Newborn Indian boy named Tsunami

Newborn Indian boy named Tsunami

Suresh Seshadri, Reuters, Port Blair, India

Six-day-old Tsunami Roy doesn't know what all the fuss about him
is, as he hungrily suckles at his mother's breast before dropping
off for a contented nap.

Sitting in a classroom in the capital of India's tsunami-
ravaged Andaman and Nicobar islands, his 34-year-old father,
Lakshmi Narain Roy, recounted on Saturday the dramatic events
leading to Tsunami's birth, three weeks ahead of time.

"It was early morning on Sunday, when I made my pregnant wife
a cup of tea and woke her up. She was just about to take a sip
when we felt the first jolt of the quake. She immediately
screamed for me to pick up our sleeping son and rush out."

Roy grabbed his 6-year-old older son and ran out of their home
near the coastal settlement of Hut Bay on the Little Andaman
island before turning back to see if his wife was following.

"She had fallen down and briefly lost consciousness. But then
she heard people screaming 'the water is coming' and managed to
crawl out to the street and asked me to put our son on my cycle-
rickshaw."

After hoisting his injured wife and son on to the rickshaw Roy
pedaled and pushed the rickshaw as fast as he could up and away
from the shore towards a nearby rocky slope. There he half-
carried and half-pushed his pregnant wife up the last 150 feet or
so to a wooded area where many others had fled.

The Roys are amongst the fortunate few who survived Sunday's
devastating tsunami that has killed more than 126,000 people in
Asia, including more than 8,900 in India.

They spent the next few hours watching the angry water foam
over their submerged homes and waiting for a mahout to come and
lead away a restless elephant, that was used for logging work and
had been tethered to a nearby tree.

"Soon she was complaining of pain in her abdomen and at first
I told her it must be due to the fall as the baby was not due
till January 15. But as the pain got worse by nightfall, I became
frantic and started looking for help, and luckily found a nurse."

The nurse, with the help of other women who had fled the
waves, rigged up a makeshift curtain, laid the 26-year-old Namita
down on a bed of dried leaves and grass and ordered the men to
get some clean cloth, thread and a bowl of hot water.

"A few hours later the child was born. But the nurse had no
instruments, she was unable to remove the placenta from inside my
wife's womb and within hours she was again in pain."

Unable to find any help locally, Roy trekked nearly a mile
down to the police outpost at Hut Bay on Tuesday and located a
doctor, who examined his wife and advised that she be taken to
hospital as soon as possible.

"On Wednesday, we learnt a Navy ship had come into the bay but
the jetty was damaged and so with help from other locals I
carried her and the baby on to a dinghy and took her out to the
big ship at sea."

Reaching Port Blair after a 7-hour journey Roy's wife was
rushed to the local hospital where doctors immediately cleaned up
her uterus and gave her some medicines.

"It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and
we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it
is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember."