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  Such a puny life. Starved of their loveliness, I feel shrunken. Diminished and faded, without their sustenance, their beauty, their smiles. Nothing like how I was that day before the wave, when we sat in the back of a jeep and watched a young male leopard leaping across the branches of a palu tree, supremely poised and scornful of the troop of monkeys that taunted him from the surrounding canopy. And nearby a haze of blue-tailed bee-eaters drifted in dust-filled light. Sometimes, even now, I can summon the lift of those birds. For some moments it takes me away from my fear and my shame.

  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? I haven’t shown a modicum of interest in her life. “Do your parents live in Colombo?” “Hmm.” I pretend to nod off again. We begin our descent over the Indian Ocean. She is even more animated. “Ooh ooh you’ll be home for Christmas. You’ll have a nice family Christmas, no? How nice.” By now I can only muster up a feeble half-smile. “So what does your family do for Christmas? Big celebrations?” Oh shut up, you nosy cow, I think. You will probably faint if I tell you. You’ll have to pull down your oxygen mask.

  I steer clear of telling. I can’t come out with it. The outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know “my story,” I talk freely about us, Steve, our children, my parents, about the wave. But with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don’t want to shock or make anyone distressed.

  But it’s not like me to be cagey in my interactions. Steve and Vik would smirk and raise their eyebrows when I stopped to chat with yet someone else at the farmers’ market or on Muswell Hill High Street. (Do you know her too?) But now I try to keep a distance from those who are innocent of my reality. At best I am vague. I feel deceitful at times. But I can’t just drop it on someone, I feel—it’s too horrifying, too huge.

  It’s not that I should be honest with everyone, the white lies I tell strangers I don’t mind. But there are those I see time and again, have drinks with, share jokes, and even they don’t know. They see my cheery side. And I kick myself for being a fraud. I don’t even reveal half the story, about my parents, or Steve. Who knows where that might lead.

  I think I also don’t confess because I am still so unbelieving of what happened. I am still aghast. I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone to someone else. So I am evasive in order to spare myself. I imagine saying those words—“My family, they are all dead, in an instant they vanished”—and I reel.

  I can see, though, that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it.

  I have coffee with a friend who must think he knows me quite well. To him I am here in New York only to do research at Columbia, as I have a sabbatical from SOAS, my university in London. I am a carefree academic, he thinks. As we chat, I find I almost believe this story myself, so deft have I become at my trickery. This is mad, my pretense. I must come out with it. Now it’s on the tip of my tongue, but I push it back.

  I was out of tea bags this morning. Bleary-eyed, I stared into a red carton of Twinings English Breakfast Tea convinced it hadn’t been empty last night. I rummaged in the cupboards for another box with no luck. There were plenty of other teas, oolong and jasmine and chamomile and that Japanese tea with toasted brown rice, but how can I drink that stuff in the morning? This would not have happened before, I griped. At home, we never ran out of tea. Or if I opened the tea caddy only to find a scattering of fragrant dust at the bottom, Steve would pop out to the shops for me. He’d be back in flash. He knows I can’t think straight until I’ve had my two large cups first thing. This morning I crushed that empty carton and flung it into the bin. What am I supposed to do now, go out and get some tea bags? Unwilling to give in to the reality of having to do what Steve always did, I refused to take myself to the grocery shop on Eighth Avenue, even though it’s just minutes away. So I put the kettle on and poured myself a mug of boiling water that I sipped in a sulk. How am I supposed to live without them?

  Steve took the boys shopping, usually on Sunday afternoons. In those first weeks after the wave when my mind couldn’t find their faces, one image that came to me was of the three of them returning from the supermarket, the boys squabbling over some sugary treat. And now today is a Sunday, and if they’d gone shopping, Vik would have claimed more than his fair share of sweets because this week is his birthday. He would have been twelve.

  This time twelve years ago, Steve and I were impatient for Vik to be born. The hyperactive boy was making my belly swing from side to side with no letup, and thrilling as this was in the earlier months, it exhausted me. And I hated being crusty with the calamine lotion that soothed the prickly rash that covered my body in those last weeks. My parents were with us in London, excited, it was their first grandchild. Ma kept telling Steve that he needed to note the exact time of birth, to the minute or second even, her astrologer in Colombo couldn’t write an accurate horoscope with approximate times.

  Vik was born by emergency cesarean section, a sudden rush of midwives and doctors and needles in my spine, when I had only gone to the hospital for a routine checkup and his heartbeat was found to be alarmingly slow. Steve hid well from me the panic he later confessed to feeling then, but I had been unperturbed. That monitoring machine must be dodgy, I thought—nothing will go wrong now surely. And as the surgeon tugged and yanked about, I began to shiver with cold, the anesthetic they said. Steve warmed my hands in his, remembering all the while to glance at his watch. “Lots of hair,” Steve said even before Vik was taken out, and moments later, we both felt the magic of that soft black hair in our hands.

