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  We had lived in this house three and something years when we left for Colombo that night in early December. And we still hadn’t got rid of that hall carpet. But we had plans for the next summer, to redecorate the whole house, move the boys into separate bedrooms. By converting the loft, Steve and I could finally have our own studies.

  With each visit back to the house in this last year, I grew more and more impatient with the ugly hall carpet. Yet how could I throw it out? The boys would sit on it to put on their shoes every morning, that’s where they’d fling their jackets down when they came in from school. Still, despite my hesitations, that carpet is now gone. I rebuked myself once I was rid of it. How could I have tossed their footprints out? Yet I keep admiring my new floor, the hallway is so much brighter now. But why does it matter, why do I care? They are not here. So what am I doing? Playing house?

  Malli often did that, with his friend Alexandra. Played house. And that’s exactly what she did the first time she came back to our home after the wave. She walked straight into our playroom, pulled out the dolls’ house from a corner, and played house, as if she’d been here just yesterday. She remembered it, she said, although she was last in that room more than four years ago, and then she was not yet five.

  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.

  Kristiana and Alexandra are over whenever I am back in the house. They help me water the garden, we discuss their homework, they punch the doors wearing Vik’s boxing gloves. They drum on Malli’s tabla. And I remember him twirling frenetically but with quite remarkable rhythm to the soundtrack from Lagaan, delicious in his Jaipuri turban, with its long tail wafting behind him, the quickening pulse at the end of “Chale Chalo” making him utterly dizzy.

  But I am an empty-handed mother. I can’t offer Vik to these girls to make them laugh at his silly jokes. I can’t give them Malli, so he and Alexi can talk about getting married—or “merried,” as Malli would say—as they often did. “You are mad to get married, Mal,” Vik would say to his brother. “Your wife will boss you around, she will shout at you from the upstairs window when you’re coming home from work.” Where that boy got his ideas about marriage from, I don’t know.

  Now Alexi is in our living room wearing the same red school uniform that my boys wore. A long thread dangles from the frayed cuff of her sweatshirt, the boys’ sweaters were always worn around the cuffs like this. I look at Alexi, and for a moment I wonder, really, am I in this life or that?

  She snaps me out of it, this nine-year-old girl. “Why did they have to die?” she asks suddenly and loudly, with great drama, throwing herself on a pile of cushions. “How can five of them die?” I have no words. “Was it scary when the wave came?” she goes on, never mind my discomfort. I tell her it happened fast. She ponders this for a while before saying, “If you and Steve had died and Vikram and Malli had survived, will they have come to live with us?” As she waits expectantly for my answer, I realize that this is her preferred scenario, and it’s something she’s been wondering about for years. I say, “Yes, of course.” She smiles. “Oh good. So my mum has your house keys, right? So we would have come and got their things and brought them to our house, right?” For days later I carry that image, a forlorn Vik and Malli standing outside our front door, having come “to get their things.”

  Five years, and how my children’s friends have grown. My boys would have too. I am increasingly curious now when I see their friends. My eyes can’t stop probing, so I can better picture Vik and Mal. I meet Vikram’s mates Daniel and Joe for the first time in five years. Joe towers above me as he hugs me so gently. He is nearly thirteen. A fist flies out of nowhere and knocks me down hard. This is how Vik would look. I am transfixed by the changes in these two boys. I stare into what I will never know in my own life, a speck of acne, broadening shoulders, a hint of facial hair. It is strangely satisfying, projecting my boys into the present like this. But Vik enjoyed the company of his mates so much. And here am I with them, when he can’t be. I feel I am handling contraband.

