B009Y4I4QU EBOK (13 page)

H
ere in our home of all places, I am surprised to find that, sometimes at least, they leave me alone. In the green dusk of our garden, a daddy longlegs stumbles along the rim of my chilled wineglass. Then I remember. It was at this time of year that we moved into this house.

It was one of those rare hot June days in London, much like today. I’d always coveted these strapping Edwardian houses, their redbrick exteriors radiant in the sun. And we’d found one just right for us, easy, inviting, not likely to be ruffled by our chaos. For now we could live with its imperfections, such as the swirling green and mustard carpet in the hallway that looked like it belonged in a pub in the 1970s. We’ll pull it up soon and repair those cracked original tiles underneath, of course, but no rush.

And I can see our first evening here, Steve spread out on the lawn after the removal men had left, hands locked under his head, sun and relief and a smile on his face. Vik and Malli, then four and nearly two, hiding in packing boxes indoors, a little lost because they could no longer shout over the fence to their friends next door. And Malee, our nanny, insisting on cooking
kiribath
and boiling milk in a new clay pot until it spilled over, for plenty and good luck. For even more good fortune, Steve insisted on playing the
pirith
tape my mother had
sent from Colombo. He’d kept it on repeat all day, and I turned the volume down so the removal men wouldn’t be distracted by chanting Buddhist monks.

We had lived in this house three and something years when we left for Colombo that night in early December. And we still hadn’t got rid of that hall carpet. But we had plans for the next summer, to redecorate the whole house, move the boys into separate bedrooms. By converting the loft, Steve and I could finally have our own studies.

With each visit back to the house in this last year, I grew more and more impatient with the ugly hall carpet. Yet how could I throw it out? The boys would sit on it to put on their shoes every morning, that’s where they’d fling their jackets down when they came in from school. Still, despite my hesitations, that carpet is now gone. I rebuked myself once I was rid of it. How could I have tossed their footprints out? Yet I keep admiring my new floor, the hallway is so much brighter now. But why does it matter, why do I care? They are not here. So what am I doing? Playing house?

Malli often did that, with his friend Alexandra. Played house. And that’s exactly what she did the first time she came back to our home after the wave. She walked straight into our playroom, pulled out the dolls’ house from a corner, and played house, as if she’d been here just yesterday. She remembered it,
she said, although she was last in that room more than four years ago, and then she was not yet five.

In those months and months after the wave, I could hardly bear to hear the names of my children’s friends. And when I began to see them again, I was afraid of being reminded of how my boys would be, of knowing what they are missing. I 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.

Kristiana and Alexandra are over whenever I am back in the house. They help me water the garden, we discuss their homework, they punch the doors wearing Vik’s boxing gloves. They drum on Malli’s tabla. And I remember him twirling frenetically but with quite remarkable rhythm to the soundtrack from
Lagaan
, delicious in his Jaipuri turban, with its long tail wafting behind him, the quickening pulse at the end of “Chale Chalo” making him utterly dizzy.

But I am an empty-handed mother. I can’t offer Vik to these girls to make them laugh at his silly jokes. I can’t give them Malli, so he and Alexi can talk about getting married—or “merried,” as Malli would say—as they often did. “You are mad to get married, Mal,” Vik would say to his brother. “Your wife will boss you around, she will shout at you from
the upstairs window when you’re coming home from work.” Where that boy got his ideas about marriage from, I don’t know.

Now Alexi is in our living room wearing the same red school uniform that my boys wore. A long thread dangles from the frayed cuff of her sweatshirt, the boys’ sweaters were always worn around the cuffs like this. I look at Alexi, and for a moment I wonder, really, am I in this life or that?

She snaps me out of it, this nine-year-old girl. “
Why
did they have to die?” she asks suddenly and loudly, with great drama, throwing herself on a pile of cushions. “How can
five
of them die?” I have no words. “Was it scary when the wave came?” she goes on, never mind my discomfort. I tell her it happened fast. She ponders this for a while before saying, “If you and Steve had died and Vikram and Malli had survived, will they have come to live with us?” As she waits expectantly for my answer, I realize that this is her preferred scenario, and it’s something she’s been wondering about for years. I say, “Yes, of course.” She smiles. “Oh
good
. So my mum has your house keys, right? So we would have come and got their things and brought them to our house, right?” For days later I carry that image, a forlorn Vik and Malli standing outside our front door, having come “to get their things.”

Five years, and how my children’s friends have
grown. My boys would have too. I am increasingly curious now when I see their friends. My eyes can’t stop probing, so I can better picture Vik and Mal. I meet Vikram’s mates Daniel and Joe for the first time in five years. Joe towers above me as he hugs me so gently. He is nearly thirteen. A fist flies out of nowhere and knocks me down hard. This is how Vik would look. I am transfixed by the changes in these two boys. I stare into what I will never know in my own life, a speck of acne, broadening shoulders, a hint of facial hair. It is strangely satisfying, projecting my boys into the present like this. But Vik enjoyed the company of his mates so much. And here am I with them, when he can’t be. I feel I am handling contraband.

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. Sarah and I go walking on the borders of Hampstead Heath, one of Steve’s favorite places in London to roam. The four of us were here just some days before we left for Colombo that December. And I have not been back until now. The hedges along the paths are quick with finches, and it’s as though I’ve never been away. It’s hard to believe that we were not together here last Saturday. I know each tree we would picnic under, I know where the boys tried to play rugby with their dad. I
see the spot where Steve led them to tackle me to the ground as I foolishly ambled over to throw back the ball they’d lobbed at me. The ground was all muddy, I was wearing white jeans, and they were wildly hysterical. Amused I was not.

