Wave

When Mette turned up at the hospital, I was thankful to see him. I felt a little safer now. Mette is a jeep driver, and he always drove on safari in the park. We’d known him a long time. We had said goodbye to him the previous night when he took us back to the hotel. It had been an uneventful safari, only a blur of a bear at dusk. We told him we’d see him again in August, we were leaving the next day. August is not that long to wait, I told Vik, who was always impatient to return. Now Mette was at the hospital because someone had told him that I was here, alone. He sat with me on the bench, he didn’t bother me with any questions. I asked him what time it was. It was around noon.

[Anton’s] face was empty. I held his hand. This is getting real now, I thought. Slowly, very slowly, the realness of what was unfolding was seeping into my brain. I knew then I had to go back to Colombo. There will be more trucks coming in through the night, more bodies. I had to get out.

They meant nothing, those words, tsunami, tidal wave. Something came for us. I didn’t know what it was then, and I still didn’t. How can something so unknown do this? How can my family be dead? We were in our hotel room?

I can’t live without them. I can’t. Can’t.

Why didn’t I die? Why did I cling to that branch?

Pieces of me hovered in a murky netherworld, timeless day after timeless day.

They are my world. How do I make them dead? My mind toppled.

I don’t have them to hold. What do I do with my arms?

Soon, very soon, I have to kill myself.

I was never left alone. An army of family and friends guarded me night and day.

On the floor, under the Buddha and Ganesh statues, was a set of Vikram’s cricket stumps, the tallest ones he had, Steve would tap them into the ground with his bat in the middle of the athletics track of the Sports Ministry playing fields every evening. I picked up one of the stumps, staring at its pointed end that was darkened with soil, the wetness of the earth still clinging to the wood, almost. I took it to our bedroom. I struck at the bed. I stabbed the mattress with the muddied pointed end, over and over, harder and harder, until a tear appeared, and again to make the hole deeper and against to make another gash and again to join up all the gashes. The four of us, we slept here in all our innocence. That’ll teach us.

It was the back cover of a research report written by Steve and a colleague. […] The ISSN number was still clear on the bottom left. Except for a small tear in the middle, this page was intact. It had survived the wave? And the monsoon in the months after? And this relentless wind? It appeared right by Steve’s father’s foot? It rustled? Random assignment. I remembered the many studied that Steve had been working on, these two words absurd in this madness now. Had Steve been reading this on the toilet when I shouted to him? Was this one of the last things touched by his hands? I clasped the paper to my chest and sobbed. My father-in-law stood next to me. “Cry all you want, sweetheart.”

It was the light that did it. It was the angle of the sun at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon on a Sunday evening in early March on a country road somewhere in Shropshire. It was those sinking rays slanting against a yew tree and glinting on the wing mirror on my side of the car, dazzling my eyes. […] This light that is so very familiar unexpectedly makes me forget. It makes me forget that I am driving back from Wales with my friends David and Carole. It sends me into our car, Steve at the wheel, the boys at the back. The four of us drive the gentle curves of an English country road as we have done innumerable times before. For three years I’ve tried to indelibly imprint they are dead on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they are alive. Coming out of that lapse, however momentary, will be more harrowing than the constant knowing, surely. But now I am unmoored simply by the familiar light. […]

I stare at this little dirt-covered bowl, remembering Vik kicking his legs as he spat out his first mouthful of food. And I don’t rush outside to put it away where it belongs, in the shed with the rest of the garden toys. It wouldn’t be mad or foolish to keep it indoors now.

We laugh, and I am unsettled. Why do I feel this lightness? This is indeed like the old times, but it seems bearable, I am enjoying it even. Then I warn myself. I shouldn’t get too comfortable. Don’t I know that Malli will not stand on that chair again, wearing a pink tutu and licking cake mix off a wooden spoon? Steve will not come in the front door at seven, there will be no clatter as he empties his pockets onto the table in the hall. The windows next door will remain intact. Still, I am relieved to reenter the warmth of our life, even though I know that reality will get me, later.

I am as I was in those early months when I was collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house in Colombo. But it’s four years later now, and I am startled by the intensity of this fear in me. It came upon me all at once, when I was at our home in London recently, in late October. I felt one night, with a new and terrifying force, the way in which I was flung out of our life, just like that.

