ANNA NAGAR, India – It was a story of unfathomable loss that was told a thousand times yesterday along the 600-mile stretch of Indian coastline.

“I was with my wife, my daughter, my father, my sister picking the small fish from my nets,” said 30-year-old Murugaran. “Then the waters came. Now my family is gone.”

Only his son survived, snatched from the racing waters by a father who, when faced with the most extreme of choices, grabbed his most precious possession and fled. Murugaran, who is penniless as well as bereaved after losing his nets and catamaran, stood apart from the crowds on the beach at Anna Nagar fishing village on the edge of Madras.

The white smoke from seven funeral pyres was drifting from the cemetery where Murugaran had buried Dasamal, his wife, and Shalini, his 6-year-old daughter. “I was not able to save the others,” he said. “The water just came too quickly. It smashed them. It smashed everything. My boy is with relatives, too frightened to speak. He will not leave the house.”

As he spoke, Murgaran stood amid the debris of the disaster – children’s schoolbooks, a single plastic shoe, mangled cooking pots, and a TV facedown in the sand. Tales such as Murugaran’s were too numerous to record yesterday as India turned to the task of burying and burning the dead, who by nightfall numbered more than 5,600.

In fishing encampments such as Anna Nagar, where 19 died, including seven children, the last rites were performed with simple dignity. Eldest sons lit funeral pyres according to Hindu tradition, and families gathered for puja (prayers), banging drums, chanting, and placing a few grains of rice on the lips of the dead.

Further down the coast, however, in Cuddalore and Nagapattinam, there was no time for niceties as the authorities dug pits and laid vast funeral pyres to avoid disease.

In Cuddalore, mechanical diggers gouged out mass graves into which relatives carried their dead, carefully placing each body alongside the next.

Many of the dead were fishermen who had set out to sea or their families living in flimsy shacks of bamboo staves and a lattice of palm leaves.

As a rule, the poorer the family, the closer they lived to the beach, and the more likely that their lives were consumed when the sea reared to claim them at 8 a.m. on Sunday. The reek of decomposition was carried on the wind down the beach, where rescue teams worked from dawn to retrieve the dead from the sea.

One man in Cuddalore, spotting the body of his 8-year-old son, collapsed on the sand, wailing inconsolably. The boy’s mother rolled on the ground screaming and beating her chest.

Two hours’ drive down the coast, the district of Nagapattinam suffered the heaviest toll in Tamil Nadu – about 1,700 dead, many of them children, police said.

Bodies littered the district’s villages where fishermen and their families had lived off the sea for generations, scratching out a $3.43 per day living catching, drying, and selling sprat-sized fish. “Water has taken away my family, water has taken away my family,” grieved Anbalakhan in Karambambari. Her husband, son, and two daughters were killed by the waves.