  Our life is also kindled when I go back to our old haunts. I avoided these places until recently, and I insisted I’d never return. But slowly I am finding the nerve to revisit them. Sarah and I go walking on the borders of Hampstead Heath, one of Steve’s favorite places in London to roam. The four of us were here just some days before we left for Colombo that December. And I have not been back until now. The hedges along the paths are quick with finches, and it’s as though I’ve never been away. It’s hard to believe that we were not together here last Saturday. I know each tree we would picnic under, I know where the boys tried to play rugby with their dad. I see the spot where Steve led them to tackle me to the ground as I foolishly ambled over to throw back the ball they’d lobbed at me. The ground was all muddy, I was wearing white jeans, and they were wildly hysterical. Amused I was not.

  Malli was about two when he began telling us about his real family. We were his family, too, but he had another family, his “real family.” “I am going back to them,” he’d say. “I am staying with you only a little time.”

  “So what’s your real dad’s name?” Steve would ask. “Tees.” “Tees? What kind of weird name is that?” “Don’t laugh, Dad, it’s a real name.” “And your mum?” “Sue. And I have a sister. Her name is Nelly.”

  He said he loved his sister the most. They lived in America. “Our house is near a big lake, we have a boat even, we do. It’s in Merica.”

  Malli was undeterred by Vikram’s smirks and the incredulity of his little friends. “But you don’t have a sister, Mal. Where is she? Show me.” “Don’t be silly, Alexandra, she can’t come here. She’s in another country, Merica.”

  My mother and our nanny, Malee, insisted that he was talking about a past life. “This is just the age some children remember their previous birth,” they’d say. They sometimes asked that Steve and I “do something” about it, go to the temple, talk to a priest.

  All we did was entertain our children by pretending to be Malli’s “real” parents, we’d do it for whole weekends sometimes. Steve proposed they lived in rural Mississippi. The boys had raucous fun when he acted as Tees coming to London to visit Malli. In his rather comic version of a southern accent, he would launch into tirades about how crowded the big city was and how he missed the mosquitoes of the swamps. “Again, again, Dad. Do Tees again!”

  Malli ended the story of his real family some months before the wave. “Mal, where are Sue and Tees now? Are they still in America?” Vik asked him one day, teasingly. “They’re dead,” came the reply. “They went to Africa and were eaten by lions.” “All of them? Lions don’t usually eat so many people at once,” said Vik, ever the naturalist. “Yes, all of them. I just got the message.” “Message from whom, Mal?” He didn’t reply.

  COLOMBO, 2010

  Even the lizards have left, it seems. Those small green and brown creatures with their ancient heads and sticklike tails would be forever scuffling in this grass, alert to Vik stalking them with his fishing net. But nothing stirs in this wilted garden today. Nearly six years after the wave, and five years of other people living in it, my parents’ home is transformed. Empty now, it cringes with neglect. Leaves from the jak tree litter the back veranda. My mother never liked that jak tree. It towers in the middle of the garden, and she thought it far too big. She fretted that it would come crashing down in a strong wind one day and destroy the house.

  I was seven when we moved to this house. On our first night here my parents had a pirith ceremony to bless our new home. For hours the monks hummed, and I sat distracted by the rows of little clay lamps that flickered around our pond
. For me then, that pond was the most marvelous thing about our new home. It was indoors and had no roof over it. I was curious, how will it be when the rains come? This house changed over the years because changing the house was one of my mother’s passions. Dining rooms were enlarged, all glass and open to the garden, terrazzo floors were dug out and replaced with marble. And the pond disappeared. It was paved over because it overflowed during the monsoons, and Ma got tired of goldfish gasping on her new floors.

  I’ve not stepped into this house since those early months after the wave, when I wandered through it, stunned. I’ve come back now eager for details of us, of my parents especially. I want to make our life in Sri Lanka real, less of a dream.

  But this is quite unlike being in our home in London, where it feels as though we’ve just stepped out. There our life is affirmed, whereas in this strangeness it falters. Did my father really read his newspaper on this veranda, on that ebony armchair with the armrest that kept falling off? Did my boys wake in this bedroom at night disturbed by polecats pelting on the ceiling, and did I really hush them into sleep, my fingers combing their hair?

