water thrust in, running between the narrow lanes. Yet more water swept over the entire island of Vilufushi.
She held to some branches but the waters were too strong and hitting hard like concrete, she let go to reach another tree. She heard children crying, some kids drowning in the strong current. The sky was clear blue. She cried Sundhya recitals. She heard local cries for help and, “Allah Akbar!” She saw boys climbing limestone walls. At that moment, the drill beneath her feet grew stronger tripping her off and drawn back further into the woods. Yet again she was thrown back deep into the waters. There were men and women clutching to little kids but she was far away from them. She couldn’t hold her feet in the current. She grabbed and grabbed at the branches and they came torn, gulping saltwater and catching for air. She saw a boat maroon into the undergrowth. The cries were loud, hysteria, prayers, yelling for help. Islanders who got used to these islands panicked. She was helpless for a while, hanging to the leaves, waters running away and ripped off her skirt. The island flooded and totally submerged.
One of the girls washed in the tidal waters wedged to a tree trunk. Iffé risked a move towards Ibthisham. She grabbed her naked leg. Further away, another man was holding two little children. He left one child on a wall and suddenly, it collapsed. By then the waters were running out and the swell was going down in full thrust. It took the soft sand drilling beneath the walls and one by one, the brick walls fell down.
Some people called not to go near those walls, get out of the houses and move to the mosque. So there wasn’t anytime to save anything inside the houses. They were falling down. Women carried babies over their shoulders and waded in water up to the waist making way towards the mosque and the playground. Ibthisham and Iffé reached the girl holding on to the tree and the other girl safe with them, slowly made their way. Ibthisham could see foamy waters bubbling and fizzing around. They were green waters of the lagoon. By then, land and offshore was lagoon.
“What’s happening?” One of the girls cried.
“Let’s try to catch up with the rest.” Iffé said. “My brother, I hope they are fine with mom! Oh God! Help us!”
The waters were still strong but subsiding fast. Many other items now seemed to float around. Empty cans, bottles, coconuts, clothes, barrels and the rubbish picked up from the bushes. Island girls habited to dump their sanitary carelessly around into the bushes. They emerged along with plenty of empty liquor bottles dumped by the wild boys. It turned the green waters murky and mixed with the lagoon, still sizzling. The four girls clutched wrist to wrist and headed through the trees. They heard a rumble and a house fell down in four pieces. The roof stumbled down in one piece. The walls came down without a crack. The soil washed away under the walls, loose and eroding rapidly. These houses looked beautiful but none built on concrete foundation.
As the four girls approached the houses, a wall came down and there was a crying boy standing on a water tank beyond the fallen wall. An old man was pulling an old granny from a tiny room. He could not hold his feet on the smooth cement screed and he kept slipping. The girls hurried over the fallen wall to help them. The old man was naked. They were inside a gifili boundary. They were fortunate to pull out the woman before the roof fell down on them. Inside this particular house an elderly woman held on to a sick boy. He was paralysed. They were cornered in a bathroom and a timber blocking them. Iffé and other girls reached them but unfortunately, the boy was hardly breathing.
Ten minutes later, Ibthisham caught up with her mother standing on the road and carrying Arsalan. She was completely naked. “My mom and dad in the house, my house is going down! No one home! No one to help! I haven’t seen my other child! My husband’s away!”
“Mom, don’t cry!” she told her courageously.
People were trying to rescue the children and old grannies. Some boys got smart in the waters playing tricks with the foamy crests. One of the shops stood with all its goods flooded in water. Iffé called a boy and they headed towards the blue gate.
They couldn’t make it any further when they heard shouting, “Rālé kè! Rālé kè!” Another wave! Ibthisham called to her mother to move with the girls to the playground. This time the waters rushed in by the curves of the corners into the narrow lanes, still a metre high, sizzling in brine condition, splashing everything and knocked down the walls. This time the waters were brown and no reflection of the sun. This time the walls couldn’t hold another second.
