B009Y4I4QU EBOK Page 3

  Anton came back, I don’t know how much later. He stood by the window of the jeep. He found Orlantha, he told me. He found her, only her. She is not with us anymore, she is gone, he said.

  His 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.

  Mette agreed to take me to Colombo. His jeep was too decrepit for the journey, he had to find us a car. He turned on his phone, and for the first time that day there was a signal. He gave me the phone. I rang my mother’s mobile. That’s the first thing I did, still thinking there was a possibility it might ring, that they might even answer. But they did not. There was only that recording in Sinhala, the number you have called is not responding. Mette then suggested I call my aunt’s house. I did so reluctantly, I punched the numbers on the keypad slowly. How do I explain, what do I say? My cousin Krishan answered. The connection was bad, there was a lot of interference. I mumbled something like, it’s only me who survived, I’m coming back. The phone went dead, again the signal was gone.

  Mette took me to his home, which was very near the hospital, on a quiet street. There was a well in his front garden, by the side of a large tree. I could hear splashing in the dark, someone was taking a bath. Mette’s wife and daughter were home. He told them to look after me, he was taking me to Colombo, he was going out to find us a car.

  I sat on a brown leather armchair in their living room. The two women sat on the sofa next to me. They offered me food and drink. I said I didn’t want anything. They insisted and brought me a cup of very sweet tea. I sipped it, it tasted nice. I held the cup with both hands, that warmth felt good.

  They asked me about what happened. I’d hoped they wouldn’t, but they did. When did we see the wave, where were we then, what did it look like, did it roar, where did I run to, where did I last see my kids. I didn’t reply. There was a big clock on the table across from me. I sat cross-legged on the armchair and ogled that clock. I could see they were shaken and upset for me, these women, but I didn’t want to speak. I wanted to fade into that chair.

  The women began to lament my plight. Never in their lives had they heard such a story, everyone dying and just one person left. She’s lost her children, she’s lost her world, how can she live? And her children, they were so beautiful. If they were me, the women wailed, they wouldn’t be sitting quietly, they’d be out of their minds, most likely they would have died of grief. I said nothing. My eyes clung to that clock.

  The front door of the house was open, neighbors and relatives wandered in. They were told about me. Everyone looked at me aghast. She’s lost her children? And her husband and her parents? Some of the visitors left quickly and returned with more people saying, look at this poor lady, isn’t it unbelievable, her whole family is gone. I was slumped in that brown armchair. Is this me they are talking about?

  Someone pointed to the cuts on my face and arms and legs. Everyone looked anxious and worried. I might get an infection, why didn’t I have my wounds cleaned up at the hospital, they asked. I shrugged. Then there was concern because I didn’t want food. I might faint if I don’t eat, after what I’ve been through. Where was Mette? I wished he’d hurry up. I wondered if the hands on that clock were stuck.

  At one time everyone in that house began to panic. What if that wave comes back tonight, it could kill them all. It was an elderly man who set this ranting off when he wheeled his bike into the house. They were too afraid to sleep tonight. This is it, they will all be engulfed, probably soon, you never know when. Don’t be silly, I thought to myself, you live about twenty miles away from the sea. But I didn’t have the energy to allay their fears, I couldn’t open my mouth to talk.

  Some three long hours later Mette returned with a van. The owner of the van would drive us to Colombo. It was close to midnight. Finally I could stop watching that clock. I felt huge relief when I first climbed into that van. But as we began driving in the darkness, I was scared. I didn’t want to get to Colombo. I wanted to escape the madness of the hospital, I wanted to get away from everyone at Mette’s house, but couldn’t I somehow stay suspended in my confusion? I want to sit in the back of this moving van forever. In a few hours it will be light. It will be tomorrow. I don’t want it to be tomorrow. I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start.

