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  Steve was full of stories about his family and his childhood and about the London he knew. He’d grown up in Manor Park, on the outer edges of East London—“growing up on the Manor,” it was called locally. It was here that Steve played football with his brother, Mark, late into the night under streetlamps. He loitered with his friends outside the sweet factory nearby, imagining the rich pickings inside. They ate tomatoes that grew wild by the sewage works near the Roding River, a trifling tributary of the Thames, and their faces broke into a rash. One day Steve’s father told him that he’d smash his kneecaps if he saw him hanging around too many street corners. Steve knew his dad wouldn’t but was thankful for the threat. It allowed him to stay in and do his homework when his friends called round, yet again, to go hurl milk bottles against the wall of the social club at the end of their street. “Na, not tonight, mate, me dad’ll kill me.”

  His father’s long absences from home due to his job meant that Pam, his mother, raised Steve, his brother, and his two sisters largely on her own. She did so cheerfully and very volubly. When Steve was little, she’d embarrass him no end by bemoaning to everyone at the launderette the fact that his ears stuck out, as the two of them folded the family laundry. Although Pam’s daily life was confined to their East London neighborhood, she had a great curiosity about world affairs and politics. And of all her children, it was Steve who paid attention to her interests. As a teenager, he’d spend long evenings lying on the sofa with his head on his mother’s lap, evaluating for her the French parliamentary system or explaining the Spanish transition to democracy. His mother’s other passion was romance novels—she read one a night—and Steve and his sister Jane would be instructed to buy secondhand paperbacks by the dozen for her from a stall in Green Street Market.

  They’d stop by the market on their way to see West Ham play at Upton Park on Saturdays. Since Steve was about seven, Jane, who was five years older, took him to football matches. After the game they’d visit their grandmother, who lived near the stadium in a flat full of clutter above a Chinese takeaway. She always told Steve he was bright because he took after her sister, who was “the cleverest woman in Rangoon.” In Rangoon, his grandmother’s father was the supervisor of a slaughterhouse, and she spent her days playing tennis or going to garden parties.

  His details caught my fancy—so many yarns, tender and funny. My stories of my childhood seemed meager in comparison. I told him about my first trip to the cinema when I was five, to see My Fair Lady. My parents had to bring me home halfway because I began howling at the steaming hot bath that was being run for Eliza. We had only cold showers then in Sri Lanka, and I thought she was about to be boiled alive. This upset me more than the stilt walker who came down our street once a week in the afternoons, when my mother was having a nap and I was playing outside.

  Despite that early nervous talk about rain, Steve had a self-belief that ran deep, I soon learned. He was unruffled, at ease with himself. When we had exams or essays to write, he had remarkable focus. He worked intently, nimble and efficient in identifying what was important from those absurdly vast reading lists. Always precise, those notes he scribbled with a pencil on revision cards in the hush of the library’s Manuscript Room.

  Steve came to Cambridge from a secondary school that was academically dismal. When they were sixteen, a couple of his peers would spell Hitler as “Itla.” The street outside was lined with police riot vans at the end of the school day. Mobs of students who played truant turned up at the gates to fight others who’d spent the day wrecking classrooms. Apart from our friend Lester, who’d been to that same school, no one went to university, some went to prison. On hearing that Steve was off to Cambridge, one of the veteran delinquents assumed it was just another borstal and said, “Which one’s that then? What’s the grub like there?”

  Steve was always relaxed about the bedlam in his secondary school. It even worked to his advantage, he told me. For he had the undivided attention of his teachers, a rare student they could actually teach, and he thrived. And the troublemakers let him. He had respect for being on the basketball team. It also pleased a few of his white peers that “one of them” was excelling. “That’ll show the Pakis,” they’d say, perceiving that it was mainly Asians who achieved anything academically in that school. This was the late 1970s and early 1980s, when notions of white supremacy were widespread among groups of youth in deprived neighborhoods. The distress he felt about the prejudice and hatred around him, Steve poured into his troubled teenage poems about the corrupt urban soul.

  Some Sunday afternoons in Cambridge, the two of us would go study in a meadow or an orchard, a bottle of Southern Comfort in hand. The English countryside had no allure for me as yet, and I would complain that it was boring, no wild elephants charging at us. Steve declared that, unlike me, he could find charm in any landscape. He described how he’d luxuriate in the glow of early sunlight striking red brick on his council estate as he cycled through its streets every morning delivering newspapers for Patel’s, the newsagents on Romford Road.

  We would hitchhike from Cambridge to London a few times a term, the group of us. We’d go to the Reading Room in the British Library and to Highgate Cemetery, out of reverence for Karl Marx. Our friend Seok introduced us to Cantonese roast duck and rice at Kai Kee on Wardour Street. It was on one of these trips that Steve’s great passion for the bronze Sri Lankan statue of the goddess Tara in the British Museum was ignited. Another time, one December afternoon, he made Seok and me walk around his neighborhood for hours looking for the place he buried his Action Man when he was six. It was cold and dull—what was that nonsense he’d told me about radiant red brick?—and I was pouting.

