Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

I could sense that. I am going to die, I am nothing against whatever it is that has me in its grip. What to do, it’s over, finished. I gave up. But as I went whirling in the water, I did feel disappointed that my life had to end. This cannot be happening. Only now I was standing by the door, I was talking to Orlantha. And what was that she said? A dream? What you guys have is a dream. That’s what she said. Her words came back to me now, I cursed her for saying that.

It was only then that I wondered what happened to everyone. Could they be dead? They must be. They must be dead. What am I going to do without them, I thought. Still panting, still spitting. I couldn’t keep balance, I was sliding in mud.

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.

Nothing was normal here, and that I liked. Here, in this ravaged landscape, I didn’t have to shrink from everyday details that were no longer ours. The shop we bought hot bread from, a blue car, a basketball. My surroundings were as deformed as I was. I belonged here.

I never did find Crazy Crow. I stopped searching the day I found the shirt Vik wore on our last evening, Christmas night. It was a lime-green cotton shirt. I remembered him fussing that he didn’t want to wear it, it had long sleeves, which he didn’t like. Steve rolled up the sleeves for him. “There, that looks smart.” When I found the shirt, it was under a spiky bush, half-buried in sand. I pulled it out, not knowing what this piece of tattered yellowing fabric was. I dusted off the sand. Those parts of the shirt that had not been bleached by salt water and sun were still bright green. One of the sleeves was still rolled up.

The Smiths, though. Hearing them didn’t feel so raw, they were not from our immediate life. It was when we were undergraduates in Cambridge that Steve was possessed by them. Now, in the car, I played “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” repeatedly.

“Bigmouth Strikes Again” now. I hope you can hear this in there, I said as the car stereo hammered out the words “by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed” in our hushed Colombo street.

My relatives and friends became concerned about my nightly forays. After months of begging me to leave my room, they now tried to hide the car keys. “You mustn’t harass those tenants, they are innocent in this, it’s not their fault,” they’d plead. “You are driving yourself insane.” Finally. I was insane. I liked this. And even if I didn’t really believe I was, I welcomed the chance to act as if deranged. I’d been too compliant since the wave, immobilized on that bed, crushed and numb. Everyone’s dead, that’s not how I should be, I should be raving around.

Smiths at the memorial service in the chapel of my old school, Ladies’ College. Of course it had to be “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

I was held for a few moments in the coherence and safety of the life we had, when so much seemed predictable, when continuity was assumed. There would be more bills for Steve to sort out, more sunsets for me to get distracted by while he did just that. And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking.

How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong about me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months. Why else did we have to be right there just when the wave hit? Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier? Or I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life, I was paying for that now. And even as I have discounted such possibilities over time, shame remains huge in me.

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.

Although for some moments I wanted to stay alive for my boys, I soon gave up. Some mother.

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 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.

Abbey Lincoln’s “When the Lights Go on Again”

Vik was so funny, says Alexi. And as her blue eyes flash in remembering, I am made acutely aware that so much of Vik and Malli still remains embedded in these girls.

Perhaps I suspect that remembering won’t make me any more inconsolable. Or less.

On a counter in the kitchen there are a couple of CDs, out of their covers. In those last months, Steve played these for the boys, music from his youth. Vik would jump up and down gracelessly to “Our House” by Madness. The three of them would belt out Ian Dury’s “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”—yelling the words “ ‘It’s nice to be a lunatic, hit me!’ ” That energy, I can retrieve it now. It still crackles within these walls.

there is the rag he used for that final buff, the same one he’d had for years and years. He’d sit on the stairs on a Sunday evening and shine his shoes and the boys’. I hold that rag to my nose, and it still smells of the start to our week. My face is wet with crying. Yet how welcome, this old rag that tells me it was true, our life.

For years I’ve told myself it’s pointless to cherish my children’s personalities and their passions, for they are now dead. But here in our home I am surrounded by proof of it all. I unlock my mind a little and allow myself to know the wonder of them.

“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.”

Hampstead Heath, one of Steve’s favorite places in London to roam.

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...

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.

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.

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.

He’d play the Susheela Raman track “Love Trap” in the car.

We had rented a house in central Colombo during that time. Whenever I’ve passed that street in these years since the wave, I’ve looked the other way or pretended to myself it was of no significance. Now I drive down this narrow lane with my in-laws. And I can see them, Steve and Malli, walking up here. Malli has his doll in a stroller, they are playing “Dads and Dads.”

The clatter of slurped-out shells on a tin plate, salt on the children’s eyelashes, sunset. Malli called this time of day “the sky is upon the table time.” That was his version of the early lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I don’t know quite why, I often recited them to the boys.

Eerie but flawless, Steve would say about Coltrane’s Blue Train.

Kev and Steve flung each other about in loutish mock fights, chanting, “come an’ have a go if you think you’re ’ard enough”—very childish, I thought.

“Song to the Siren” sitting on a rock, declaring that when they first heard it played on John Peel Sessions, their hearts stopped.

We lived in Colombo for the next two years, renting an apartment with an old stone bathtub and overpolished cement floors, and an enormous spider named Insy who hid behind the kitchen sink.

Still, my mother sent him an elaborate lunch every day in a tiffin carrier to the school where he taught economics and played lots of basketball. If his lunch was late, he’d phone my parents’ house, but Saroja, our cook, who insisted on calling him sudu mahattaya (“white gentleman”), although he pleaded with her not to, would be confused about who was calling until he announced loudly, “This is the white gentleman speaking,” leaving the other teachers in the staff room quite aghast.

The most frequent trips we made in that red van were to Yala. As a child I spent countless family holidays there, when we stayed for a week in a bungalow in the jungle, and my parents and aunts and uncles always brought too little water and soft drinks for the children but somehow got the quantities for beer right.

Each evening we’d sip a beer on a rock by the lagoon near our hotel and recount our day’s adventures and conjure up our future. As a child, I always wanted to be a ranger in a national park when I grew up, and now Steve’s enthusiasm for the wild matched mine. So we canceled our plans to return to England to do Ph.D.’s in economics. We’d become naturalists and live in the jungle, in a tent. Of course we did go back to England and get doctorates in economics. But on those Yala evenings, as the lowering sun gave that lagoon a coating of crushed crimson glass, our dreams made complete sense.

This was the first I’d heard of Cockney rhyming slang and learned that tea leaf was “thief” and butcher’s hook meant “look” and trouble and strife was, of course, “wife.”

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?”

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.