  I turn on a light in the living room, even though it is daytime. The familiar feel of that confusing jumble of switches on the wall, and I perk up. I wash my hands in a bathroom upstairs and feel a lightness from the touch of the tap. Sunlight streams into that bathroom, and I sit on the toilet and let it scorch my back. The relief of habit. I don’t hear the tinkle of my mother’s gold bangles (“Aachchi’s bells,” Vik called that sound), but these walls have knowledge of it. My life coheres a little.

  It is July. We’d be here every July for the summer holidays. The house gusted with my children’s chaos. My parents filled our days with big ceremonial meals. Pork curry blackened with roasted coconut on Monday, hoppers on Tuesday, biryani on Wednesday, and god forbid if Steve and I planned to go out to dinner with friends on other days. Ma would be glum and announce that someone she knows ate at the restaurant we were going to and had diarrhea, for a whole week would you believe. For my mother, no one could cook as well as she and her three sisters, and she wasn’t far wrong. During English winters, Steve craved her prawn curry, her signature dish. The fiery-red gravy was thickened with a paste made by grinding the half-cooked heads of the prawns, something she’d learned from her grandmother.

  It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and there are three triangles of sunlight trembling on the floor of this veranda, now as there were then. I can almost hear them out here. My mother and my aunts.

  Together they were wayward, Ma and her three sisters. Mostly they laughed. Their laughter was a constant in my life, and in this house. As a child I was perturbed by just how much they laughed. I thought it unbecoming, other mothers and aunts didn’t get so hysterical surely? But always I felt safe within their merriment.

  I could never resist being regaled by the stories that set them off. There was endless gossip. Someone emptied a flower vase, water and all, on the head of her husband’s mistress at the hairdresser’s. And stories from when they were young girls—my grandfather, a serious-minded civil servant, lined his four daughters up at the men’s barber’s and ordered severe short haircuts so they’d be unattractive and no boy would take a second look. Then there were descriptions of my grandparents’ later attempts to arrange suitable marriages for them. Michael, their squint-eyed gardener, would be the first to glimpse and pronounce on these proposed suitors. “Eeya, haamu, eeya” (Yikes, madam, yikes), he’d whisper through the window to Ma and her sisters as a hapless, oily-haired man stepped out of a Morris Minor.

  And they laughed at us, when we were children. They thought it hilarious when I was distraught that time we holidayed in a dirty bungalow in Elephant Pass in the north of Sri Lanka. I was fourteen and wanted to be partying in Colombo, not stuck out in this remoteness with only an enormous lagoon and a train that went past once every night. “Come watch the train,” they’d say to me, chuckling, and I’d sob. I remember the mirth my cousin Krishan caused when he was a little boy learning to read—he struggled with the word right. “ ‘Every cat has a rigit to eat fish,’ ” he would read with aplomb, a cat food advertisement on the back of a Reader’s Digest. His mother and aunts would shriek with glee and press two rupees into his hand.

  On an afternoon like today, Ma and my aunt Swyrie would be sitting out on this veranda, trying to outdo each other in not eating the chocolate cake on the table beside them because it would make them fat. Not looking fat mattered. I scolded them when they took it too far with that man selling bee’s honey in the Habarana jungles—on another vacation that was. This almost toothless man, with straggly long hair and clad only in a loincloth, spent his days collecting wild honey, holding a flare to the mouths of beehives high up on trees and smoking out the bees. He was sitting in a forest glade when we met him, squeezing out liquid from the honeycomb with both hands, his long fingernails stained and gnarled. Pleased with the prospect of a quick sale, he held forth on the medicinal properties of his honey. Ah, but is it fattening? asked my mother or aunt. He looked at the two of them, alien species with lipstick and large sunglasses, and unsure of the correct response replied in his singsong voice, “Those who are too fat lose weight, those who are thin gain.” “So what do you think will happen to us then?” they pestered him, giggling. Mortified by their ridiculous vanity, I quickly made them pay him and leave.