Spinning and drilling started again, neck deep in water, Ibthisham and Iffé couldn’t make to the house. In the hands of the waves that did its cleaning job; washed everything in a giant washing machine, huge walls dismantled to bricks and debris grew in quantity turning into a construction site. Erecting a house means erecting a house and nobody cared about its strength and that was the kind of structure you’d find in the islands.
Ibthisham’s house came down. More light and brightness reached the flooded ground with no trees around. She could see more of the blue sky and the sea out there in whitish waters – bubbling and boiling. It seemed the sea stirred right from the bottom of the ocean. There was no blue sea but foamy white waters and the green lagoon reaching a short horizon.
A 2000 litre water barrel rolled down her way. She couldn’t touch her toes to the ground, gulping water. Someone behind her held a grip to her and helped her to a balance. People were calling to climb the boats in the western lagoon. Another house came down and the waves started cleaning the bricks. More debris accumulated. Deadly branches and sharp pieces of roofing sheets rushed towards them. They headed to the western coast.
In the hour that passed, a third wave bulged in and swelled the flood again to their necks. More houses came down. More debris floated around. By the time they reached the playground, it was swamped hip deep in water and the islanders gathered here were wet and naked. Normally islanders dressed in a very indigenous manner wearing wraps and blouses without undergarment. Once the wraps were gone, they got nothing to cover their body. However their minds stricken with fear set to save their lives and nothing else mattered.
And to her relief she saw her grandparents climbing a boat with her aunt and family, the other half-brother and half-sister among them. Her half-brother, Hythem, was 14 years old. He helped her mother and Arsalan towards the boats. Tamara was nine years old. Many others reached the boats safely.
These vessels called doni miraculously floated in the muddled lagoon rather close to the shrubbery because the island got no beach no lagoon but water everywhere. And for some reason, all these tiny islands got such boats around them in the lagoons and they saved their lives on this day.
Unlike other island girls, Ibthisham had not shaven her pubic hair. She learnt much later from Iffé that islanders didn’t like it that way. Usually hair got thick in brine condition and islanders wore palm oil on their skin and hair to smoothen texture.
There were two dozen men in the boat she climbed, some naked, two of them lying almost unconscious. Her mother got a piece of kandeki wrapped over her shoulders and sat moulding to protect her nude. She was in the gifili when the wave hit them. Some other women were in worse condition, without clothes.
The people reported that their mobiles were dead. They got no news. This was a major failure. Since the telephones and mobiles came in use, those VHF and USB radio sets on these islands were replaced with telephones and facsimile machines. Once the waters flooded the low-lying islands, in fact with the first wave, all base stations that powered the antennas to connect the cell phones went dead immediately. Powerhouses cut out and the engines sit dead in the salt. Her grandfather’s carpentry got lot of heavy electrical equipment, plants and tools, nothing insured, and the goods in the shop. This was utter disaster and unrecoverable loss. They watched the houses fall down one after another.
At that point there was only one thing to do, first to save the lives of women and children and the most vulnerable. They heard an outboard engine, a dinghy approached. Picnickers to Fahala returned and reported no casualty however they rescued a drowning man from the sea – a Bangladeshi worker. Some able to use their cell phones in the early stages reported that the whole of the Maldives submerged.
Horror struck in their faces, kids didn’t know to cry, big mouths open and water in their eyes, everyone waited for the next wave to rise. Two hours after the great wave, they observed the island standing not one single house. Only the palms and Dish Antennas stood erected, many trees were uprooted.
It was 26th December 2004. A tsunami was created after an earthquake that occurred in the undersea coast west of Sumatra, recorded to an upgraded magnitude of 9.3 in Richter Scale, also known as the Boxing Day Tsunami or the Asian Tsunami, and at that juncture nobody in the Maldives knew what a tsunami was and how it occurred or how to spell the word. Casualty figures rose as it recorded the whole of Banda Aceh, the Andaman and Thailand were washed out, Sri Lanka and India hit badly, several other coastal states around the Indian Ocean were affected.
