Baskaran’s midway lapse into the past tense may be a cruel twist inflicted by the tsunami, but few helping him today can understand the reality he lived by. Like the adivasi who is in a symbiotic relationship with the forest, people like Baskaran too live by and subsist on the forest they call the sea. But, for a civil society ignorant of fisherfolk ways, the best of efforts and the most honest of intentions are falling woefully short of giving them back what they have lost.