Indian child born to parents fleeing the terrible tsunami waves that devastated their village in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The baby was not due until January 15, 2005. On December 26, 2004, Lakshmi Narayna Roy, the baby’s father, had just made tea for his wife, when the earth shook. Roy ran out of their house in Hut Bay with his pregnant wife and first-born son, Saurabh, age 6.
Roy’s job is a rickshaw driver. He managed to put his wife and son on his bicycle and pulled and pushed his little family uphill, minutes before the first waves destroyed their village. Just hours after reaching high ground with 700 other people, Namita began having labor pains. Luckily a nurse was among the refugees and she attended to laboring mother, while other women made protective draperies out of their rescued saris.
The birth was difficult and the mother, Namita Roy, had lost a lot of fluid. Namita and her newborn were carried down the hill in a rickshaw to a medical center where a navy officer alerted the ship. Because of the destruction in the harbor, the ship could not get to shore, so Lakshmi Roy and his friends lifted Namita and her baby above their heads and carried them through the waist-deep water.
A doctor in the Port Blair hospital named the boy Tsunami and the parents agreed that it was a fitting name. Lakshmi added “I am sure he will fight with me when he grows up, though, for giving him a feminine name.”