In this world somewhere, a child dies of hunger in every three seconds but not in the Maldives – children faces lit up with smiles posing for pictures but this day they cried.
The waters hadn’t gone down a metre, instead it turned dirty. There happened to be no wave after that. Men climbed to rescue islanders blocked in the houses or searching for missing people. As they all watched, they carried dead bodies to the mosque, mostly elderly people and children. Somehow tiny pieces of cloth reached them and they covered their nudes.
Ibthisham’s mother climbed down to the waters to wash her menses, some blood left on the plank she sat. Flies touched down. Somebody washed them. She wrapped the kandeki on her waist, still without a bodice. Meanwhile, her aunt was falling sick with cramp in her legs. Ibthisham got a piece of towel wrapped around her hips. They climbed down and joined the stranded people now accumulated by the mosque.
As the day passed, islanders hoped that the government would send rescue teams. People grew nervous, two infants were missing, two adults were missing and a dozen of dead bodies lay behind the mosque, others injured. Men on the island headed into the debris searching for food and water. Little children were thirsty, others growing weak, no safe dry place to lie down. The whole island was inundated. All the houses went down and dissolved to bricks from which these walls were built.
She wondered about her father in India. At that point she didn’t know that the tsunami wave hardly reached the coast of Gujarat. Iffé and Ibthisham joined the rescue team to search for missing children and bodies and get hold of food items and water bottles scattered in the debris. They made it further back to their home area over the fallen fences, roofs, rafters, bricks and water tanks. They couldn’t find a single piece of clothing. They floated away into the open sea. The houses dissolved and the island flattened to a flooded brook of debris.
They saw furniture overturned in the schoolyard. All those computers ruined in water. This was a mess and disaster. They helped the rescue team to remove another dead body of an old man.
As night approached, it grew darker and children feared the sea would roll in. By then the flood had gone down a bit and the mosque area turned dry. They set up a cooking apparatus and tried to cook wet rice from the pickings. By now nobody was waiting for help anymore because they knew there was no contact with another island. A couple of boats left for Buruni taking with them some seriously injured people, old people, women and children. A boat arrived later that night from the island of Buruni to find out the situation of Vilufushi.
That was the darkest night Ibthisham could ever remember. There was no electricity, no food, no water, no proper clothing, no sanitation, no shelter and no communication with any other island or the rest of the world. Before dark they cleared the school hall and accommodated the stricken people. This was perhaps the only shelter that hadn’t come down completely. Ibthisham’s mother sat with Arsalan sleeping in her lap. Men and women lay on the floor and the smell grew nasty. They were lost in the sea and castaway while on an archipelagic paradise.
In the meantime, Malé struck by the tsunami recorded at 9:23 hrs local time. People rushed to the southeast coast rather known as Lonuziyaraii-kol, a place much favoured by joggers in the morning, surfers during the day, children and sightseers by the evenings and lovers by night. They found it so marvelling to watch Malé hit by giant waves. The waters crept up the island city covering one third of the ground around the coast, damaging roads and pavements, flooding houses and shops. Those who lived in the coastal areas got busy piling sandbags at the gates but to no effect.
Tourist attractions on separate islands were tinier and hit badly by the tsunami. Malé International Airport was closed down for twelve hours to clear the flood. Anxious tourists and the operators looked for ways to get out of the disaster stricken zone. Their holidays ruined with tragedy. It wasn’t anything like a dream on paradise, even if earthquakes and landslides occur, epidemics and war zones spread, aeroplanes crash and passenger liners run aground, a tsunami of this magnitude or even to a lesser scale in this region was never recorded in the history of mankind.