  The boys would trace the scar on my stomach with their fingers, astonished they’d emerged from there. This prompted Malli to want to be a mummy, his doll wrapped in a wad of small blankets protruding from under his T-shirt, Vik’s protests that boys can’t have babies resolutely ignored. It was calm at the Royal Free Hospital when Malli was born, a planned cesarean with no frantic dashing around, but Steve forgot to check his watch. A few minutes after noon, he mumbled to Ma, far too imprecise for her astrologer’s charts. Two-year-old Vik stared awhile at his newborn brother and whispered, “Malli,” in a voice so tender that it still stirs my heart. Malli means “little brother” in Sinhala, and we always called him that, even though his given name was Nikhil.

  I can see us now, on the day he was born. What bliss. Malli asleep on me. Vik, who was quickly bored by his brother, clambering precariously onto the handrail of my bed to look at a crane hoisting some steel rods outside the hospital. Steve too elated to worry the boy might fall. A Voltaren suppository nicely numbing the pain of my cut. I think of that day now, and I cannot reconcile it with the impossible horror of how they were severed from me in an instant.

  We talked about birthdays the day before the wave, sitting in a jeep under a weera tree, while gabbling hornbills flitted about. Vik was to be eight in a few months. Malli was annoyed that each year Vik’s birthday was before his. He asked us when he would be eight. Steve explained that he had to be six first, then seven, and only then eight. “Will Vik still be eight when I am eight?” Steve confessed that Vik would be ten then. Malli’s outburst of “Aw, why do I always have to be younger?” sent the hornbills scattering, and we too drove away.

  Vik’s eighth birthday arrived not even three months after the wave. I was in the bedlam of my mind. He is dead? For his birthday he’d wanted a camera and a new cricket bag.

  I recently opened Vik’s cricket bag. I’d avoided doin
g this for four and something years. I looked at his bat and in every dent saw the flourish of his hands striving for the perfect stroke. His red ball was flecked with grass and mud. He nearly broke Steve’s middle finger once when bowling to him in our garden—it wasn’t his fault, Dad was stupid not to wear gloves. In that bag were a helmet and kneepads and sweat-soiled guards and yellowing white gloves. And amid all that, a single leaf. A small dark brown leaf with a pointed tip, I couldn’t say what kind, dried up and crisp but still intact, its threadlike veins and jagged edges undamaged after all these years. It crumbled a bit when I picked it up, dust on my hands. Where did this come from? Our garden? Or maybe Highgate Wood. Steve and Vik would play in the cricket nets there while I kept watch on Mal as he climbed a pyramid of logs and twigs or hid among the trees awhile before shouting out “Mum!” in a slight panic that I might have lost him.

  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?

  I know it was me, of course, but that knowing is cloudy and even startling at times. Strange. For one thing, they are dead, so what am I doing alive? I must be heartless. I am their mother. I am tortured, true, my dreams howl for them most nights, I am still as mutilated as I was in those first weeks when I couldn’t step beyond the door because they weren’t beside me. But this is hardly enough, surely my reactions nowhere near match the awfulness of their death. Yet nothing can, I suspect, fantasize as I might about hurling myself into that heaving ocean in Yala, doing it properly now, no clinging on to branches this time.

  Is it because I am still dazed that I can’t grasp the reality of being their mother? Is it because I am stunned by the way it ended that the truth of being their mother is muted? Maybe I willed it this way, in shock and desperation, when in an instant they were gone. I was so tightly wrapped around them, their moods and needs tugging at me always, but then I tried to unwind from them, determined and furious, insisting to myself that it was pointless keeping close to them, because I was no longer their mum. And even now, some four years on, I am hesitant to grab them with my heart, fierce and tender, the way I used to when they were alive. How can I bear to do that in this void? So I shy away from knowing Malli’s weight in my arms as I carried him indoors when he’d fallen asleep in the car. I don’t want to hear Vik ask me if he’d played well at his football class, in that uncertain tone he used when he knew he hadn’t but needed me to reassure him with a lie. If I allow any of this, I will go mad for wanting them.

  Won’t I?

  And maybe I forfeit being their mother because, at times, I feel helplessly responsible for their death. We took them back to Sri Lanka that December, Steve and I. Although we were only doing what we always did, and although it was those tectonic plates that slipped, I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I led them to harm when they relied on me. So I am hesitant to evoke the intensity with which I watched over them. I can’t tolerate knowing how they always counted on me. Yet occasionally, for a few moments, I cannot resist peeking into that life. When Google street maps went 3D in London recently, I looked at our street, and I was catapulted into being who I was with them. We walk to school, I tell them to zip up their jackets. Now they run ahead of me. “Don’t tread on that dog shit, Vik,” I hear myself say. If I didn’t watch out, he always did that.

