Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

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,

couldn’t open my mouth to talk.

I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start.

uncle Bala

cousin Natasha’s

told them the jeep turned over in the water. I described the crushing in my chest.

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.

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

awful. That I must ...

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.

I wanted to stay dangling in a dream. Even though I knew I was not.

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

“They found Ma and Da today,” my brother Rajiv said softly.

He is telling me that Vik is dead.

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

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

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.

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.

From our bedroom in London we mostly heard finches and robins and the thump

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 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.

I was never left alone. An army of family and friends guarded me night and day.

Keshini

Gunna

Ruri

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

Lester

Anita kept telling me that I had to live, without me she couldn’t raise her girls.

Chris

Beverley

I didn’t want to step out of that room.

resolved not to leave the house, ever. How can I go outside? Outside was where I went with my boys.

There were all those first times. The

There was the first time I saw a paradise flycatcher. I thought then I should never have allowed my friends to open the curtains in my room. I had been much safer in blackness.

feathers along the branches of the tamarind tree outside. No sooner I saw it, I turned away. Now look what’s happened, I thought. I’ve seen a bird. I’ve seen a flycatcher, when all the birds in the world should be dead.

Steve and Malli were identified four months after the wave.

All that while I’d told myself that they’d disappeared into the depths of the ocean. Vanished. Magically became extinct. This kept their deaths as unreal and as dreamlike as the wave. Then

What I did for my boys never stopped. Now I have to give that all up?

dinosaur birds?

Let them, let our life, become as unreal as that wave.

They had become muffled and distant then anyway.

They don’t want me to drink. Some

Each night I hoped to die

from my frenzied drinking. And it diluted my terror of getting to sleep. I knew I had to wake up the next morning and relearn

back. I rushed inside when the birds began to sing at first light, birds I had to escape.

I felt crazy, and that’s how I thought I should be. My world gone in an instant, I need to be insane.

wanted to make it all real now, but I had to be drunk to even try to do that. There was also a numbness in me, due not to drink but to a deeper deadness, that I