Geographically, these islands are not connected and quite dispersed by many miles of open sea. While most of the islands are generally less then a square kilometre, the seas to cross are hundreds of miles in distance. There are more than tens of thousands of sandbanks and islands. Some emerge only during low tide. Not one single island is over a metre above sea level. A fact recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records for the lowest lying nation in the world. Physically, the belt of ridges form twenty-six clusters of atolls along 90,000 square kilometres, characteristically containing atolls, islands, house reefs and barrier reefs, sandbanks, lagoons, inner seas and outer seas. Island vegetation is tropical generated from coconuts and other forms of plants and pods drifting in the waters. The archipelago extends in the Indian Ocean from latitude 7˚ 6’ north to latitude 0˚ 42’ south and between longitudes 72˚ 33’ and 73˚ 44’ east. Approximately, 400 miles southwest of Sri Lanka and 350 miles closest distance to the Indian sub-continent. The area is greatest by 100 kilometres in breadth and 900 kilometres in length. Significantly, only 300 square kilometres sum up the land space and only one percent inhabited. The biggest atoll is Huvadu Atoll (the Suvadives) and the greatest sea is the one and a half degree channel called the Huvadu Kandu. ‘Atoll’ is a word derived from the Divehi Language.
Politically, 1190 islands are recognised in 20 political divisions where only 200 islands are inhabited; some overcrowded while some big islands left uninhabited. The capital island of Malé is the only island where a proper socio-economic infrastructure existed; schooling, hospitals, warehouses, businesses, commerce, administration, police or national security guards and comprised of other social features. An island compared to Malé differs strongly in urban and rural development and it’s regarded as the most perceptible difference of such nature existing in the region.
Malé, the island capital, is congested of houses and overpopulated and this is the reason why it’s ranked at top ten of the most crowded cities in the world. Living space is thin, tiny cubicles serve families and often a single bed serves two occupants. Such quarters are relatively unhygienic, discordant and unclean, not with proper ventilation. Living is expensive, facilities modern and advanced, electricity consumption at peak load and goods broadly imported.
Whereas the isolated islands are reached by boats and recipients are conscious of a link with the capital by listening to radio or receiving television via satellite. Telecommunication is the only mutual connection that linked the islands. However, every island is socially interconnected in terms of fulfilling needs, attaining supplies or services and tied up with relationships, marriages and families, and concatenates in all aspects of life.
Decentralisation was much a spoken plan but an ideology overlooked by the government in order to minimise the gap of difference in the urban and rural sectors. Mostly the government plans concentrated on a control strategy with a pattern of oppressions that drove island communities vulnerable and dependant on the government to provide a way of life. The islanders watched international football and other television channels through satellite receivers and Dish Antennas supplied by the central government. The islanders were indoctrinated to please their minds from government provisions of health, education, sanitation, freshwater, mosques, powerhouses, quaysides, etc., until it came clear on this day of the tsunami when the collective system failed to deliver immediately with aid relief. Its substantial scale of destruction brought the administration to its knees and the people realised, they got no potential themselves – the only choice was waiting for a failing government to reach out for them.
Meanwhile, the central government waited for news from the islands. Everyone relied heavily on telecommunications in these isolated communities located in dispersed islands. Their task grew blind as it occurred to question how, where and with what to form relief teams. Communication was a major failure that disrupted formulating instant relief teams. Ironically, one of the national TV presenters happened to be a Marketing Manager of Dhiraagu who questioned the coastguard chief about relief teams and why it so delayed. The chief replied that the main failure was the paralysed communication system and not their preparedness.
The Maldives communication monopolised by Dhiraagu, with a huge share portion belonging to Cable & Wireless of the UK, was indeed a British run business. They manipulated communication systems in the country to be installed with their products and services. They dismantled the USB and VHF radio-transmitters which were used previously. In two decades, they spent less than two dollars for any promotional project. Telephone booths on the islands first appeared to be used with magnetic cards and in a year they changed to cell card machines claiming that the public were cheating with magnetic cards by manipulation. Money spending projects as such were no worry to advance because they made huge profit from providing this service to the Maldives. In a Third World nation with relatively a well-off but a small populace, providing such facilities of sophisticated telecommunication and technology acquiring profit in short term led to the costliest communication services in the world. When this company first estimated the use of cellular phones in the country, the figure was cited ridiculously of 600 handsets and in a month in 1995, it sold over 6000 cell phones paralysing the network. Then for four years, due to financial downfall, this service was interrupted until they could come up with the GSM services.
