B009Y4I4QU EBOK (10 page)

I
cower in a corner of my bed. I can barely raise my head. My stomach is clenched, my heart races, my right hand grips my left arm so tight it hurts. I shake all over, or at least it feels that way. Imagine if they could see me. They would be inconsolable.

I stay indoors alone for days on end in my apartment in New York, where I have been living these past few months. I can’t face the sudden wintry brightness in this new city. I can’t tolerate the happy scatter of children coming out of school. I can’t bear a dimple on a small boy’s cheek. Bloody hell, Steve, I sob into my pillow, how useless are you, wherever you are, why can’t you sort this out. Just get me killed, I’ve more than had enough.

I am as I was in those early months when I was collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house in Colombo. But it’s four years later now, and I am startled by the intensity of this fear in me. It came upon me all at once, when I was at our home in London recently, in late October. I felt one night, with a new and terrifying force, the way in which I was flung out of our life, just like that.

It was blustery, that night when I rifled through
some papers on Steve’s desk. The windows behind me trembled, I could feel a draft on my back. Our office was tidier than it used to be, but the computer screen was tilted as always, so that in the daytime the branches of the silver maple that spread outside the window wouldn’t reflect onto it and make you squint. I always had Jazz FM turned up loud when I worked in that room. But that night there was no music, only the wind.

The desk was piled up with Steve’s usual stuff. Pages and pages of econometric models with some coefficients circled in blue ink, a book on chess, the
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
, an appointment card for a haircut. I thumbed through Steve’s checkbook, which was in the drawer. He’d written three checks on our last day in London, for the gardener and the milkman and for the boys’ school dinners. Those two words, school dinners, were all it took. I shattered.

For one thing, my mind had not even murmured those words in all these years. How could I have forgotten? How could I have shut this out? I could now hear our daily conversations. Vik telling me that he’d had sausages again at lunchtime, Malli shrugging his shoulders and walking away when I ask if he’s eaten any vegetables. And I could see Steve sitting right where I was, signing that check with the pen that is still on the desk, tearing it off and putting it in Vik’s schoolbag. I would have seen that dinner bill lying around for days and left it for him to deal
with. I would have picked it up when I sat at that desk reading a chapter of a student’s thesis, stopping too frequently to read a film review on the
Guardian
website or to gaze at a shaft of late sun firing the redbrick chimneystacks of the houses across the street.

But it was not simply that I had forgotten about something as commonplace as school dinners that got me that night. As I stared at the stub in Steve’s checkbook, 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.

They would indeed be aghast to see the mess I am now. This is not me, this is not who I was with them. I can see that me as we left London for Colombo exactly four years ago today, the eighth of December, the day Steve wrote that check and we flew out of Heathrow’s Terminal Four. Things couldn’t have been better. I had it sorted. Steve and I were impatient for the three days we would spend in a small hotel on the coast, leaving the boys to be indulged by their grandparents. We’d have the room with enormous windows that open to the ocean on
three sides so the din of quickening waves smashing against rock even enters your dreams. Then the four of us and my parents would go to Yala, where the soundless feet of a baby elephant hiding under its mother’s belly as she brushes past our jeep would enthrall the boys. Steve and I were grateful our kids didn’t want to go Disneyland.

None of that assurance now as I shudder on this bed. I recoil at my desolation. 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.

It is nearing Christmas, and I can’t join in my boys’ giddy enthusiasm. I don’t have my boys at the kitchen table writing Christmas cards to kids they’ve not spoken to all year or making greedy lists for Santa. I can’t do all those things that were normal for us and still are for countless others. And I balk at the failure that I am. Quite separate, this, from the more obvious agony of missing them.

So I avert my eyes from the Christmas displays
in the shop windows on Bleecker Street because I don’t have Malli here to be spellbound by them. Our last December I lifted him up in the London drizzle so he could see the tinkling
Nutcracker
exhibits outside Fortnum & Mason. But my arms are empty now, luckless mother that I am. I cross the street to avoid the smell of Christmas trees lined up for sale on the pavement near my apartment. Yet I remember our local Christmas-tree seller on Friern Barnet Road who wears a Santa hat as he does a roaring trade. One year he also sold us a red metal stand for our tree. “This is heavy duty, it’ll last you forever, darlin’,” he told me. I saw that red stand recently, it’s still in our garden shed. I was conned. It wobbles.

It seems shallow, my shame, all about being trounced and not having, but that’s how it is, and it won’t dislodge. My time at home in London on that visit was tinged with it. I looked in the boys’ wardrobes. They would have grown out of those clothes by now, I thought, and this felt like my defeat. It was half-term that week, and the tumble of children on trampolines filled neighboring gardens. I only had the silence indoors. So this is me now, loitering on the outskirts of the life we had.

In Colombo, there is no home now, not even one empty of them. I want the solace of that space, and I feel dispossessed. When I go back there, I break into a cold sweat and become nauseated as I pass through our neighborhood. It is unacceptable that I can’t
drive through those gates and walk into my childhood home. I know every pothole on that street, my foot goes down on the clutch, and my hand changes gear with effortless recall. My memory of the house is immaculate. But I feel expelled from there. I lost my dignity when I lost them, I keep thinking.