  But the next morning when Steve came to my room and sat on my bed, I reached for him. To save him the bother of, yet again, reading Keats. He was very eager, of course, so sweetly intense, but before long he said, “Back in a minute,” and left. I later learned this pause was so he could sprint to Kevin’s room and bang on his door and brag “I snogged Sonal” and relish his friend’s response. Kev threw him onto the floor. “You lucky bastard, you jammy git.” Had I known then of this silliness over a kiss, I would never have let him in my room again that cold December morning. But he came bounding back. And stayed a good while.

  MIAMI, 2011

  I am not one for telling. So it might be the mojitos that make me confess. I had two with dinner. No, I think, three. The night was clear, and the ocean quiet. Even in the dark I could see pelicans dive.

  These are perilous days, my boys’ birthdays. They make me anxious as they approach. In these past six years I’ve spent this time with friends. We traveled to new landscapes, some of them vast and fierce, they echoed my tumult, some diverted me, a little. There was a blizzard on a glacier in Iceland and a storm that rocked our car by a lonely Scottish loch. We got tangled in pondweed swimming in the Berkshires, in Madrid we sought out the bars.

  Now this time it’s different. It was Vikram’s birthday two days ago, and again I traveled. But alone. I wanted an unfamiliar vista to help me endure the day, and I was curious—do I dare spend this time on my own? When I came to Miami from New York, I told myself, it’s not far, if I am too wrecked, I can always come back. Vik would have been fourteen two days ago. Fourteen.

  I didn’t at first trust the lightness I felt. It’s just Miami, all this gaiety around me, I am getting carried away, I am being duped into feeling nothing is amiss, I thought. How could I be this comfortable otherwise? Yet my ease didn’t fade. Each day I walked on the beach in the early sun, the wind was wild, and I felt brisk and fresh. I dipped in the ocean, time and again, let the salt sting my arms. There was a downpour last night, and I swam in an empty pool, spring rain cutting my face. I was peaceful in that water, I found a brightness in myself I didn’t think I now possessed.

  This was a discovery. On days like this, birthdays, the anniversary of the wave, I want to be alone. Alone, I am close to them, I slip back into our life, or they slip into mine
, undisturbed.

  The young bartender at this hotel is a student. He has lots of questions when I tell him I am an academic, in London, now at Columbia. I give advice where I can but keep it brief. I am guarded when conversations with strangers go on too long—questions about family might arise. So each evening the young man fixes my third excellent mojito and says with a broad smile, “Professor on spring break.” I think, if only you knew, sweetheart.

  It still seems far-fetched, my story, even to me. Everyone vanishing in an instant, me spinning out from that mud, what is this, some kind of myth? Even now I cannot mouth those words “They are all dead.” So at best I am vague about family. At other times I lie and find myself in a pickle. “Are your parents well?” a neighbor in my building in New York will ask if I have just returned from Colombo, because previously she has asked whether my parents live in Sri Lanka and I have mumbled, “Yes.”

  The Rosenbaums looked about my parents’ age, dressed smartly for dinner as my parents would have done, maybe that’s why I started chatting to them. They are here for the weekend too, in Miami, at the Standard Hotel. I said something innocuous like “Nice here, isn’t it?” when he said hello. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he promptly replied. “I feel very out of place.” I was only being polite, but now I couldn’t just walk away.

  Turns out it was very different forty years ago, this hotel. That was when his parents spent entire winters here, with their friends, lots of Jewish retirees. His wife and he came back today for the memories. And to celebrate their wedding anniversary. But he didn’t expect this, a boutique hotel, swarming with young people, barely clothed. He feels extremely awkward among them, what at his age?

  More than an hour later, we are still in conversation. “And another thing,” he says each time I stand up to leave, and his wife smiles at me in apology. “I’m sure she wants to go to her room, dear,” she keeps telling him, but he takes no notice. He is curious. How do I find it, traveling alone like this? I say, fine. He is persistent in seeking my opinions. So I am from London, did Turner live his entire life by the Thames, walking by the riverside? As an economist, what do I think of the Great Recession, the stimulus package, the euro, how do I explain the economic success of the Jews? And he disagrees, at great length, with all my answers.

  This I find endearing. Familiar also. In Sri Lanka I know lots of contrarian characters like him, uncles, fathers of friends, charming for all their rants and their grouchiness. What a smart, cheerful young woman you are, he keeps remarking. (I assure him I am not young, but that he ignores.) He is so enjoying our chat, he feels he knows me well, I must promise to keep in touch. It’s turning chilly out here now, I bid goodnight, again. He kisses me on both cheeks and says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with young men these days, a lovely young woman like you, you shouldn’t be single.” I don’t respond. He must think he’s made some blunder. “Oh, oh, have you ever been married?” he asks. I would normally have said no and left.