In the meantime, rich countries like Japan appealed to the Maldives to assist and provide advanced technology on telecommunication, all that was denied by the one-party headship to continue with usual ties for bribe interest with the UK partners. When BBC questioned C&W why they could not stop the government from banning certain websites while C&W provided the service, the company defiantly said it got no right to intervene with internal matters of a country. BBC never questioned C&W about unusual ties with the Maldivian Government.
Meanwhile, the Economist wrote an article about C&W saying that it was the lowest rating communication services that existed in the world which derived revenue from overall monopoly in providing communication services in some Third World nations like Jamaica and the Maldives. Had the Maldives considered the Japanese proposal for national interest, this failure would have been averted on this day of misery.
These islands had not seen go-between stages of telecommunication history because technology took a leap from a manually operated telephone exchange to a sky-high, digital, satellite system.
In the aftermath of the tsunami, Dhiraagu and C&W, for the first time, declared to help the Maldives and parted with two million US dollars sighting huge loss to their businesses if the nation collapsed.
Leaving a book on a table in the Maldives would mean that you left it two metres above sea level. It was just two weeks for the schools to reopen after the long annual holidays when the students lost their newly purchased books and text books, uniforms and shoes ruined in water. It was shortly after parents made their journeys to the capital and purchased materials for their children’s education. Education was the number one priority of every parent in the Maldives.
Basically, the Maldives had a stable economy growing at 9.5% and its GDP rated US$2500 per capita (2004), a serene environment, free of dangerous diseases, free of problematic issues of racism, boarder dispute, terrorism and trade issues. The Maldives maintained good governance and a reputable status among the international audience, enjoying benefits of funding, loans, grants, aid, scholarships in foreign countries, expertise, consultation, achieving goals fundamentally of high social standards, expansion of tourism, advancements in living standards, modernising structural quaysides, harbours, airports and administrative buildings and faculties. However, failures of this strategy of a great social agenda remained obscured but imminent as it occurred with the rising youth comprising seventy percent of the population. A quick solution averted the lack of educational incapacity by doubling the schools to teach in two or three sessions – an instant fix.
Now the Maldives faced the second era of a growing youth population and crippled to create jobs and employment consequently throwing them into drugs and sex. A third phase of negligence wasn’t even deemed at this stage of what would be mismanaged marriages and divorces, childbirths and uncared children and the demographic trap. Basically, the government always planned for instant fixes and without a vision for the future.
Even the compiled chart of high-esteem, called Vision 2020, had much of its shortcomings and short-sightedness, for example; the lack of sight into multi-culture, democracy, religious issues, migration, foreign labour, mobility, creating jobs for hosts, national law compatible to international or to SAARC standards, protecting a Maldivian in foreign country, privatisation of tourism and businesses, etc. Vision 2020 sighted once again into development and not advancement, comprised of introducing new businesses, construction of city-type buildings and amenities as of such ten domestic airports to appear by the year 2020, achieving better standards in health, education, shelter and social facilities as first-planners or what was done thirty years ago but included no plan for revision of policies applicable for the 21st century understanding the broader world and global links created by advanced technology and the new order of people, proficient changes and attitudes or even ethnic changes in the growing population, environmentally – hardly given thought of land use or on issues of biodiversity despite a big talker.
During the tsunami, this nation was undergoing crucial blame over a continuous one-party system. Steps were taken towards reforms in a seriously needed shaping of democracy and to accommodate political parties for the first time in history. Troubles got started in confrontations with the opposing voices particularly in the year from 2003 to 2004. It should be mentioned that such opposition existed throughout the last decade. Much criticism came from EU of the very nations whose money built the Maldives. However, the changing faces of EU even seated an Indian-born parliamentarian who strongly criticised the Capricorn Regime in the Maldives.