I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate. I hear this occasionally. A friend will say, I told someone about you, and she couldn’t believe it was true, couldn’t imagine how you must be. And I cringe to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined, even though I do wonder how impossible this really is. Occasionally an insensitive relative might walk away if I mention my anguish, and I reel from the humiliation of my pain being outlandish, not palatable to others.

Such a puny life. Starved of their loveliness, I feel shrunken. Diminished and faded, without their sustenance, their beauty, their smiles. Nothing like how I was that day before the wave, when we sat in the back of a jeep and watched a young male leopard leaping across the branches of a
palu
tree, supremely poised and scornful of the troop of monkeys that taunted him from the surrounding canopy. And nearby a haze of blue-tailed bee-eaters drifted in dust-filled light. Sometimes, even now, I can summon the lift of those birds. For some moments it takes me away from my fear and my shame.

T
he woman next to me on the plane asks questions. I give her the briefest of answers. I pretend to sleep, it’s been two long flights, from New York to Colombo. But the woman doesn’t stop. “Do you have children?” “No.” “Are you married?” “No.” “Oh, it is good to be so dedicated to your career, no? You must be such a clever girl.” Girl? And I haven’t told her anything about a job. I smile politely. Why doesn’t she get it that I don’t want to speak with her? I haven’t shown a modicum of interest in her life. “Do your parents live in Colombo?” “Hmm.” I pretend to nod off again. We begin our descent over the Indian Ocean. She is even more animated. “Ooh ooh you’ll be home for Christmas. You’ll have a nice family Christmas, no? How nice.” By now I can only muster up a feeble half-smile. “So what does your family do for Christmas? Big celebrations?” Oh shut up, you nosy cow, I think. You will probably faint if I tell you. You’ll have to pull down your oxygen mask.

I 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 it’s not like me to be cagey in my interactions. Steve and Vik would smirk and raise their eyebrows when I stopped to chat with yet someone else at the farmers’ market or on Muswell Hill High Street. (Do you know
her
too?) 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. I imagine saying those words—“My 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 might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it.

I have coffee with a friend who must think he knows me quite well. To him I am here in New York only to do research at Columbia, as I have a sabbatical from SOAS, my university in London. I am a carefree academic, he thinks. As we chat, I find I almost believe this story myself, so deft have I become at my trickery. 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.

I
was out of tea bags this morning. Bleary-eyed, I stared into a red carton of Twinings English Breakfast Tea convinced it hadn’t been empty last night. I rummaged in the cupboards for another box with no luck. There were plenty of other teas, oolong and jasmine and chamomile and that Japanese tea with toasted brown rice, but how can I drink that stuff in the morning? This would
not
have happened before, I griped. At home, we never ran out of tea. Or if I opened the tea caddy only to find a scattering of fragrant dust at the bottom, Steve would pop out to the shops for me. He’d be back in flash. He knows I can’t think straight until I’ve had my two large cups first thing. This morning I crushed that empty carton and flung it into the bin. What am I supposed to do now, go out and get some tea bags? Unwilling to give in to the reality of having to do what Steve always did, I refused to take myself to the grocery shop on Eighth Avenue, even though it’s just minutes away. So I put the kettle on and poured myself a mug of boiling water that I sipped in a sulk. How am I supposed to live without them?

Steve took the boys shopping, usually on Sunday afternoons. In those first weeks after the wave when my mind couldn’t find their faces, one image that came to me was of the three of them returning from the supermarket, the boys squabbling over
some sugary treat. And now today is a Sunday, and if they’d gone shopping, Vik would have claimed more than his fair share of sweets because this week is his birthday. He would have been twelve.

This time twelve years ago, Steve and I were impatient for Vik to be born. The hyperactive boy was making my belly swing from side to side with no letup, and thrilling as this was in the earlier months, it exhausted me. And I hated being crusty with the calamine lotion that soothed the prickly rash that covered my body in those last weeks. My parents were with us in London, excited, it was their first grandchild. Ma kept telling Steve that he needed to note the exact time of birth, to the minute or second even, her astrologer in Colombo couldn’t write an accurate horoscope with approximate times.

Vik was born by emergency cesarean section, a sudden rush of midwives and doctors and needles in my spine, when I had only gone to the hospital for a routine checkup and his heartbeat was found to be alarmingly slow. Steve hid well from me the panic he later confessed to feeling then, but I had been unperturbed. That monitoring machine must be dodgy, I thought—nothing will go wrong now surely. And as the surgeon tugged and yanked about, I began to shiver with cold, the anesthetic they said. Steve warmed my hands in his, remembering all the while to glance at his watch. “Lots of hair,” Steve said even before Vik was taken out, and moments
later, we both felt the magic of that soft black hair in our hands.

The boys would trace the scar on my stomach with their fingers, astonished they’d emerged from there. This prompted Malli to want to be a mummy, his doll wrapped in a wad of small blankets protruding from under his T-shirt, Vik’s protests that boys can’t have babies resolutely ignored. It was calm at the Royal Free Hospital when Malli was born, a planned cesarean with no frantic dashing around, but Steve forgot to check his watch. A few minutes after noon, he mumbled to Ma, far too imprecise for her astrologer’s charts. Two-year-old Vik stared awhile at his newborn brother and whispered, “Malli,” in a voice so tender that it still stirs my heart.
Malli
means “little brother” in Sinhala, and we always called him that, even though his given name was Nikhil.