JAFFNA CENTRAL COLLEGE – OBA (U.K)

It was a peaceful Sunday morning in Thalaiady, a coastal hamlet in Tamil Eelam where the inhabitants having returned home from a colourful morning church service on the day after Christmas were sitting down to a family breakfast when suddenly the ocean rumbled a horrendous war-drum and the skies screamed an eerie siren. The first to respond were the birds and animals which shot in different directions in panic. Men, women and children along the coastal belt, startled at the deafening noise, thought the Sri Lankan Bukhara war-planes were descending on their village. What the people along the coastline saw was something they had never seen in their lives before. From the midst of the blue-green spread of the wide ocean, a huge bulge was rising about fifty feet from the shore all along the coast, first into a fuming steam and then into a soggy ashen pulp. As it sped towards the shore, the towering wave at thirty feet high arched into an attacking cobra, baring an army of killer fang crests. All that the helpless people could do was to pick up their babes and rush out not knowing where they were fleeing. The speed at which the killer wave breached its shores and wiped out the line of villages settled for centuries along the south and north-eastern shores of Sri Lanka beyond recognition was unbelievably blood-curdling!