BBC came online with the President asking about the current status of parliamentary bi-elections. The President replied, “I am not in a state to think about elections. There’s a Commissioner who will decide over such issues. I’m doing my job to find help from the international sources to save my country from disaster.”
Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga said, “My country is not capable to deal with this kind of disaster.” Sri Lanka was in civil war with the Tamils who wanted to establish a homeland in Jaffna peninsula.
BBC had a keen interest in Maldivian politics from the very beginning. In the last decade, it continued to air interviews with the opposition party who were based in the UK. While BBC was able to send their teams to attend every demonstration organised by the opposition party, it failed to send a personnel to report on the tsunami in the Maldives during the first week. After the award winning Panorama series, BBC tended to inform its audience with 180 degrees of a panorama, failing to bring about real voices of the true islanders in the Maldives. During the tsunami, it aired a programme called Asia Today which brought plenty of such interviews with the opposition party based in the UK known as the Matadors. BBC was proven of such irresponsibility in the Hutton Enquiry for blaming the Prime Minister over the Iraq War. Later on a Dateline London programme, BBC asked the international journalists over the Hutton Enquiry and everyone returned to blame BBC of making up a story.
Popular vote always count and therefore media focused to bring about an emotional stir as a powerful means to obtain such vote of the viewers for booming business. It necessarily didn’t have to be right or wrong…sometimes quite irresponsible. Media focused on big stories that came out of Banda Aceh, Phuket of Thailand and Sri Lanka. It was reported only three tourist deaths in the Maldives and they were British citizens, national loss accounted 80 deaths and 26 missing. Whereas the whole of the Maldives was sucked in the waters, damage and destruction of the infrastructure that existed on every island cost over two billion US dollars and it was two-fold greater than the GDP and some 20 years of development, 12,000 people stranded or homeless from a 270,000 population. It was a big claim for a small unwanted nation which was deemed to disappear in a matter of fifty years. However, western media would have no big story to tell out of the Maldives while thousands of western lives suffered in places like Phuket and Sri Lanka.
Finally, when Barnaby Philips of BBC came to report about the tsunami crisis in the Maldives, his initial words, “I’m standing in the National Disaster Management Unit surrounded by sophisticated communication equipment…” If he knew better, every rubbish collector would have a cellular phone in his pocket. Significantly, the nation of seafarers and fishermen found a way how to talk with their spouses while out on the sea.
And that day, a divided population of the Maldives came to unite and for the last time perhaps, to help in relief work. It turned out to be the entire population of the nation reporting with whatever material they could get hold of; clothes, food, toys, money, etc. Some people offered shelter for the victims in their houses. This unity was hurriedly disrupted by political interests who rushed out with markers to write down their names on the cartons packed of relief items and started a campaign of hand-outs. Ugly scenes and fights took place inside the National Disaster Management Unit between members of the Matadors and the Capricorn.
All opposition websites and media had risen to popularity by creating an emotion among the islanders by talking about failures and abuses of the Capricorn Government which took to power in 1978. Since then Capricorn had ruled for twenty-six years. Likewise, the Matadors failed to plan a new strategy or to campaign or to bring about a movement for the Maldives and the people while rising to fame by speaking ill of the existing government, so it was like a parasitic plant climbing an old oak tree and once the tree was cut, the parasite would fall.
Nonetheless, the Matador websites disrespectfully published cartoon pornography of the Capricorn President and the First Lady in order to obtain popularity. The state was divided. Formerly, this was a country of indigenous islanders with no diverse factions of race, colour, culture, language or religion and in actual fact, the people were unsighted to understand greater aspects of societies and societies were relatively communities of oneness in the Maldives. And thus it was an intellectual divide. When propaganda was used in the mass media to gossip about the Capricorn Family towards a motion of nepotism – the truth of the matter was that every two persons in the nation were blood-related. Consequently, they were fathers, brothers, spouses, cousins and sons, steps and ex supporting an opposition in one way or the other rather, who got involved in strangling and fights at the National Disaster Management Unit.
