Posted on Thursday 30 December 2004

A survivor who works as a masseuse on a beach in Penang looked up and saw the wave. He wasn't certain what it was he was looking at but his customer, a Japanese tourist looked up and shouted "Tsunami! Run! Run for your life!"

The Malay language now has a new word. Well, not really, of course the word has been part of the international lexicon for many years but, at least with regard to the Malay peninsula, nobody had an actual use for it until now.

The television is now full of it, tsunami this, tsunami that, the frequency of its utterance outstripping even the word sodomy in the opening days of the Anwar Ibrahim show-trials.

I'm still trying to come to terms with the enormity of the tragedy that has occurred. The Malay peninsula, unlike its neighbour Indonesia, is geologically remarkably stable. It's not a place known for extremes, its west coast is protected from the Indian Monsoon by the great island of Sumatra and it was also protected from the full force of the giant waves the same way. But even so, the tsunami has taken away more than fifty lives here, mainly those children and elderly, most killed while picnicking with their families on a public beach in Penang. In global terms this toll was fortunately small but it is large enough to be considered a national disaster.

Fortunately for us, we were in Kuala Lumpur and not close to the coast. I didn't even feel the tremor which I understand that many people at the top of high-rise buildings felt. Being in holiday mode, I wasn't even aware of the news until told about it by a friend.

A tsunami? You're kidding. Are you sure that's the right word? A tsunami?

Since then, all I've seen is probably what you have all seen, charts of epicentres, concentric circles expanding out wards, incomprehensible statistics of loss of life. It's a sobering thought that only for a a timing difference of a few weeks and a bit of luck running the wrong way, we could have been standing on that beach in Penang suddenly scrambling against a panicking crowd in search of higher ground, desperately trying to cling to our two small children, one five years old, the other two and one other. Actually it's more than sobering, it's the stuff of nightmares.

And then you take a step back and imagine the global scale. Frankly, I'm astonished that a quake off the west coast of Sumatra could kill hundreds of people in Africa let alone the tens of thousands across nine countries. I'm astonished that the toll estimate has now exceeded fifty thousand people. The only reality that I can bring to this is having experienced first hand what the coastline can be like in some parts of the Third World where the poorest people get forced onto the most marginalised lands and where shantytowns have sprung up along the most marginal land of all, the lagoons, inlets and beaches. Typhoons and flooding are a normal and expected part of the misfortune of being poor on the coast but tsunamis virtually unknown except, I suppose, in the places where they have a name for them.