  At first I ignored the crunching in my ears as I was waking up. Then I knew what it was. It was Vikram eating a pack of crisps. The slow crunch, crunch and the rustle of foil as he took a single crisp out of the pack, savored it with his eyes, lowered it into his mouth, and munched. And he repeated this until the last little smashed-up piece of crisp was gone. That was how he ate crisps. With unhurried, exaggerated actions to demonstrate just how much he relished them. His behavior was even more emphatic if I was around, to call attention to my cruelty, in not allowing him a daily ration of his favorite snack. But, Mum, other kids have crisps in their packed lunch every day. Yes, every single day, and I have to eat a stupid muesli bar. Yuk. The noises in my ears went on and on, and I lay there immobilized. Vikram’s revenge, I thought, getting back at me for all the times I deprived him of junk food. Then I could see him, sitting on a pillow on my bed, wearing his school clothes, gray trousers and bright red sweater. Leaning back on the headboard, his knees tucked up, holding a packet of Tesco Ready Salted Crisps in his left hand. He has his gray school socks on, the long ones with stripes on them, threadbare at the big toes. It was the after-school look. Mud stains on the trousers, a trace of dried-up snot below one nostril. Don’t drop crumbs on my pillow, I’d say. Don’t sit on my bed with your mucky school trousers on. Go wash your hands now, Vik.

  COLOMBO, THE FIRST SIX MONTHS AFTER

  I climbed out of the van that stopped by the gates of my aunt’s house. It was three a.m., the middle of the first night after the wave. I dusted crumbs off my clothes. Somewhere along the way the driver of the van had stopped to buy some biscuits. I told him I didn’t want Lemon Puffs, so he bought Ginger Nuts.

  There was a crowd gathered at the house. They rushed out as I arrived. I saw my uncle Bala at the front. He lifted his hands to his head when he saw me, he opened his mouth as though he was about to howl. I quickly turned away, staggering past everyone and going upstairs. I needed to shower, there were stones in my hair.

  I sat on the bed in my cousin Natasha’s room. I held on to the covers I’d pulled up to my chin. My relatives and friends asked me questions. I told them the jeep turned over in the water. I described the crushing in my chest. Didn’t I see Ma or Da or Steve or Vik or Malli? they kept asking. In the water? Any one of them? They couldn’t have survived, I heard myself insist. I was prodding myself to say this, to think this. I must prepare for when I know it’s true, I thought.

  I asked for a hot drink. Someone brought tea. Someone suggested I take a sleeping pill. I refused the pill. How can I sleep? If I sleep now I will forget. I will forget what happened. I will wake believing everything is fine. I will reach for Steve, I will wait for my boys. Then I will remember. And that will be too awful. That I must not risk.

  My aunt asked me for Steve’s parents’ telephone number. This unnerved me. I got the numbers right but muddled the order. I was troubled by this talk of calling Steve’s family. It meant something was wrong and I didn’t want to admit to that. Earlier when I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw shocking purple bruises streaking my face, I promptly looked away. This was needless proof, this was far too real. I wanted to stay dangling in a dream. Even though I knew I was not.

  It’s possible Steve is alive. He has the boys. He will phone us. His voice will be tired. I could hear it, Hello, Sonal, barely audible. I didn’t reveal these thoughts to anyone.

  The gluey dark snot coming out of my nose reeked of dog shit. My forehead was being drilled. The next morning my aunt called a doctor. A bit pointless, I thought,
I will kill myself soon. The doctor dropped his bag as he walked into the room, and it fell open, and his instruments rattled onto the floor. He stuck them into my nose and my ears and my throat. A raging infection, in my sinuses, that filthy water. He gave me five types of antibiotics. I should inhale steam. It will clear the gunk. It will lessen the pain.

  The stunned voices of friends and family floated about. An earthquake under the sea near Indonesia. The tectonic plates shifted. It’s the biggest natural disaster ever. A tsunami. Until now our killer had for me been nameless. This was the first time I’d ever heard the word. They talked numbers. A hundred thousand dead, two hundred thousand, a quarter of a million. I was unmoved. I cowered on that bed. It could be a million more for all I care, I thought.

  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.