Some of the top ranking political dissenters who were imprisoned by the police used their mobiles to call leading opponent figures, but friends, and asked for favours such as to deliver a blue movie to his wife or dispose a stock of narcotics in his possession or used sister’s influence married to a decorated police officer to talk to someone while in detention. Some of the inmates were previously ministers and colleagues who weren’t thrown out from ministerial posts visited them while in jail.
New faces of the Matadors appeared to be familiar formerly with the Capricorn. Even the Attorney General who signed that doctrine that prohibited party activity in the nation joined the Matadors when he was sacked from the government as a minister. Another minister who obtained huge bribes while holding the Tourism Ministry had recently joined the Matadors after he was sacked. Now he talked of reforms and democracy which was unfashionable for him in the past. An intellectual divide was clearly in their brains and not in the blood. The Matadors built up of losers and dissenters of the past regime. The opposition voice was not a call for proper democratic reforms but a rivalry no matter how international media continued to report. And to a great length of responsibilities, the British Commonwealth Office shaped up a new nature of politics besides diplomacy to give significant rise to oppositions in her former territories.
Another factor for intellectual divide was the line of education. Some who got educated in the western countries were pro-western and others who got educated in the Middle East or Asia tended to be supporting radicalisation. Since 11th September 2001, extremist ideology inundated the hearts and minds of the Moslems in the Maldives; predominantly a Moslem nation and believed to be the only country with a 100 percent Moslem society in the world. Such elements rapidly split in ideology and sprung with a third political party called the Dogs while some radical elements remained with the Matadors and some with the Capricorn. Radicalism created a desired new identity and recognition in a globally linked world after a long time isolation of the island nation.
For 800 years the Maldives knew Islam as a religion without knowing greater societies: other people, other countries, other races, other languages, other religions, other colour, other cultures or other gods. The Hindus and the Buddhists in the neighbouring countries instigated no influence. While colour, culture, fashion, lifestyle, marriages and society did; religion did without. The Maldives was not even referred to as the Islamic Republic because religion got no boundaries and the island nation got no boarder. Nine-Eleven brought huge change and now it seemed a beard should grow for new identity and an alien dress called a hijab gave rise in trend to cover a promiscuous society.
Wikipedia explains, “The isolation of the Maldives from the historical centres of Islam in the Middle East and Asia has allowed pre-Islamic beliefs and attitudes to survive in the land. Western anthropologist, Maloney, during his 1970’s fieldwork in the Maldives, reports being told by a Muslim cleric that for most Maldivian Islam is “largely a matter of observing ablutions, fasting and reciting incomprehensible Arabic prayer formulas.” There is widespread belief in jinn and evil spirits. For protection against such evils, islanders often resort to various charms and spells. The extent of beliefs has led observers to identify a magico-religious system parallel to Islam known as fanditha which provides a more personal way for the islanders to deal with either actual or perceived problems in their lives.”
Some of the westerners visiting the Maldives wrote in their websites undermining Maldivian way of life. “It’s apparent that young Maldivian turning to modern fashion as they appear in western dresses side by side with the old Islamic headscarves on the streets of Malé.” The rational truth was that those headscarves happened to be a recent trend and radicalising young hearts were growing in numbers since Nine-Eleven. Islander clothes and traditional dresses did not have a headscarf and in fact, women started to wear a bodice to cover their bosoms in the 50’s when it made obligatory by President Amin who saw a woman with irregular tits. By tradition, each girl would mark a ceremonial day of ‘hedun-levun’ following the end of her first menstruation but too often poverty complicated matters of getting garments to postpone this function in which the girl undergoes a bathe and gets dressed in kandeki wrap and libas bodice and there begins her adulthood.
