ABSTRACT
65“Oh, the water is sweet here,” my friend and field assistant Renuga often says when we walk about in the streets of Tharangambadi, a coastal village in the South-east Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Calling on people who live in the newly constructed part of the village where thousands of people have resettled after the Asian tsunami swept away their homes on the shore in December 2004, she almost routinely tastes the water from the pumps that have been established on the plot of many of the new houses.
