Couple's hearts torn after a trip to India
Posted Jan 12, 2005

Linda Strowbridge for The Owings Mills Times

Sheela Murthy's strong, quick, confident voice shudders and grows hushed as she describes a seaside drive during her Christmas vacation.

Murthy, an Owings Mills attorney, and her husband, Vasant Nayak, had set out along the southeast coast of India Dec. 23 with their nephew. The young man from Chennai was anxious to show his American relatives the area's improved road network and the idyllic ocean views to which it leads.

"We drove along and kept saying, 'Oh, look at that beautiful fishing village. Look at the great view they have.' Here I was so jealous of their homes - little fishing cottages literally 20 feet from the ocean," Murthy said.

They stopped in the village of Mahaballipuram <near Mahaballipuram>.

Children, excited by the arrival of a car, gathered around. And the visitors happily indulged the children with a western treat. They pulled out a digital camera and, standing on the beach, began shooting pictures of the children - one of a 6-year-old boy with his pet dog, another of a 12-year-old schoolgirl and her mother. Then they showed the children the amazing images on the camera's view screen.

Driving back to Chennai that afternoon, they decided to make prints when they returned to Maryland and ship them back to the village - a tiny gift to fishing families too poor to afford photographs of themselves.

Three days later, tsunamis crashed onto India's coast.

Murthy and Nayak, who had been safely inland at the time of the disaster, tried to get back to Mahaballipuram <near Mahaballipuram>. But the road was blocked by authorities.

"They are saying there is nobody in that village left alive. All of it is gone. There is nothing left, just debris," Murthy said. "These children were supposed to outlive me. To think that they are no longer part of our world, that they are gone, I get goose pimples. You just feel like sitting and crying because you feel so helpless."

Murthy, founder and principal of an immigration law firm with offices in Owings Mills and Chennai, India, did the one thing possible. Working through her charitable Murthy Foundation, she arranged to provide food, clothing, medicine and household essentials to 100 people displaced by the tsunamis. Murthy also appealed to the public to support tsunami relief efforts through a message in her weekly electronic newsletter, which has more than 40,000 subscribers.

In and near Chennai, where Nayak's family and Murthy's sister live, thousands of people died in the tsunamis, including people close to their families, Murthy said. Countless others were severely injured.

"The work is overwhelming in the government hospitals," said Murthy, adding that her sister, a physician, has been treating the injured while grieving the loss of some patients, professors and friends.

"It is not at all a remote event to us," Nayak said. "The day after the tsunamis, two of our employees in Chennai came into the office and told me that their neighbors' children had died." Like many other residents of Chennai - a large and congested city - the families had gone to the beach early that Sunday for some fresh air and fun.

The Murthy Foundation's relief efforts quickly mushroomed. The foundation committed to providing for 100 families, then more. It donated "several tens of thousands of dollars" directly to relief efforts and dispatched the lawyers and staff from the Chennai office to coordinate with aid workers on the ground to funnel appropriate goods and funds into local relief efforts.

Murthy, who has worked extensively with Indian organizations on immigration issues, began encouraging the community to donate to relief efforts coordinated by CARE (an international organization that works to ease poverty in 70 countries) and the Association for India's Development (a U.S.-registered nonprofit that promotes sustainable and equitable development in India through education, employment, health, social justice and women's empowerment projects).

She also linked fund-raising efforts on her Web site with those of Sulekha, an international network of Indian professionals. Sulekha has committed to match tsunami relief donations to CARE and the Association for India's Development dollar-for-dollar.

"I don't feel like we are doing a whole lot," Murthy said, "but we are more fortunate to be able to give back than a lot of people, and I feel such a deep sense of obligation and gratitude to the country of my birth."

"The more that comes out about the people of India, the better," said Nayak, who has worked as a photographer for UNICEF and other international aid organizations documenting conditions in India's slums.

"If something good could come out of this, it would bring light to conditions that have been ignored by the world. It would show that these people (in India's poor fishing villages) haven't been getting the basics of housing, health, nutrition, education, and it would turn the world's generosity to fixing that."

Sheela Murthy's Web site is www.murthy.com.