Three days later, Ibthisham and her family transferred to the island of Buruni. A cleaning task was carried out on every island in the Maldives. As she learnt, Vilufushi was destroyed completely and all 192 buildings stumbled. Nobody had gone there to clean the debris. 18 people from her island feared dead – 7 males and 11 females, among them 7 were children; 14 dead, 2 adults and 2 children missing. She spent days with cleaning crew and relief workers, cooking and preparing community meals at a makeshift table. A generator set and water containers were quickly hoisted by the community workers and the relief teams but the tents had not come up – still more work to be done before setting up the tents. She picked few dresses from a pile of clothes that arrived from Malé, carried a bottle of water in her hand all the time. She never knew poverty at this level. She slept with Iffé on open joli perches.
It seemed aid was promptly promised by the international community, food and water reached the atolls. She had also learnt that the first flight with aid relief touched down at Hanimadeu Airport in the Northern Region at 10:30 hrs on 27th December and it belonged to the Indian Air Force. On the sixth day, she called home and found her father doing well – the paralysed network was repaired.
As days passed, people grew anxious and angry; losing patience and indecent scenes of islander behaviour caught sight of her eyes. Ibthisham saw her mother having sex with an NSS personnel on a folding bed creaking loudly, out in the open, while her family and Iffé sat by them in the falling dark. What else could you do on an island? Islander chemistry was contagious particularly to heighten with sexual activities and the people sat unconcerned or ignoring and rather not to disturb. She had witnessed more of such vulgarity among the islanders, even Iffé behaving badly. Unrefined behaviour took place inside the temporary camps set up all over the nation. Under difficult circumstances, while they got no privacy, sex could not be ruled out for a sex-hungered island community and their laidback lifestyle, creating a disclosure to wrangles and physical harassments, child abuse, sex and drugs. Ibthisham grew victimised to experience harassment at a very personal level on an island full of stranded fornication.
In January 2006, Ibthisham applied for a Maldivian passport because she was half-Maldivian. Her mother was Maldivian. She lost her passport in the tsunami. While the Indian Embassy in the Maldives endorsed her papers with which she could fly home safely as an Indian, simultaneously, she tried to seek Maldivian citizenship which in the beginning seemed possible.
In Capricorn’s power, no foreign-born or alien-blood Maldivian could obtain citizenship in the Maldives. Firstly, they did not accept anyone whether Moslem or non-Moslem into the nation. Secondly, the population was growing constantly since the 60’s and the 70’s, government focused to reduce growth and it did control by the year 2000; in 1990, the growth rate was recorded at 3.5 and it dropped to 2.0 by 2000. The Maldives, faced with overpopulation problems mainly in the urban areas and lack of space in the country, planned to tackle with development based on the census studies which the country maintained successfully for the last 100 years and thus they figured slowing down growth rate was a crucial factor for development. In the 80’s and the 90’s, the government embarked on tackling population control by introducing western philosophy; ruled out young marriages, ruled out divorces, ruled out polygamy, introduced condoms and contraceptives, applied family planning and campaigned for pausing between births. However, inconsiderately, foreign labour was allowed in huge numbers to do the work that the locals could not do. Foreign labour and cheap labour from countries like Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal had not been a problem over with even today.
Thirdly and most ferociously, a non-Moslem was unconditionally out of accord. A bill came up in the Parliament in the 80’s to allow citizenship to foreign-born Maldivian children. This particular bill was not given a chance for debate instead rejected by the Capricorn Government who ruled with absolute power.
His Excellency got Capricorn qualities; he learnt from experience and stubbornly listened to nobody. Few years after the unholy bill was rejected, it happened to be the Capricorn himself who raised the matter to the Parliament with an intensity to pass it through by unanimous vote. It occurred, one of the twin daughters of Capricorn married an alien and soon they expected birth of a Maldivian child – there was no other choice.
Fathers and mothers of foreign origins married to Maldivian islanders rejoiced with the good news that their children became Maldivian citizens, still they were registered as Moslems whether practising or not.
There was hope when Ibthisham attended the authorities seeking for citizenship. She made one crucial mistake and she was denied of citizenship. Whatever bill may have passed, it was not working at all; law forbids her from becoming a Maldivian. She told the authorities her religion was Hinduism.
