B009Y4I4QU EBOK (7 page)

I showed Steve’s father and sister those rooms. They stared silently at the floor of the bathroom, where Steve was when I saw the wave. I retraced the
path we took as we ran from the water. I showed them the driveway where we climbed into the jeep. We stood on that gravel awhile. I kicked up red dust.

I noticed objects wedged in the top branches of a large acacia, one of the few trees still upright. An airconditioning unit, a pink mosquito net, the number plate of a car. And in the rubble on the ground, I could see a Japanese magazine now dried to a curl, a room-service menu, a broken wineglass, a black high-heeled shoe. A child’s red underpants. My eyes rushed past this. I didn’t want to find anything that was ours.

I walked down to the ocean alone. It was June, when the surf here is wild. I stared. These waves, this close. I stood there taunting the sea, our killer. Come on then. Why don’t you rise now? Higher, higher. Swallow me up.

When I came back to my father-in-law, he was holding a sheet of paper, peering at it. He showed it to me. He told me he’d stood in that wind and spoken a few words into the air, to Steve and the boys. That’s when something fluttered by his foot. He took no notice. It was just a scrap of paper, mostly covered in sand, some old newspaper, he thought. With each gust of wind, it kept flapping. So he dug it out. It was a laminated page, A4 size. Could this be something of Steve’s? he asked.

I looked. And I looked. My blood jumped. For it was.

It was the back cover of a research report written by Steve and a colleague. A report on “using random assignment to evaluate employment programs,” published in London in 2003. The ISSN number was still clear on the bottom left. Except for a small tear in the middle, this page was intact. It had survived the wave? And the monsoon in the months after? And this relentless wind? It appeared right by Steve’s father’s foot? It rustled? Random assignment. I remembered the many studies that Steve had been working on, these two words absurd in this madness now. Had Steve been reading this on the toilet when I shouted to him? Was this one of the last things touched by his hands? I 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. I kept going back to Yala, obsessively, over the next months. I scavenged the debris of the hotel. I searched, dug about, scratched my arms on rusted metal. I pounced on fragments of plastic, did this come from one of our toys? Is this Malli’s sock? 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 tore open the wrapping and saw it, how he’d lit up.

I followed the course of the wave inland, time and again. In a trance, I scrambled through the uprooted scrub. The jungle had been devoured by the water, vast tracts of it were now covered in bone-white sea sand that had been swept in by the wave. I ignored danger and walked far into the forest, there were wild animals—elephants, leopard, bear. I lied to my unsuspecting friends from London who sometimes came with me. “Are you
sure
this is safe?” “Yeah, course it is, come on.”

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 kept returning over the next months and saw the jungle begin to revive. Fresh green shoots sneaked out from under crushed brick. New vines climbed around tilting pillars, and these ruins suddenly looked ancient, like some holy site, a monastery for forest monks, perhaps. Around our rooms a scattering of young
ranawara
bushes dripped yellow blossoms. And everywhere, on bare ground and between cracks in the floors, tiny pink and white
flowers that flourish along the seashore forced their way up.
Mini mal
, or graveyard flowers, they are called. I resented this renewal. How dare you heal.

Still, I began to experience a new calm. In Colombo my chest cramped continuously, here that pain lessened. I lay on the warm floor of our hotel room as a slow moon scaled above the sea, and I could breathe. At the edge of this floor, there was a small bolt-hole, filled with sand. When I saw the wave coming toward us, I asked Vik to shut the back door. It was into this bolt-hole that he pulled down the lock. Now I traced its rim with my fingers. I cleaned out the sand.

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. I could see Vik and Malli catching hermit crabs on this beach. They’d keep the crabs in a large blue basin that they’d landscaped with sand tunnels and ditches, then release them by the water’s edge at the end of the day. Now I could hear the two of them, their innocence twinkling in the late-evening light. “Have I been good, Mum, and will Santa bring me lots of presents?”

I had glimpses of those hours before the wave. Vik jumped on my bed. “Come give me cuddle,” I said. “A Boxing Day cuddle?” he asked, snuggling
up. We were to check out of the hotel soon, my mother would have had her vanity case packed. I remembered our last night here, a star-sprawled sky. “Look, Dad, the sky has got chicken pox.” We were sitting outside on the sand, the air was still, from the
mayila
trees, like a marble skipping on stone, a nightjar called. A fucking nightjar? When I needed a vast pronouncement, of what was looming. The end of my world.

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.

M
y journeys to Yala became less frequent after I began to harass the Dutch family. By that December, as the first anniversary of the wave approached, I had this new fixation. Strangers had moved into our home in Colombo. A Dutch family. When I was first told the house had been rented to them, I raged at Rajiv for doing it. I was desperate. I screamed. I explained: the house, it anchors me to my children. It tells me they were real. I need to curl up inside it, now and again. But my brother could not comprehend any of this. Why would I want to crawl back into that torturous space? It was so empty of them now. And he didn’t live in Sri Lanka, and I was not in a state to manage it. He had no choice but to rent out the house.

But I smashed my head on the wooden frame of the bed after he told me this. Again and again I bit my arm.

