Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

thought was preventing me from being truly insane. I wanted to spear it with these images. I searched on and on, hoping something would shock me into madness.

Someone had removed the brass plate with my father’s name on it from the gray front wall.

Mary-Anne’s

Now, six months after the wave, I dared to set eyes on this house.

was wary as I sat in Mary-Anne’s car, which was parked by our front wall. I didn’t want to look around. I was afraid of seeing too much. But I couldn’t help myself, I peeked.

Apart for the now nameless wall, the outside of the hous...

From its perch on a nearby telephone post, a bulbul trilled. And I recalled the pair of red-vented bulbuls that nested in the lamp that hung in the car porch, just over the front wall. In the hollow of the glass lampshade, there would be a nest built with dried twigs and leaves and even a green drinking straw.

The

boys were spellbound by the arrival of fidgety chicks, still part covered in pale red shell. They watched the first flutter from that lamp many times, shooing off the mob of crows that rallied on the wall waiting for an unready chick to drop to the ground. Now I could see the two of them, placing a chair under the lamp to stand on and get a bette...

In the past months, I’d been unable to focus on the death of my parents. I’d held back thoughts of them, so utterly bewildered was I by the loss of my boys and Steve. Now, as I lingered outside this house, my parents emerged, a little.

They must be still in that room, surely. It’s impossible they are not.

I glanced quickly at the lamp in the porch, some scraps of a nest, no birds.

I didn’t want this barrenness. I yearned for the house as it was, as we left it.

maybe some warmth would seep into me.

Broken and bewildered, my brother had the house cleared and packed away, painted and polished, all in the first month or two after the wave. For him, that was the practical thing to do, to impose order on the unfathomable, perhaps.

I had been collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house at the time and could not contemplate returning to my parents’ house. I quaked at the very thought of it.

Now, in this stillnes...

with the odor of varnish and paint, I hunte...

There must be some atom of our life hidden here, lingering in this quiet somewhere. And then I saw it. The mat. Just a small square black rubber mat with little round bristles, unremarkable. But I was transfixed. This was the mat Vik wiped his muddy feet on when he bounded

from the garden. The very same mat. It was inside the house now, tossed to the side by the stairs, not on the step leading out to the garden as it should be. No one had bothered to dispose of it, no one had bothered to clean it up.

As I stood in the dark of

Malli tying clusters of balloons on the frangipani trees in the back garden because we were having friends to dinner, and what’s a party without balloons. My mother teaching Vikram to play “Silent Night” on the piano, and his deliciously dimpled smile as he changes the chords and presses hard on the pedal, making the tune unrecognizable. Steve wearing that burnt-orange shirt the night we had the party, the shirt I’d bought him only that day, a tad more flamboyant than his usual choice.

All of this now sharply in focus just by being within these walls, my vapor-filmed m...

I looked out the window and saw the lime tree in the front garden. The tangy smell of those lime leaves, when they a...

that so well. Familiar insect noises filled the outside, crickets rubbing wings together, cicadas vibra...

quies...

Drifting in and out of the rooms in a daze,

took it to our bedroom. I struck at the bed. I stabbed the mattress with the muddied pointed end, over and over, harder and harder, until a tear appeared, and again to make the hole deeper and again to make another gash and again to join up all the gashes. The four of us, we slept here in all our innocence. That’ll teach us.

This was my first trip back to Yala. I went with Steve’s father, Peter, and his sister Jane. On the two-hundred-mile drive from Colombo, we had to stop often, so I could

vomit.

The sea eagles that had thrilled Vik, they were still there. Bold in this desolation, they sailed low, sudden shadows striking the bare ground.

Eagles without Vik. I didn’t look up. I couldn’t make this real. This wasteland.

me? I thought. This was where I was last with my family? Our wine chilled in a bucket here on Christmas Eve? I couldn’t believe any of it,...

The wave was more than thirty feet high here. It

But with that rock I found my bearings.

I stood there taunting the sea, our killer. Come on then. Why don’t you rise now? Higher, higher. Swallow me up.

clasped the paper to my chest and sobbed. My father-in-law stood next to me. “Cry all you want, sweetheart.”

After finding that page, I was no longer afraid of chancing upon our belongings amid this rubble. Now I wanted to discover more.

What I really wanted was to find Crazy Crow, the big glove puppet with unruly black feathers that we had given Malli for Christmas, the day before the wave.

When he

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.

My surroundings were as deformed as I was. I belonged here.

I kept returning over the next months and saw the jungl...

resented this renewal. How dare you heal.

Still, I began to experience a new calm.

In Colombo my chest cramped continuously, here th...

We loved this wilderness. Now slowly it began pressing into me, enticing me to take notice, stirring me from my stupor, just a little. And here I found the nerve to remember.

I’d walk on the beach following the footsteps of a solitary peacock, and allow in snatches of us.

a nightjar called. A fucking nightjar?

never did find Crazy Crow. I stopped searching the day I found the shirt Vik wore on our last evening, Christmas