It was blustery, that night when I rifled through some papers on Steve’s desk. […]

The desk was piled high with Steve’s usual stuff. […] I thumbed through Steve’s checkbook, which was in the drawer. He’d written three checks on our last day in London, for the gardener and the milkman and for the boys’ school dinners. Those two words, school dinners, were all it took. I shattered.

The woman next to me on the plane asks questions. I give her the briefest of answers. I pretend to sleep, it’s been two long flights, from New York to Colombo. But the woman doesn’t stop. “Do you have children?” “No.” “Are you married?” “No.” “Oh, it is good to be so dedicated to your career, no? You must be such a clever girl.” Girl? And I haven’t told her anything about a job. I smile politely. Why doesn’t she get it that I don’t want to speak with her? […] shut up, you nosy cow, I think. You will probably faint if I tell you. You’ll have to pull down your oxygen mask.

Mum. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I was their mum. Even as I remember fragments of their birth or recall how I reassured Malli as he peered from behind that tree, the truth that I was their mother is veiled in confusion. It is distant also. Was I really? Was it really me who could predict a looming earache from the color of their snot, who surfed the internet with them looking for great white sharks, and who cuddled them in blue towels when they stepped out of the bath?

There’s more. I didn’t even look for them. After the water disappeared. I let go of that branch, and I didn’t search for my boys. I was in a stupor, true, I was shaking and shivering and coughing up blood. But still I berate myself for not scouring the earth for them. My screams should have had no end. Instead, I stared at the swampy scrub around me and told myself they were dead. I remember now. I even then wondered what I was going to do with my life. […] Why did I so readily accept this hideous reality? Because I was desperate to protect myself from hope in case that hope became dust? Or because I truly knew? I cannot say. But I was their mother, and I should have reached for them in whatever way I could, however futile or impossible it seemed. I did not, I abandoned them, and that sickens me.

[…] Kristiana stirs, clutches her stomach, and whimpers a little. I run my fingers through her hair to. Keep her asleep until the Calpol makes her tummy ache better, exactly as I would do with Vikram.

In those months and months after the wave, I could hardly bear to hear the names of my children’s friends. And when I began to see them again, I was afraid of being reminded of how my boys would be, of knowing what they are missing. I see my children’s friends often now. They are bubbling over when we meet, I enjoy their sparkle. And they make my boys real, so they are not beyond my field of vision, as they were in those first years.

Now, in this house, I can bring my parents close. For six years I’ve pushed them and their death to the fringes of my heart. That’s all I could tolerate, my focus was on our boys and Steve. How hideous, that there should be a pecking order in my grief.

I’ve berated myself continually for bringing my family back to Sri Lanka that December. What was the need? We had only recently returned to London. We did too much, rushing between two countries, wanting it all, we couldn’t get enough. I had it all, and I blew it, I’ve thought. […]

But this summer, as I am more alive to those months we spent here, I accuse myself less. I can see why Steve and I decided to return. We wanted some continuity with the life we’d established.

And look. An upside-down eagle. One of the young sea eagles is attempting to dive but is the wrong way around. It’s falling on its head, looks like. Legs splayed, talons pointing at the sun, white belly gleaming head looking up at the sky, not down.

It’s hard to comprehend a creature of such unearthly dimensions. The two whales rotate around our boat, they move with effortless grace, seeming to have some powerful purpose. The sight of them is staggering, the sensation sacred. I am happy to be here, thankful even.

I want every detail. I want to take in all this blue whale magic, maybe more so because Vik can’t. I search the ocean as he would. […]

Hang on. I am really not one for telling. But I must defend Steve. “It’s not because he is not Jewish,” I blurt out without thinking. “It’s because he is dead.” What have I just said? I stun myself with my own words. Dead? My new friend looks so sorry, the poor man. And he doesn’t even know the half of it.

I trip up constantly, between this life and that. Even now, seven years on. A rush of footsteps in the apartment above me is all it takes. I think it’s the boys, upstairs, another scuffle. “Knock it off,” I almost shout. “I’m trying to, Mum,” I hear Vik, ribbing me, as he aims a ball at his brother’s head. Then I have to accept that I don’t have them. I am in New York.

But our banter doesn’t subside in me. This is very different from those early months after the wave, when all I heard was a sudden whisper, some snatches of sound. Their voices have doubled in strength now, not faded with time. Their chatter plays with my thoughts no end. And I am sustained by this, it gives me spark. I often think I utter Steve’s words, not mine. Or at least that’s my excuse.