  I don’t remember when they told me. Three, four, five days later. I had limped downstairs. There were thorns deep in my feet, and they were now rising to the surface, almost piercing the skin when my feet touched the floor.

  “They found Ma and Da today,” my brother Rajiv said softly. I sat down. The chair was broken and I tipped backwards and nearly fell off. Someone rushed to give me another chair. I looked at Rajiv. “They found Ma and Da,” he said again. I knew what he meant. He meant they’d found their bodies.

  “And I think also Vik,” he said. “Can you remember what he was wearing? Was it a green T-shirt and black and white shorts, checked ones?” I nodded. He is telling me that Vik is dead. I stared at Rajiv and my aunt and my uncle and Natasha, who were in the room. He is telling me that Vik is dead. I stared, wordless. That green T-shirt, it had a tiger on it, we got it in India, it was the day we saw a wild tiger for the first time. He is telling me that Vik is dead? I didn’t scream or wail. I didn’t faint. And I didn’t think of asking for them to keep that green T-shirt.

  I’ll wait until all the bodies are found, I told myself. Then I will kill myself.

  My brother organized a massive search for Malli. Malli just might be alive. He scoured the country with friends and family. They went to every hospital, every camp for survivors, they appealed in the newspapers and on TV, they offered rewards. Malli’s photo looked out from walls and shop windows and the back of trishaws. I pretended to ignore Rajiv’s efforts. I told myself they were in vain. I must not hope. Not again, not now.

  How can I accept that Steve and Mal just vanished? That there will never be any proof? I kept asking myself this. How can I tolerate something so absurd? But then, all that was reasonable in this world had been blasted by that wave.

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

  In a stupor I began to teach myself the impossible. I had to learn it even by rote. We will not fly back to London. The boys will not be at school on Tuesday. Steve will not call me from work to ask if I took them in on time. Vik will not play tag outside his classroom again. Malli will not skip in a circle with some little girls. The Gruffalo. Malli will not cuddle me in bed and read about the Gruffalo, with that poisonous wart at the end of its nose. Vik will not be excited by whoever scored for Liverpool. They will not peep into the oven to check if my apple crumble has cooked. My chant went on.

  But I could not absorb any of it.

  I’d put pizzas in the freezer for the boys because our flight got into Heathrow late. The milkman will deliver our usual the next morning, I’d left a note. We are going to a party at Anita’s on New Year’s Eve. It was Christmas. Vik and Malli were singing their favorite version of “Jingle Bells,” squealing out the line “Uncle Billy lost his willy on the motorway.” Not long ago they were giddy with Halloween. Their leftover bounty of sweeties is still in an orange bucket in the kitchen. I can feel their gloved fingers twining mine. It’s fireworks night, I can smell damp November on their cheeks.

  All that they were missing, I desperately shut out. I was terrified of everything because everything was from that life. Anything that excited them, I wanted destroyed. I panicked if I saw a flower. Malli would have stuck it in my hair. I couldn’t tolerate a blade of grass. That’s where Vik would have stamped. At dusk I shuddered when I glimpsed the thousands of bats and crows that crisscrossed the Colombo sky. I wanted them extinct, they belonged in my old life, that display always thrilled my boys.

  Now I had to make myself safe. I had to shrink my sight. I disappeared into darkness. I shut myself in the room. Even with the curtains closed, I pulled the covers over my head.

  The traffic outside my aunt’s house was endless. The noise stripped my nerves. But it felt fitting to be in that grueling din. I could better make them dead when I was constantly jolted like this. These were the warped sounds of life without them. From our bedroom in London we mostly heard finches and robins and the thump of a football.

  London, the thought of it, I felt horror. Our home. Their school. Their friends. Taking the Piccadilly Line to the Natural History Museum. The jingle of the ice-cream van. What do I do with all this? I wanted to shred my knowledge of our life.

