CUDDALORE, India — The floor is dirt, the walls corrugated cardboard. There are no windows, no door. There is a foot-high gap between the roof and the walls, a wishful invitation to the slight breeze that sometimes blows from the nearby sea in this hot and destroyed village.
This is the new home of Ezhilarasi, built by the Indian government to replace her stone house with its refrigerator, television and sewing machine. Without the machine, she cannot work. Even if it had survived, it would do her no good. There is no electricity here.
Only row after row of cardboard lean-tos, dipped in tar to keep out the rain. The government has said it allotted about $1,100 for each dwelling, but that sum is not evident in the crude construction. These are what Indian authorities call temporary shelters, refuge designed to house survivors of December's devastating tsunami while permanent houses are built.
In Ezhilarasi's fishing village, 57 people perished, most of them women and children who could not outrun the wicked waters. Along with their homes, the sea sucked away their boats and nets, leaving them with nothing to live in and no way to work.
Now there are 1,450 survivors living in the sand and dirt, waiting to find out what will happen to them. By early February, deliveries of rice and cooking pots from the government and aid organizations had stopped, and food was running out. Like thousands of others along this southern coast of India, these villagers are in limbo, neither here nor there on the long road to recovery.
"How can I like it here?" Ezhilarasi asked, sitting in the shade of a palm tree, her hands knotted in her lap. "By noon, it's too hot to sit in that place," she said, pointing to the dark brown structure she is supposed to live in. "My children refuse to sleep there. They say the smell of the tar is too awful."
Her three children, ages 9, 7, and 4, are staying in downtown Cuddalore with her mother. At night, Ezhilarasi and her husband stay there too. In the morning, her husband walks down to the water and waits for government workers to come so he can complete a seemingly never-ending series of forms documenting the loss of his home, his boat and his nets. Without such documentation, the family cannot continue to receive aid.
Ezhilarasi walks down to the temporary shelters and sits with other women from the village, waiting for whatever deliveries of food and clothing will come. For the last three days, there has been nothing, she said. The government's initial payout of $88 and 50 kilos of rice per survivor will not last long.