  But the drinks have made me mellow, and I have this new ease, and that makes me honest, so I say, “Yes.” “Was your husband English?” “He was.” “Aah, that was the problem, you see. You should have married a nice Jewish boy, this would never have happened.” I pause for a moment, then understand. The this is me being dumped by some useless English scoundrel.

  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.

  NEW YORK, JUNE 22, 2012

  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. It brings me at once into our home in London. 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.

  It used to startle me. The sudden realization of not having them, of being alone here in New York. I’d find myself gasping violently as I stood outside my apartment building in the West Village. I am here because they are gone? That was when their absence, as well as their realness, was wavering and suspect. It’s different now. I know it is true that they are not here. An unfathomable truth, but maybe I am more accustomed to it.

  New York has given me the distance from which I can reach for my family. From here I travel back and forth to London and Colombo, rediscovering us. And I can absorb my findings free from the fear of always colliding with the too familiar—the milkman, a Sainsbury’s wine gum wrapper, Camden Town. When I first came to this city, I would wander along Doyers Street with its quiet row of barbershops that seem from a bygone age, and my mind would slowly unclench, and allow in glimpses of us.

  Last evening I walked downtown along the Hudson at sunset, as I often do. I stopped on the boardwalk on Pier 46 to watch the orange light. There was a canopy of hysterical gulls over my head, the birds were spinning and swerving, no end to their agitation, it seemed. And standing there, I could enter another vista, see another river. The four of us on a Saturday afternoon at Butler’s Wharf, by the Thames. I am impatient, shooing along the boys who are dillydallying in the drizzle because they think Tower Bridge is about to open, any minute now. I could hear it, the chords of my sons’ protests, Steve’s elected silence, much better to let me be the spoiler of all fun.

  More and more now I keep my balance while staring into us. And I welcome this, a small triumph, it lights me up.

  But of course, it also shifts, this equilibrium. This morning I sip my coffee on a bench in St. Luke’s Garden in the West Village, where the early summer light froths on the hydrangeas and foxgloves. Such an English garden, this. I notice the whiff of a dead insect on my fingers, one of those tiny mites that skid the air and become a smudge on your hand as you wave it away. This transports me instantly to our garden in London which teems with these midges in warmer months. And I see us, idling after breakfast on the patio on a Sunday morning. I pester Steve to massage my neck. I hear Vik, with deepening voice, now fifteen. Then I lurch into what I am missing.

  I am immersed in another reality. Our life, as it would be today. When I’ve trespassed here through the years, I’ve kept my projections imprecise. But lately the details of how we would now be have come striding in, lucid, quite exact. My alertness to the “us now” is so immediate, it’s as though I’ve only just been torn from our life.

  I know it intimately. My world, if I had them. The rip, the clamor, the colors, the milestones, the odors, two teenage boys.

  This is treacherous, my alertness to what will never be. I want to stifle it, somehow.

  Seven years on, and their absence has expanded. Just as our life would have in this time, it has swelled. So this is a new sadness, I think. For I want them as they would be now. I want to be in our life. Seven years on, it is distilled, my loss. For I am not whirling anymore, I am no longer cradled by shock.

  And I fear. Is this truth now too potent for me to hold? If I keep it close, will I tumble? At times I don’t know.

  But I have learned that I can only recover myself when I keep them near. If I distance myself from them, and their absence, I am fractured. I am left feeling I’ve blundered into a stranger’s life.

  I am also split off from myself when I don’t reveal. It’s like I’m in a witness protection scheme, I’ve often thought of my life in New York. I needed this, a cover-up, when I was s
tunned. But it is different now. I suspect that I can only stay steady as I traverse this world that’s empty of my family when I admit the reality of them, and me.

  For I am without them, as much as I am on my own.

  And when I hold back this truth, I am cut loose, adrift, hazy about my identity. Who am I now?

  There was a thunderstorm last night, so this garden is perky, and my bench is wet. I see damp mornings on our lawn in London, Malli picking a dandelion, sticking it in my hair.

  And now I remember. How Malli would describe and define me. And how I’d protest.

  “We are three boys and one girl, three boys and one girl,” he’d say, explaining his family, working out our composition as he hopped across the paving stones on the patio. Then he’d recite our names, even referring to himself as Nikhil, his given name, and not Malli, as he was always called. “Stephen Lissenburgh, Vikram Lissenburgh, Nikhil Lissenburgh, and Mummy Lissenburgh.” He’d announce us with aplomb.

  Mummy Lissenburgh? I’d roar in exaggerated objection. My new credentials. Me having no identity without these three boys to whom I was merely tagged on. “Malli, why do you get both my names wrong? You got everyone else’s right. That’s not me.”

  Steve enjoyed our son’s account of me, of course. He egged him on. “Clever boy, Mal, spot on, you’re exactly right. You tell it like it is.” So “Mummy Lissenburgh!” Malli would chant. And the three silly boys would fall about laughing. Now I sit in this garden in New York, and I hear them, jubilant, gleeful, on our lawn.