MADRAS, India -- In India, very few people had heard the word tsunami, let alone understood what these waves could do. Until Sunday, Dec. 26, hardly anybody had the vaguest inclination of the destructive ability of the sea.

Of course, people have read about the angry Earth in National Geographic and other nature magazines, but there was little knowledge of what a tsunami could do along India's long coasts.

I had been to the beach that Sunday morning, and had seen a bright sun, clear blue skies and a deceptively calm ocean. The Bay of Bengal, on whose shores lie the southern Indian city of Madras, seemed so serenely calm that I could not imagine that a quarter of an hour after I left waves would roar in anger and rush inland.