  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.

  Often, in the far corner of this veranda, by the garden, there would be a seamstress bent over an ancient Singer sewing machine, tuk-a-tuk-a-tuk-a, I can hear her now. There was invariably something Ma urgently needed sewn. My mother was always elegant and paid careful attention to how she dressed. Except for the day before my wedding, when she was so busy and distracted that she rushed downstairs in the morning wearing a silk blouse and her usual sequined sandals but no trousers.

  A few days before we left for Yala, Ma’s seamstress made some dressing-up clothes for Malli. A parrot outfit and a large blue satin sack adorned with gold stars for his costume collection: his Christmas presents. He wore his parrot outfit on Christmas night, and it was tight around the ankles. We’ll have it altered when we get back to Colombo tomorrow, Ma told Malli. Now I remember: some months after the wave, when I was scouring the ruins in Yala, I found that blue sack. It was entangled on the branch of a dead tree, intact, the satin still agleam.

  I sit on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, and it seems vast now, cleared of its furniture. Ma would drape her saris standing in front of the mirror that hung on one wall. I can see her fasten a pleat, reaching for a pin from a white porcelain bowl, the pin beaded with a tiny button so the silk wouldn’t tear. Her saris were her art, they filled mothballed wardrobes in their bedroom and in her dressing room. She despaired that I didn’t show adequate enthusiasm for her collection. “Who’s going to wear all these saris when I am dead? I don’t know why I bother to buy so many,” she’d say. Or she’d tell me, “You are so boring, such a shame you became an academic. I saw some women like you going to a conference the other day, so badly dressed, I wanted to cry.” Malli was her hope, he understood glamour and flair. “Tell your mum to wear prettier clothes, more makeup,” she’d say to him as he stretched out on her bed admiring his collection of small scented soaps. On our last night in this house, I did dress up, and both my mother and son approved. It was the evening of Malli’s violin concert, and I wore one of Ma’s saris, a crimson silk. Malli watched me dab on some lipstick and told me he had his own lipstick, I could use it if I liked. Next time, I said.

  My parents’ bedroom leads to the balcony on which my mother enacted her daily farce with the fishmonger. Each morning he’d arrive at the gates screaming out the contents of the baskets tied to the pole he had slung across his shoulders
. She’d yell to him that she needed nothing, although she intended to buy his entire catch, and he’d leave, loudly disgruntled, full well knowing he’d be back. They’d repeat this for some hours before he emptied his baskets by the gate, his day’s work quickly done, and Ma would have more fish than she needed but at half his asking price. Steve would look at the crows and flies rushing to the bloodstained gravel by the gate and ask my mother if there was not a more efficient way to shop.

  My parents helped Steve and me negotiate life in Colombo. In their minds we were still children, needing to be looked after. And in these years I’ve not permitted myself to yearn for their care. I’d feel even more perilously alone if I did, I’ve thought. Yet here in our home, snug in these familiar surroundings, I can’t help but crave their comfort. Each night my father would stand on this balcony smoking his last cigar for the day. I want the smell of that smoke to reach me now and make my eyes sting just as it did then, although then I always complained about it.

  I settle into our life in this house and am suddenly chilled. As always, I think about how I didn’t stop. When we ran from those waves, I didn’t stop at the door of my parents’ hotel room. I decided not to. A split second it was, and I didn’t know then what we were running from or running to, but I decided that.

  The last time I saw my mother, it was the night before the wave. After dinner on the terrace of the hotel, I said goodnight to her. I was hurried, the boys were tired, and I was taking them to bed. Goodnight was all I said. My father I saw the next morning when he knocked on our door to take back the pair of binoculars that Vik had borrowed from him. He was packing to leave. I only half-opened my eyes. Why are you packing so early, why do you have to be so bloody organized, I thought.