By:Chris Munzing
Sudha Sahai, her husband, Anil, and their sons Rohan, 13, and Achal, 26, had just settled into a lazy day around the pool at their resort in Phuket, Thailand, when the tsunami hit. The Sahais had spent the previous two weeks sightseeing in Cambodia and Myanmar, and were looking forward to relaxing for a day on the picture-perfect Thai beach.
"It was going to be the end of the trip," Sudha said in her living room in Lido. "It was supposed to be the chilling-out part of our vacation. My husband said that we must go to Phuket on our trip."
The day they arrived at Kata Beach in Phuket, the family settled into two second-floor rooms and headed down to the pool. "My little one said, 'Why are we staying here only one day?'" Sudha recalled. She extended their stay by one day, but the next day they woke up to a different beach. "The next morning, I looked outside and it was really windy," she said. "But I thought that's what Phuket must be like. Some of the guests said they had felt tremors earlier, but we hadn't felt anything."
The family settled down by the pool again, while Rohan, an eighth-grader at Long Beach Middle School, went for a swim in the ocean. He quickly found that the further out he went, the shallower the water became. He was dozens of feet into the sea, yet still standing on wet sand. "He told me, 'The ocean was coming out with me,'" his mother said. "He said that there were fish flopping that couldn't keep up with the water."
Achal, who was at the beach with his younger brother, watched the sea grow violent, and then saw the first of several massive waves rushing toward the beach. The two brothers ran to their father, who had been sitting on higher ground by the pool. Sudha was in the lobby, speaking with a hotel employee.
"She's talking to me, but she's looking past me, over my head," Sudha said of the employee. "I turned around and just saw people running towards us." The first wave had rushed over the beach and into the low-lying lobby, rising around guests' ankles. It quickly receded, taking beach chairs and belongings with it into the choppy sea.
Sudha quickly located her family and they went upstairs to their rooms, not quite sure of what was going on. The second wave came shortly afterward, but this time it rose much higher than the first, surging over the pools and swim-up bars. The curiosity that came with the first wave quickly turned to panic and confusion.
When the third wave slammed into the hotel, completely flooding the bottom floor, panic turned to terror. "With the third one, the water comes gushing into the ground floor," Sudha said. "We could hear people screaming. I looked out into our corridor and saw a woman, and I thought, 'Why is she covered in ketchup?' I didn't realize until much later that it was blood."
The family, which, Sudha said, always packs very light, grabbed their few bags and belongings and decided it was time to go. They walked down to the first floor into knee-deep water, which became chest-high in a matter of seconds. Holding their bags above their heads, the Sahais made it to the exit and up a steep hill to higher ground.
"Everybody was in their beach clothes, bathing suits," Sudha said. "We were the only people on the hill with our belongings. Nobody else had passports, plane tickets, money, nothing."
The Sahais sat on the hill with a Danish couple they had befriended earlier. "The woman was crying because she had seen someone's babies washed out into the sea," Sudha said. She frequently closed her eyes as she recalled the destruction she witnessed.
From their hilltop, the family watched as the water receded, taking with it everything that wasn't bolted down, including many hotel guests. "I wasn't sure at all that we were going to come out of this alive, because we had no idea what was going to happen next," Sudha said. She called her middle son, Anoj, 21, who was at home in Lido Beach, and told him how to get into the safety-deposit box and where he could find her will.
The family quickly decided that they had to get out of Phuket. They paid a cab driver "six or seven times what it should have cost" for a ride out of Phuket to Krabi, to another hotel that had been spared by the waves. The cab driver drove along the abandoned roads quickly, stopping only at the Sarasin Bridge, the only roadway out of Phuket. The normally calm inlet from the ocean that runs beneath the bridge was filled with rushing water and littered with chunks of destroyed buildings, capsized boats and other debris. But the cab cross the bridge without incident, and eventually made it to Krabi.
"When we arrived at the hotel in Krabi, an employee asked where we had come from," Sudha said. "We said Phuket. He said, 'How? The bridge collapsed.' We realized then we had barely made it across."
The Sahais eventually made it to Bangkok, and after hours of waiting in an airport, home to Lido. Sudha said she still sees the wave in her mind and wonders how many of her fellow hotel guests in Phuket made it out alive.
Anil, an investment banker, and Sudha, a nutritionist, have since returned to work and Rohan to school, but there is little doubt that what they have seen will stay with them forever. "I think this is what a war is like," Sudha said.
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