Boxing Day 2004.

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

Rad Nagar Beach there is famous for its silver sands and clear blue waters and was recently named “Asia’s Best Beach” by Time magazine.

My best friend from college and her family have lived in Port Blair, the capital of the islands, for fifteen years, but this was my first time visiting the islands, and I arrived just before Christmas.

We planned to stay in Havelock for three days and in the morning we packed up snacks and sandwiches, gathered the excited kids and set off to catch the ferry from Phoenix Bay Jetty in Port Blair.

Not wanting to miss a thing, I was standing on the foredeck looking around when disaster struck.

As we were sailing out of the port, the ship suddenly tilted and the pier next to where we boarded suddenly collapsed and fell into the sea. Next came the watchtowers and telephone poles.

It’s an extraordinary sight. The dozens of people standing next to me looked on, dumbfounded.

Fortunately, the pier was empty at the time and no one was injured. A boat left from there in half an hour, but the passengers had not yet arrived.

A crew member told me it was an earthquake. I didn’t know it at the time, but the 9.1 magnitude earthquake was The third strongest It remains the largest and most destructive event in Asia ever recorded in the world.

It occurred off the northwestern coast of Sumatra under the Indian Ocean, triggering a devastating tsunami that killed approximately 228,000 people in more than a dozen countries and caused huge damage to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives and Thailand.

About 15 minutes later, a wall of water up to 15 meters (49 feet) high in some areas hit the land, causing widespread damage in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, about 100 kilometers north of the epicenter.

The official death toll is 1,310, but more than 5,600 people are missing or presumed dead, and more than 7,000 islanders are believed to have died.

However, while on the boat we did not notice the scale of the destruction around us. Our phones didn’t work on the water and we could only get snippets of information from the crew. We heard of damage in Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Maldives, as well as the coastal town of Nagapattinam in southern India.

But there is no information about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – a group of hundreds of islands scattered in the Bay of Bengal, about 1,500 kilometers (915 miles) east of mainland India.

Only 38 of them are inhabited. It is home to 400,000 people, including six hunter-gatherer groups that have been isolated from the outside world for thousands of years.

The only way to reach the islands is by ferry, but we later learned that an estimated 94% of the marinas in the area were damaged.

This was the reason why we failed to reach Havelock on 26 December 2004. We were told that the dock there was damaged and flooded.

• Watch Geeta Pandey talk about her experience here

So the boat turned around and started returning. For a while, there was speculation that we might not be able to get permission to dock at Port Blair for security reasons and might have to spend the night at anchor.

That makes passengers, most of whom are tourists looking forward to sun and sand, anxious.

After drifting for a few hours in the rough sea, we returned to Port Blair. As Phoenix Bay was closed after the damage in the morning, we were taken to Chatham, another port in Port Blair. The dock we were dropped off had huge holes in many places.

When we returned home, signs of destruction were everywhere – buildings reduced to rubble, boats overturned in the middle of streets, large gashes in the roads. Thousands of people were left homeless as waves inundated homes in low-lying areas.

I met a traumatized nine-year-old girl whose house filled with water and she told me she almost drowned. One woman told me that she lost her life’s fortune in the blink of an eye.

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

This was the first tsunami to hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the scale of the disaster was shocking.

Salt water has polluted many freshwater sources and destroyed large areas of farmland. With the docks unavailable, transporting vital supplies to the island was difficult.

The authorities carried out extensive rescue operations. The Army, Navy and Air Force were deployed, but it took several days to reach all the islands.

Every day, Navy and Coast Guard vessels ferried boatloads of people displaced by the tsunami from other islands to Port Blair, where schools and government buildings were converted into temporary shelters.

They brought with them stories of devastation in their hometowns. Many people told me they took nothing with them except the clothes on their backs.

A woman at Car Nicobar told me that when the earthquake hit, the ground started spewing frothy water as waves came in from the sea.

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

Aftershocks hit Port Blair almost daily, some strong enough to trigger rumors of new tsunamis and send scared people running to higher ground.

A few days later, the Indian military flew reporters to Kanikoba, a flat, fertile island known for its stunning beaches and home to a large Indian Air Force colony.

A deadly tsunami completely leveled the base. The water level here has risen by 12 meters, and while most people are sleeping, the ground is being pulled away from their feet. A hundred people died here. More than half are Air Force officers and their families.

We visited the island villages of Malacca and Kakan, which have also borne the brunt of nature’s onslaught, forcing residents to take shelter in tents on the roadside. Among them were families torn apart by the tsunami.

One distraught young couple told me they managed to save their five-month-old baby, but their other children, ages 7 and 12, were swept away.

Surrounded by coconut trees, every house is in ruins. Personal belongings scattered around included clothes, textbooks, children’s shoes and a musical keyboard.

The only thing standing intact at the traffic circle is the bust of India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi.

A senior military officer told us that his team had discovered seven bodies that day and we watched their mass cremations from a distance.

At the air base, we see rescuers pulling the body of a woman from the rubble.

An official said that for every body found in Canicoba, several were swept away by the waves, leaving no trace.

All these years later, I still sometimes think about the day I jumped on the ferry to Havelock.

I wonder what would have happened if the earthquake had struck a few minutes earlier.

What would happen if a wall of water hit the shore while I was waiting at the dock to board the ferry?

On Boxing Day 2004, I nearly died. Thousands of victims were not so lucky.

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