On 25th December, some relatives and I were in Nagercoil for a family wedding. The place is half an hour’s drive away from Kanyakumari which we wanted to visit. There were six of us—two children, their mother, her elderly parents and I. That morning we heard news of giant waves hitting the Chennai coast. When we reached Kanyakumari, we found the sea there behaving oddly. So we turned back immediately. On the way to Nagercoil our driver took a road that goes past the Suthavli coast. Since we had not spent time at the Kanyakumari beach, he thought we might want to spend some time here. There too the locals told us that the sea had been behaving in a peculiar fashion since the morning. The waves would ebb for a while and suddenly swell and advance. When we arrived, the sea had receded. We got out of the car, walked a little way but felt anxious and turned back in five minutes. The car was parked on a rise. The distance to it from the seashore was barely twenty feet. As we were walking towards it, some locals shouted, ‘Look! It’s a miracle!’ We turned round to look. A monstrous wave had gathered on the horizon and was lunging towards the shore. I began to record the sight on my video camera. It was instinctive. None of us had seen anything like it before. I thought I could even make a short documentary on the phenomenon if I got enough footage. But within seconds the wave had expanded across the horizon and was advancing at a crazy speed. It was now as tall as a two-storey building. We started running towards the car. The driver managed to get in, but before we could reach, the wave had pounced on us. The car was tossed up into the air and shattered to bits. The wave pulled us into itself with a demonic force, tossing us around as it advanced. I held my breath. I was being dragged over some hard objects that I couldn’t identify.