  But I let my children go, when I was their mother. That jeep turned over in the surging water, and in all those minutes after, I have no idea how long, I didn’t think of what became of them. There was that terrible crushing in my chest in the water, true, and I thought I was dying. But there was no shrieking refusal to leave, I didn’t lament for them, for our life. It’s over, but what to do was more precisely the thought that fluttered in my mind, and now I am startled by how wispy and casual this seems. I would have expected different. We were in our hotel room only moments before, it was Christmas the previous day, for crying out loud, and now in this ferocious water, all I could muster was a what to do? Although for some moments I wanted to stay alive for my boys, I soon gave up. Some mother.

  When that jeep turned over, we dispersed. We just slipped out, I guess, no moment of separation, not one that I was aware of anyway. It was not like I tried to cling to my children as they were torn from my arms, it was not like they were yanked from me, not like I saw them dead. They simply vanished from my life forever. In order to survive this bizarre and brutal truth, do I have to make murky the life I had with them?

  That Malli wanted us to kiss his toe better whenever he stubbed it running barefoot in the garden. That a wave came for us when they were playing with their Christmas presents in a hotel room, when we weren’t even in the ocean. Not knowing how to allow these two realities to coexist, I perhaps dim them both, intentionally or not, I don’t know.

  But I wasn’t there when they most needed me. I know I was too powerless in that raging water to get to them, not that I knew where they were. Even so, I failed them. In those terrifying moments, my children were as helpless as I was, and I couldn’t be there for them, and how they must have wanted me. Their helplessness I can’t bear to consider, just as I turn away from the memory of Vik crying in fear as we sat for a few moments in that jeep before the water filled up. How can I hold the truth of being their mum when I have all this to live with?

  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. And in those weeks and months after, when my relatives and friends were combing the country for Malli, I took no notice, or I insisted it was pointless. 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.

  I might feel more like their mother if I was constantly weeping and screaming and tearing my hair out and clawing the earth, I think sometimes. Over these years I’ve only infrequently even come close to this. But why? My reactions are not natural, they are feeble, I feel, and I find this abhorrent. I am paralyzed without my family, true, but I expect something different. I remember being about eight years old and sitting cross-legged on the floor of our balcony at home in Colombo and swatting mosquitoes while listening to a woman from the shantytown nearby wailing because her sister had died. For days and days, her shrieking and her swearing sliced the neighborhood with hardly a pause, and I was mesmerized, believing that’s what you have to do when someone dies. That thought must still lurk in me, for every time I read about England winning a test match, or about Pluto no longer being a planet, I loathe myself for not howling endlessly, knowing Vik would be so rapt in all that. I might be less bewildered about being their mum, if I did. Then again, it’s not like my mind isn’t teetering when I read those words, it’s not like I’m not wild inside.

  I do have times of clarity, though, when I reunite with the truth of being their mother, quite unreservedly, without wincing or clenching. Sometimes vast isolated landscapes allow me this. Recently, my friend Malathi and I were in sub-Arctic Sweden, on the deserted shores of a lake of ice, surrounded by naked birches sheathed in frozen fog, each branch glowing like a stag’s antlers in velvet in that mellow light. Immersed in that endless white, I knew I was t
heir mother, my horror dormant, or not that relevant even. I burned with the knowledge of Malli’s coziness on my lap. I allowed myself to know how his legs curled around me as he sat squeezing the hump of his toy camel, which blared out an Arabic pop song that irritated before long. And this was different from my usual hesitant, misty remembering. Perhaps that shimmering emptiness melted my defenses and untangled my mind and untwisted my heart. But I was startled by my boldness in trespassing so wholly back into that life.

  It can also be like this when I am in our home in London, which is something I can’t tolerate too much. On my last visit, I sat in the boys’ bedroom wondering, was it really me who laid out their clothes on these beds each morning? I found Vik’s favorite black sweatpants, faded to white at the knees. I touched them, and my confusion about putting out their clothes vanished. And lying on the floor, the pants clasped to my chest, I sobbed into them a good while, as a mother should. I only stopped when I looked in the pockets and found a wrapper from those Love Hearts sweets that boy was so greedy for. Steve would have given in and bought him that rubbish, not me. And I was as narked as I was then, remembering how Vik would suck on those sweets with glee, showing off what Daddy had got him, rolling the heart-shaped candy in his mouth, his tongue alight with that bright lemon, E-number-rich coloring. Disgusting.

  You were spinning,” she said. “Imagine that.”

  She’d been searching for a crocodile skull when my friend Caryll met one of the men who found me in that muddy jungle on the day of the wave. The crocodile skull was for the museum. Vikram and Malli’s primary school in London, Holly Park School, had a fund in their memory, and we used the money to modernize the small wildlife museum in Yala. It was on a bench there that I sat in a daze in those first hours after the wave. Caryll organized the renovations—she gets things done—and that museum is now wonderfully transformed.