I was spinning in a helpless rage. My boys have been flung out of their home. Other people are in our house, infesting it, erasing Vik and Mal. I want to sit in our garden. I want to pluck on a blade of grass that my boys pounded on. And I can’t? All these months with everyone coaxing me, you have to live, and now I can’t even do this?

On the night I learned about the Dutch family, I drove to our home. I went alone.

I know what I’ll do, I thought. I will smash the car into the front wall. It will burst into flames. I will die. That will be fitting. Killing myself in our home. I’ll do it with an explosion. I’ll do it in style.

This was my first time driving alone since the wave. It was dusk, when traffic is cranky on Colombo roads. I tore through, steering with one hand, overtaking on the wrong side. I played one of Steve’s old The Smiths CDs. My friends from England had brought me a selection of our music, but I couldn’t bear to listen to most of it. I did play 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. “And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us, to die by your side, well the pleasure, the privilege is mine.” Ah, this is noble. I swung the car into our street.

When I approached the house, my foot wouldn’t slam on the accelerator pedal as I’d planned. I slowed down just as I did when we lived here. Just as then, I got to the front gates and stopped. The gates were closed. We always kept them ajar at this time, and our security guard would open them when I pulled up. He’d wake from his nap for the glare of the headlights and rush out in disarray, tripping over his open sandals, buttoning his shirt. None of that now. The gates stayed shut.

I could see curtains open in all the bedrooms. Lights were on. Other children, in Vik and Malli’s room. Other children, readying for bed upstairs. It is December. These other children, will they have a Christmas tree? Will they put it right where we put ours? My head dropped to the steering wheel. I stayed a few minutes. Then drove off.

Strangers in our home. It’s ghastly. The Dutch family, settling in there like nothing’s happened. They must be dancing around in their fucking clogs.

I can’t allow them to stay, I vowed. Our home is sacred. I need to get it back. But how?

Maybe I can scare them. Hound them out.

So I went back, every night. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” became my anthem. The bounce in the music made me drive fast. And of course the lyrics. Morrissey was singing for me. “ ‘Because it’s not my home. It’s their home. And I’m welcome no more.’ ” I shouted along.

Powered by The Smiths and several shots of vodka, I didn’t sit outside the house silently anymore. I got out. I pounded on the gates. Those gates are made of metal sheets, they boomed as I punched and kicked. Hello, Dutch family. All nice and calm in the house, is it? A peaceful Sunday evening? I’ll show you peaceful. Take this. When I heard the front door open, I drove off. Then returned ten minutes later, kicked the gates again. They must be getting worried now, surely. Just a teeny bit. It’s happening
every night. Some nutter banging on the gates at all hours. They must be unnerved. How much it pleased me, that thought.

Sometimes I’d ring the doorbell. At two a.m. Asleep, are we? Not for long, you won’t be. I’ll see to that. I had to keep my finger pressed on that button for many minutes before anyone stirred. No security guard ran to the gate in disarray. He must have taken Ambien, like me, I thought. A light would come on upstairs, in what was my parents’ room, and I’d get back in the car and blare the horn. Or I’d wind down the car windows and turn the music up. More of The Smiths. “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.

I drove back with a swagger along an empty Bullers Road. I laughed out loud.

I suddenly felt more in command, not so powerless. Steve will appreciate what I am doing, I thought. Scaring away the Dutch, this is taking some imagination. Steve will be pleased I’ve still got that.

Alone in the darkness of my car, I was able to let in thoughts of my family. For some moments at least, I didn’t try to quell them. Ringing the doorbell reminded me of Steve’s yarns about playing knockdown-ginger when he was a child roaming his East
London council estate during school holidays. He taught our boys to try the prank on me. If I was home when they returned from the park, they’d ring our bell and scram to hide behind the hedge next door: “Shh … Mummy doesn’t know it’s us.” I could hear them now, as I drove through a red light at the Thunmulla junction. I shrank back from their voices. I couldn’t see the road in front of me for wanting them.

Since I started on the Dutch family, my days livened up. I still woke paralyzed by the chant “they are dead,” but slowly my mind revived. I had to plan for the night. I lay in bed and schemed. Getting rid of the Dutch required serious thought. I’ll go to the house at different times each night, I won’t be predictable. I’ll give you a few nights’ break, my lovely little tulips, and when you think it’s all over, I’ll start again.

I clasped a seashell in my fist as I strategized, one of those cowrie shells I found in the house before it was rented. On its shiny surface still, Malli’s fingertips.

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.

I began phoning the Dutch family. At night, late. At first I had to force my fingers to tap out that number. They hovered over the keypad as if incredulous that I wasn’t calling my mother. The first few times I called, I said nothing when the Dutch man answered. “Who is this? Who
is
this?” he kept asking. A chilling silence from me, I thought. Let him think this is a portent of worse to come.

It tore my skin off to hear a stranger speaking to me from the phone in my parents’ bedroom. When Ma called me in London to ask if Malli’s fever was better or to check on how my biryani turned out, she used that phone. I have to be more fierce. I have to free our house.

I moved on to making sinister noises when the phone was answered. I hissed, I rustled, I made ghostly sounds. The Dutch man spoke with more urgency now. “What is it you want?” he said time and again. “Tell me, please. What is it you want?”