  I was frightened of Sundays. It was just after nine on a Sunday morning that the wave came for us. Now I tried not to look at a clock on a Sunday morning. I didn’t want to know that it was exactly at this time two, three, four, ten, fifteen weeks before that life ended, for them, for us. In Colombo we went swimming on Sunday mornings. Now I steeled myself against the sensation of Malli’s silky earlobes on my cheek as I held him in the deep. Now I didn’t want to acknowledge that it was a Sunday morning and Vik would never again have a tantrum because Steve was reading the papers and not taking him to the park. That it was a Sunday morning and Steve would never again smear newsprint on the toilet seat.

  This could not have happened to me. This is not me. I teetered endlessly. Look at me, powerless, a plastic bag in a gale.

  This is not me. I’d lumber into the shower, and unable to work out how to get the water going, I’d stare at the taps and get dressed again, squirm back into bed. I felt I was falling and falling as I lay motionless on that bed, plummeting so fast I had to grip the sides.

  How is this me? I was safe always. Now I don’t have them, I only have terror, I am alone. My stomach cramped. I pressed a hot water bottle to my chest to calm the hammer blows to my heart, but they wouldn’t stop.

  I stabbed myself with a butter knife. I lashed at my arms and my thighs. I smashed my head on the sharp corner of the wooden headboard of the bed. I stubbed out cigarettes on my hands. I didn’t smoke, I only burned them into my skin. Again and again. My boys.

  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.

  Natasha kept hold of me, not leaving my side for half that year. Ramani infuriated me by tapping on the bathroom door if she thought I was taking a suspiciously long time, but my body was so clenched that I had to sit on the toilet with all the taps running for ages just to pee. I chased Keshini out of the bedroom at night, accusing her of snoring too loud, yet she took six months off from her job in the States to watch over me. Amrita warmed me and distracted me, her job abandoned, children left in other people’s care. Gunna and Darini coaxed me to take a few steps outside that room. Ruri snuggled into bed with me to cry.

  Sometimes I would drag myself into the kitchen—maybe I can slit my wrists—but someone would steal up behind me. Besides, they had hidden all the knives. My aunt gave me a sleeping pill at night, carefully rationed, just one. I tried to hoard them, together with some bottles of painkillers I’d found. Then Natasha discovered my stash and yelled at
me like I was a bicycle thief. I thought every day about throwing myself under one of the buses that hurtled by outside. But Natasha assured me that if I didn’t succeed and instead became paralyzed, she would leave me all day in my wheelchair in the middle of the garden, alone.

  I insisted I never wanted to see our friends in London or Steve’s family again. That life was over. But they turned up.

  When our friend Lester walked into my blackened room and told me he was so glad I was alive, I shouted at him. Didn’t he get it, stupid man, I wanted to die. Lester had been in Colombo with us only a few months before, in the summer. We’d gone to cricket matches where he impressed Vik by drinking too much beer. We went to the rain forest where Malli woke him too early each morning to go for a walk. And now Lester is here because they are all dead?

  I was bewildered when Anita appeared sobbing in my room. We’d said goodbye to each other after the school Christmas concert weeks before, shouting at our children not to trip on their costumes as they raced down the road. And now? Anita kept telling me that I had to live, without me she couldn’t raise her girls. Fuck off, I thought.

  Steve’s family came to Colombo, again and again. When his brother-in-law Chris began telling me about the memorial service they were planning in London, I asked him to stop. Memorial service? That was outlandish. Still he persisted, asking me to choose some music for the service, cajoling me gently by mentioning that my mother-in-law had remarked, “Well, when Stephen was a boy he liked some band called Slade.” I braced myself and told Chris to play some Coltrane. Just saying that word made my heart convulse. I saw Steve in our kitchen, grilling fish, listening to A Love Supreme.

  Steve’s sister Beverley sat on my bed wiping her tears. On the morning of the twenty-sixth of December, she had woken up in London, weeping. At the time she hadn’t been able to imagine a reason for this, it was the morning after Christmas, they’d had a typically happy and raucous family gathering the previous day. But before someone phoned her with news of a tidal wave in Sri Lanka, she had been crying. As she told me this, I could only think, her chin, her chin, her chin is Steve’s.