My boat was just a few meters from shore when the waves crashed

Boxing Day 2004.

When the earthquake struck at 06:30 a.m. (01:00 GMT), I was on a ferry bound for Havelock – an island in India’s Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.

Radhanagar Beach is known for its silver sand and clear blue waters and was recently named “Best Beach in Asia” by Time Magazine.

My best friend from college and her family had lived in Port Blair, the archipelago’s capital, for a decade and a half, but this was my first visit to the islands, where I had arrived on Christmas Eve.

We had planned to spend three days in Havelock and in the morning we packed snacks and sandwiches, gathered excited children and headed off to catch the ferry from the Phoenix Bay jetty in Port Blair.

Not wanting to miss anything, I was standing on the front deck looking around when disaster struck.

Just as we were leaving the harbor the boat began to rock and suddenly the jetty next to where we had boarded collapsed and fell into the sea. This was followed by the watchtower and an electricity pylon.

It was an extraordinary sight. Dozens of people standing next to me watched with their mouths open.

Luckily the jetty was deserted at the time, so there were no injuries. A boat was supposed to leave from there in half an hour, but the travelers had not yet arrived.

A member of the boat’s crew told me it was an earthquake. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the 9.1 magnitude quake third strongest ever recorded in the world – and it remains the largest and most destructive in Asia.

It struck off the coast of northwest Sumatra in the Indian Ocean and triggered a devastating tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people in more than a dozen countries and caused massive damage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives and Thailand.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, about 100 km north of the epicenter, suffered significant damage when a wall of water up to 15 meters (49 feet) high in places made landfall just about 15 minutes later.

The official death toll was put at 1,310 – but with more than 5,600 people missing and presumed dead, it is believed that more than 7,000 islanders may have died.

While we were on the boat, we were unaware of the extent of the destruction around us. Our cell phones didn’t work on the water and we only got fragmented information from the crew. We heard about damage in Sri Lanka, Bali, Thailand and the Maldives – and the southern Indian coastal town of Nagapattinam.

However, there was no information about Andaman and Nicobar Islands – a collection of hundreds of islands scattered in the Bay of Bengal and located about 1,500 km (915 miles) east of mainland India.

Only 38 of them were inhabited. They were home to 400,000 people, including six hunter-gatherer groups, who lived isolated from the outside world for millennia.

The only way to get to the islands was by ferry, but as we later learned, an estimated 94% of the piers in the area were damaged.

That was also the reason why we never made it to Havelock on December 26, 2004. The jetty there was damaged and under water, it was said.

So the boat turned around and started the return journey. There was speculation for a while that we might not be given permission to dock at Port Blair for safety reasons and might have to spend the night at anchor.

This frightened the passengers – most of them tourists looking forward to sun and beach.

After bobbing around in rough seas for several hours, we returned to Port Blair. Since Phoenix Bay was closed following the damage in the morning, we were taken to Chatham, another port in Port Blair. The jetty where we were dropped off had huge, gaping holes in places.

As we made our way home, the signs of devastation were all around us – buildings were reduced to rubble, small upturned boats sat in the middle of the road and the roads had large cracks. Thousands of people were left homeless as the tidal wave inundated their homes in low-lying areas.

I met a traumatized nine-year-old girl whose house was filled with water and she told me she almost drowned. One woman told me that she had lost everything she owned in an instant.

Over the next three weeks I reported extensively on the disaster and its impact on the population.

It was the first time that a tsunami had caused such devastating damage in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the scale of the tragedy was overwhelming.

Salt water contaminated many freshwater sources and destroyed large areas of farmland. It was difficult to get vital supplies to the islands because the jetties were unusable.

The authorities carried out large-scale relief and rescue operations. The army, navy and air force were deployed, but it took days before they could reach all the islands.

Every day, Navy and Coast Guard ships brought boatloads of people made homeless by the tsunami from other islands to Port Blair, where schools and government buildings were converted into emergency shelters.

They brought stories of devastation from their homelands. Many told me that they had escaped with only the clothes they were wearing.

A woman from Car Nicobar told me that during the earthquake, foamy water began to spew from the ground at the same time as the waves came from the sea.

She and hundreds of others from her village had waited for rescuers for 48 hours without food or water. She said it was a “miracle” that she and her 20-day-old baby survived.

Port Blair has been rocked by aftershocks almost daily, some strong enough to spark rumors of new tsunamis, prompting frightened people to run to higher ground.

A few days later, the Indian military flew journalists to Car Nicobar, a flat, fertile island known for its charming beaches and also home to a large Indian air force colony.

The killer tsunami had completely leveled the base. The water rose 12 meters here and while most people were sleeping, the ground was pulled out from under them. A hundred people died here. More than half were Air Force officers and their families.

We visited the island’s villages of Malacca and Kaakan, which also bore the brunt of nature’s force, forcing residents to seek shelter in tents along the road. Among them were families torn apart by the tsunami.

A grieving young couple told me that they managed to save their five-month-old baby, but their other children, ages seven and twelve, were washed away.

Surrounded on all sides by coconut trees, every house was reduced to rubble. Personal items scattered included clothing, textbooks, a child’s shoe and a musical keyboard.

The only thing that remained surprisingly intact was a bust of the father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi, at a traffic circle.

A senior army officer told us that his team had recovered seven bodies that day, and we watched the mass burning from a distance.

At the air base, we watched as rescuers lifted a woman’s body from the rubble.

An official said that of every body found in Car Nicobar, several were washed away by the waves without leaving a trace.

After all these years I still sometimes think about the day I took the ferry to Havelock.

I wonder what would have happened if the shaking had come a few minutes earlier.

And what would have happened if the wall of water had hit the shore while I was waiting at the dock to board our ferry?

It was a close call for me on Boxing Day 2004. Thousands who perished were not so lucky.

Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter And Facebook.