Tae-Hwan Park 201301467
Professor John Hal Bak
Intermediate English Writing
9th December 2014
Surviving the wave
"You do not know what you have until it's gone". This is a common phrase we always say but never live up to. The world is full of teenagers, siblings, or spouses who take for granted the amount of pain and sweat family members sacrifice for them. It is only near death of a family member when people truly realize how valuable their family is.
Praneeth Daham was an interesting friend whom I shared lots of time with. It was a long time since I had contacted Praneeth. The last time I saw him was about nine years ago when I was in elementary school and he was in high school. Every day my sister and I used to walk to the main road because the school bus could not get in through the narrow road leading to our house. It was early in the morning when I could always feel the cold air and the warm sun starting to mix together. I normally sat on a stair way of a bakery wondering when the bus would arrive. Praneeth would show up with well combed hair which he dropped a dab of coconut oil just to give it a nice slick back look. Despite his clean hair style Praneeth always had a five o'clock shadow that ran all the way down from his side burns to his jaw. When the bus arrived Praneeth and I would sit together right next to the door telling each other stories until we got to school. During the period I knew Praneeth for, his experience surviving the 2004 tsunami was the most impressionable stories I heard from him.
It was awkward getting in touch with Praneeth after so many years. We were able to hear from each other a few years after he had graduated. However, after that we never talked again. In the past few days I contacted Praneeth and asked to interview him. I felt strange that I could see his life through Facebook yet felt so far and awkward. Once I got in touch with him we set a date to do the interview through Skype. When the time came I almost wanted to cancel it because I felt so awkward in front of my friend. Over time I just felt that time made us total strangers.
It was through Praneeth I learned the value of myfamily. When Praneeth and his family went for a vacation to Phuket little did they know they would encounter one of the most horrifying natural disasters in modern history, the 2004 tsunami. Praneeth was one of the survivor. When the first wave hit he was alone in his hotel room while his family was eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The wave busted through his window and the current pinned him against the wall. Praneeth took all his might and strength he had and fought his way through the current and climb to the third floor through the balcony. On the third floor he encountered a German couple who help the other survivors when the tsunami was over. It took Praneeth a day and a half to find his family luckily they were all safe and sound.
"Praneeth, how did you feel when you first lost your family?" I asked.
"I was really worried because the hotel restaurant was on the first floor and I didn't know if they had made it to a safer place. I was still trying to make sense of what happened. I remember I was really worried but I remember that I was also trying to get myself together". Praneeth explain that he was worried but his current circumstances and was more focused on bringing himself together to figure out what to do next. He gave a long pause and said that he was so lost in a foreign country by himself that the immediate urge to look for his family wasn't so strong.
I asked, "What were the kinds of thoughts that ran into your head as you saw the after math of the effect?" As I was asking I realized this was a tough question and decided to wait patiently. After a long pause, I could picture Praneeth moving his head from side to side as he thought. "That was the time I knew that I was in trouble. I did not give up hope that my family was still alive but, I was also starting to consider that they might be dead after I walked down stairs and saw level of catastrophe that took place." Praneeth tried to make me picture a situation when you were in really deep trouble with the police. He tried to give me a sense of desperation and fear. "Look man I don't really know how to describe that moment but, the easiest way I can explain is I just found a small corner where no one was looking and just cried out my heart." Said Praneeth and as I was listening I tried to put myself in his shoes and I could only imagine the frustration and desperation he had. "I cried so much because of all the regret about how I could have been better to my mother and father, and how I should have shown how much I loved them when they were still alive." Said Praneeth.
I asked Praneeth about how he spent a night alone after the tsunami. "I spent that night looking for a shelter to stay. There weren't very many shelters and the conditions were really bad." Praneeth spent that night thinking about what to do. He made a plan to continue looking for his family when the sun rose. He also planned to find a phone and call some of the relatives to help him. "I tried to sleep that night but I just couldn't. I think I was lying down on the floor constantly crying whenever I thought about my mother. I kept saying to myself I wish I could have done this for her when I had the chance to, I wish I could have done that. It's all regret you know."
Finally I asked, "How did you find your family and how did you change after this incident?" As he was speaking I could tell these were questions that Praneeth had answered so many times by other people who were fascinated about his story. Yet, I could still sense his emotions that will never get used to the traumatic event. "I woke up the next day and without a concrete plan I just walked around the streets of Phuket randomly asking people if they saw an Indian family with a mother father and a girl together. Of course nobody really cared answering me but I still tried. And since I had no better plan I just started shouting out my little sister's name." said Praneeth. He started shouting aimlessly on the streets from five AM to four PM. Praneeth cried multiple times throughout the day whenever he felt like hope was lost. However, every time he lost hope he decided to not to give up looking for his family and that's just when he stumbled upon an extraordinary piece of luck. "I was just about to give up but it is just when I saw a very familiar purple t-shirt my sister wore. I chased the girl with the purple t-shirt and the closer I got to her the more familiar she looked so I started calling her name Neha! Neha!" said Praneeth. The girl in the purple t-shirt turned and looked at Praneeth with disbelief as she screamed at the top of her lungs calling out her mother and father. Praneeth's family ran towards each other and hugged each other as tightly as they could. "That was the best feeling I ever had in my life, I felt like my sins were just washed away and my hopeless soul got charged up. I remember I had almost lost my voice from all the screaming but I was still crying really hard and telling my father that I loved him." I felt a slight shake of voice as Praneeth said that. "After that day I don't really think our family fought much. Even though we didn't say it out loud we knew that life is short and why waste it fighting the people you love the most. Even until today am just so thankful that my family is alive and is here with me."
Near death experience makes people realize how important their family is. This is something I try to always remember. I personally get annoyed at trivial things like when my mother calls me for dinner when am busy or my father calling me to ask when I will be home. However, whenever, I think of Praneeth's experience I automatically think twice about my actions and be more thankful to the people I love now for I know that they would not be around forever.
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