Wave

Sonali is on I-70 driving from Denver to Snowmass with her friend Anita and Anita’s family when Anita’s daughter Kristiana, asks Sonali what a “ghost town” is. Sonali is shocked by the familiarity of this scene: she used to answer Kristiana and Vik’s questions all the time. Anita’s daughters and Sonali’s sons used to be “like siblings.” The families had been neighbors in London, and the kids grew up together. Sonali feels as if she is in a trance; her boys should be here, on this skiing trip. Hearing Anita’s girls talk and seeing them grow up fills Sonali with painful thoughts of what might have been. She will never see her boys grow up. 

One night, they all tell stories about Vik and Malli. Anita’s daughters recall how Vik used to want a pet crow. Sonali recalls how the boys had pet terrapins in Colombo. When the terrapins fell ill and died, Sonali and Steve worried that the boys would be sad—but Vik just “fed the terrapins to the crows.” Sonali knows that the wave upended the girls’ lives, too. In the immediate aftermath, Kristiana insisted that Vik was a good swimmer and so surely must have survived. Kristiana also started burping a lot around that time—a habit of Vik’s. “It’s like she took on Vikram’s spirit,” Anita observed to Sonali.

Now, Kristiana, who has a tummy ache, lies sleeping on Sonali’s lap. Sonali brushes a lock of hair from the girl’s face. Her hair is dry: she doesn’t sweat in her sleep, as Vik did. Sonali runs her fingers through the girl’s hair until she feels better, “exactly as I would do with Vik.”

London, 2009. Sonali is visiting her home in London. On previous trips, she avoided catching sight of anything that might remind her of her family. This time, she allows herself to “investigate” relics of the past, as though she is “rediscovering” her family and the old life she had with them. She used to avoid “details,” but now she yearns for them. In the playroom, she finds “This is the worst day of my life” written on the sofa, in Vik’s handwriting. It shocks her. Why did he write this? At first she worries that she may have done something to upset him, and she’s relieved when she sees the disappointing football scores—the source of Vik’s discontent—written on the sofa’s arm. Sonali’s investigations are giving her a much fuller picture of her boys—their happy, carefree selves, but also their gloomier and darker aspects as well.

Steve and Sonali’s friends used to observe how engrossed Vik and Malli were in whatever interested them. Malli loved his puppets and costumes and lived in a “fantasy world.” He painted abstract scenes with vivid backstories. His teacher once complained that he disrupted a science lesson when he claimed “that cars were alive.” Sonali and Steve had encouraged this aspect of Malli, but Sonali also worried about his “cunning.” Once, the nanny had claimed that Malli intentionally tripped Vik while walking down the street.

Vik’s math papers are all over the house. He was a whiz with numbers, and Steve and Sonali had to work hard to give him challenging, new material to keep him stimulated. He had been curious about all things, from dinosaurs to Shakespeare. Thinking of her children in this detailed, unreserved way makes Sonali ache with missing them, though she allows herself to think of and miss them more often these days. She wonders if doing so “gives [her] some relief.” When she used to temper her “yearning,” it didn’t help her any. She feels “less fractured” when she allows herself to rediscover her family in this way. Wandering over to the kitchen now, she spots the red Biro marks on the wall where Steve would measure the boys’ heights; she impulsively kisses the red marks, just as she would kiss the boys’ heads. She falls to the floor.

Sometimes Sonali can spend time in her London home without thinking of her family, but these moments are fleeting. Any little thing can jolt her back into the past. It’s June now, and she remembers that it was this time of year when the family first moved into their home, an attractive, red-brick Edwardian house. The house had some oddities and imperfections, like the 1970s-style green carpet in the hallway, but they decided to live with them for the moment. She remembers Steve basking in the sun on the family’s first day in their new house, and she remembers young Vik and Malli playing in packing boxes.

The family had lived in the house a little over three years when they left for Colombo, but they hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing the ugly green carpeting. Over the past year that Sonali has come back to the house, she has grown increasingly frustrated by the carpet, and she eventually gets rid of it, though she doesn’t know why it should matter now that her family is gone: “So what am I doing?” she asks herself. “Playing house?” Malli used to play house with his friend Alexandra. Sonali sees her children’s friends often now, but she didn’t want to for years after the wave. Now, Kristiana and Alexandra are always over whenever Sonali returns to the house. They help tend to the garden, and they play with the boys’ old things.

As Alexandra plays in the living room now, she shouts suddenly, “Why did they have to die?” She persists, unattuned to Sonali’s discomfort, asking if the boys would have come to live with her family, had it been Sonali and Steve who died instead. Sonali musters the strength to mutter that yes, the boys would have lived with Alexandra and her family.

Five years have passed since the wave, and Vik and Malli’s friends have grown up. Vik’s friend Joe is 13 now, and he towers above Sonali. His height jars Sonali, who realizes that Vik would have looked like this too, had he lived. Sonali feels guilty to be around the friends Vik so loved when he cannot be there himself. Sonali used to avoid all her family’s “old haunts,” vowing never to return to them again, but she has recently started to revisit them and finds that their familiarity comforts her. She visits Hamstead Heath, one of Steve’s favorite places to walk, and remembers a time the boys played rugby with Steve. They’d convinced her to join them and giggled mischievously when her white jeans got dirtied with mud.

When Malli was two years old, he started telling stories of “his real family.” He claimed his “real dad’s” name was “Tees,” his real mum’s name was “Sue,” his real sibling’s name was “Nelly,” and that the family lived in America. Sonali’s mother (Ma) and the children’s nanny thought Malli must be remembering a “past life,” and they would plead with Sonali and Steve to “do something” about it, like consult with a priest. But they chose merely to have fun with it, imagining amusing scenarios for Malli’s so-called “real” family. Several months before the wave, Malli claimed his “real family” was dead: they were all eaten by lions. He claimed he had “just got the message” but didn’t say from whom.