Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

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 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.

imagine saying those ...

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 mig...

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.

think of that day now, and I cannot reconcile it with the impossible horror of how they were severed from me in an instant.

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.

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?

If I allow any of this, I will go mad for wanting them.

Yet occasionally, for a few moments, I cannot resist peeking into that life.

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.

would have expected different.

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?

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 t...

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 abhorr...

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.

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.

When I project on my own what the boys would be doing now, my thoughts can be as nebulous as I want them to be. Not so with the girls’ chatter, no fog to veil what they say.

Five summers without them in this garden. But it’s different, my visit to our home this time. When I returned previously, I could endure only cautious

glances at my family. I looked now and again but mostly wanted to keep them a blur. Now I can hardly take my eyes off them, quite unlike when they were alive. So I investigate, constantly. I am rediscovering them, almost. I amass details of them, and us. These five years I’ve been so fearful of details. The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I’ve told myself. But now increasingly I don’t tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won’t make me any more inconsolable. Or less.

Yet how welcome, this old rag that tells me it was true, our life.

But now as I dare to peer more closely at them, they

emerge more whole.

For years I’ve told myself it’s pointless...

children’s personal...

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 all...

And I don’t insist myself back to reality as I usually do. Maybe it is not so overwhelming after all, to dissolve the divide between now and then.

But this does make me mad with wanting them. I let myself miss them more unreservedly now, at times at least. I rein in my yearning less.

Maybe yearning for them more freely gives me some relief. When I tried to tame

my ache for them, especially here in this house, it didn’t ease my pain. On my earlier visits here, in the evenings especially, their absence came bounding at me off walls and trees, the desolation clobbered me. There is a difference now. Their absence is not so heavy, not so leaden, it seems.

By knowing them again, by gathering threads of our life, I am much less fractured. I am also less confused. I don’t constantly ask, Was I their mother? How can so much of my life not even seem like mine? I can recover myself better

when I dare let in their light.

Here in our home of all places, I am surprised to find that, sometimes at least, they leave me alone.

see my children’s friends often now. They are bubbling over when we meet, I enjoy their sparkle. And they make my boys real, so they are not beyond my field of vision, as they were in those first years.

But I am an empty-handed mother.

Our life is also kindled when I go back to our old haunts. I avoided these places until recently, and

I insisted I’d never return. But slowly I am finding the nerve to revisit them.

Nearly six years after the wave, and five years of other people living in it, my parents’ home is transformed. Empty now, it cringes with neglect.

And in these years I’ve not permitted myself to yearn for their care. I’d feel even more perilously alone if I did, I’ve thought. Yet here in our home, snug in these familiar surroundings, I can’t help but crave their comfort.

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.

In these past six years I’ve recoiled from remembering my childhood. I felt foolish about my youthful contentment, was niggled