One is of a child sitting alone outside on a patch of mud. No one knew where his parents were. The other is of a huge pit into which hundreds of dead bodies were thrown.

Mani, a Saratoga resident, was visiting the southern Indian city of Madras with her family during the holiday season when the tsunami struck. They were barely five miles inland from the beaches of Madras, one of the places in India hardest hit by the monstrous tidal wave.

It was a clear, sunny day in Madras and Mani and her family were looking forward to yet another day of socializing with relatives.

But things were about to change very dramatically.

A housemaid who worked for the family rushed in to say that there had been a massive earthquake. Mani and her husband, Vish Vishwanath, quickly turned on the television.

"The initial reports were very sketchy," Mani said. "It was only hours later that we completely understood the magnitude of the disaster and that it was a tsunami and not just an earthquake."

Their immediate family was safe. But there were thousands who had been affected. "All along the beaches in Madras are small huts that were completely washed away," Mani said. "The people near these beaches, they bore the brunt of the disaster."

Later in the day, when visiting a local mall, they were greeted by a heartrending sight. A couple dressed in their nightclothes were walking barefoot, trying to buy shoes.

"They were vacationing at a beach resort near the city when they were struck by the tsunami. They told me that they had no time to react. The water had come in right away," Mani said.

Vishwanath said that the couple had lost everything they were carrying. Even their car had been washed away.

"It was very surreal. There was very little information in the beginning," Vishwanath said. "And it was a perfect, brilliant sunny day. We had not felt any tremors. Water and power had not been affected. But anyone in the vicinity of the coast got hit really badly."

Vishwanath lived in Madras in the 1960s and said one of his fondest memories of the city was to go to Marina beach in the evening for a stroll or to snack on something bought from the numerous vendors on the beach.

Later, many anecdotes about the tsunami came filtering in. "We heard that a neighbor of my sister's family vacationing in the Indian Ocean island of Maldives was stranded," Vishwanath said.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, friends and co-workers of the Vishwanath family in the United States spent anxious hours trying to reach them. "We were deluged by phone calls and emails. Some acquaintances even contacted the United States Consulate in Madras to inquire about the family. The consulate staff called us to make sure we were all right," Vishwanath said.

He said the death toll might have been much higher if the tsunami had struck in the afternoon or evening when a lot more people are visiting the beaches.

Vishwanath said it was very difficult to reconcile to the fact that so many had died just miles away from them. "After the disaster, the authorities did not want people to come and gawk. So only the volunteers had access to the affected areas," he said. "And yet here we were some miles away reading in the newspapers about a death toll in thousands."

Their children, Neya and Atulya, who were also travelling with them, had a lot of questions about the tsunami. "They keep asking if their grandparents in Madras are going to be OK," Mani said.

She said she was amazed at the resilience of the locals in the affected areas. "We were coming back to a secure environment, here in Saratoga ... but they seem determined to carry on with their lives."