M
alli was about two when he began telling us about his real family. We were his family, too, but he had another family, his “real family.” “I am going back to them,” he’d say. “I am staying with you only a little time.”

“So what’s your real dad’s name?” Steve would ask. “Tees.” “
Tees
? What kind of weird name is that?” “Don’t laugh, Dad, it’s a
real
name.” “And your mum?” “Sue. And I have a sister. Her name is Nelly.”

He said he loved his sister the most. They lived in America. “Our house is near a big lake, we have a boat even, we
do
. It’s in Merica.”

Malli was undeterred by Vikram’s smirks and the incredulity of his little friends. “But you don’t have a sister, Mal. Where is she? Show me.” “Don’t be silly, Alexandra, she can’t come here. She’s in another country, Merica.”

My mother and our nanny, Malee, insisted that he was talking about a past life. “This is just the age some children remember their previous birth,” they’d say. They sometimes asked that Steve and I “do something” about it, go to the temple, talk to a priest.

All we did was entertain our children by pretending to be Malli’s “real” parents, we’d do it for whole weekends sometimes. Steve proposed they lived in rural Mississippi. The boys had raucous fun when
he acted as Tees coming to London to visit Malli. In his rather comic version of a southern accent, he would launch into tirades about how crowded the big city was and how he missed the mosquitoes of the swamps. “Again, again, Dad. Do Tees again!”

Malli ended the story of his real family some months before the wave. “Mal, where are Sue and Tees now? Are they still in America?” Vik asked him one day, teasingly. “They’re dead,” came the reply. “They went to Africa and were eaten by lions.” “All of them? Lions don’t usually eat so many people at once,” said Vik, ever the naturalist. “Yes, all of them. I just got the message.” “Message from whom, Mal?” He didn’t reply.

COLOMBO
, 2010

E
ven the lizards have left, it seems. Those small green and brown creatures with their ancient heads and sticklike tails would be forever scuffling in this grass, alert to Vik stalking them with his fishing net. But nothing stirs in this wilted garden today. 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. Leaves from the jak tree litter the back veranda. My mother never liked that jak tree. It towers in the middle of the garden, and she thought it far too big. She fretted that it would come crashing down in a strong wind one day and destroy the house.

I was seven when we moved to this house. On our first night here my parents had a
pirith
ceremony to bless our new home. For hours the monks hummed, and I sat distracted by the rows of little clay lamps that flickered around our pond. For me then, that pond was the most marvelous thing about our new home. It was indoors and had no roof over it. I was curious, how will it be when the
rains come? This house changed over the years because changing the house was one of my mother’s passions. Dining rooms were enlarged, all glass and open to the garden, terrazzo floors were dug out and replaced with marble. And the pond disappeared. It was paved over because it overflowed during the monsoons, and Ma got tired of goldfish gasping on her new floors.

I’ve not stepped into this house since those early months after the wave, when I wandered through it, stunned. I’ve come back now eager for details of us, of my parents especially. I want to make our life in Sri Lanka real, less of a dream.

But this is quite unlike being in our home in London, where it feels as though we’ve just stepped out. There our life is affirmed, whereas in this strangeness it falters. Did my father really read his newspaper on this veranda, on that ebony armchair with the armrest that kept falling off? Did my boys wake in this bedroom at night disturbed by polecats pelting on the ceiling, and did I really hush them into sleep, my fingers combing their hair?

I turn on a light in the living room, even though it is daytime. The familiar feel of that confusing jumble of switches on the wall, and I perk up. I wash my hands in a bathroom upstairs and feel a lightness from the touch of the tap. Sunlight streams into that bathroom, and I sit on the toilet and let it scorch my back. The relief of habit. I don’t hear
the tinkle of my mother’s gold bangles (“Aachchi’s bells,” Vik called that sound), but these walls have knowledge of it. My life coheres a little.

It is July. We’d be here every July for the summer holidays. The house gusted with my children’s chaos. My parents filled our days with big ceremonial meals. Pork curry blackened with roasted coconut on Monday, hoppers on Tuesday, biryani on Wednesday, and god forbid if Steve and I planned to go out to dinner with friends on other days. Ma would be glum and announce that someone she knows ate at the restaurant we were going to and had diarrhea, for a whole week would you believe. For my mother, no one could cook as well as she and her three sisters, and she wasn’t far wrong. During English winters, Steve craved her prawn curry, her signature dish. The fiery-red gravy was thickened with a paste made by grinding the half-cooked heads of the prawns, something she’d learned from her grandmother.

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and there are three triangles of sunlight trembling on the floor of this veranda, now as there were then. I can almost hear them out here. My mother and my aunts.

Together they were wayward, Ma and her three sisters. Mostly they laughed. Their laughter was a constant in my life, and in this house. As a child I was perturbed by just how much they laughed. I thought it unbecoming, other mothers and aunts
didn’t get so hysterical surely? But always I felt safe within their merriment.

I could never resist being regaled by the stories that set them off. There was endless gossip. Someone emptied a flower vase, water and all, on the head of her husband’s mistress at the hairdresser’s. And stories from when they were young girls—my grandfather, a serious-minded civil servant, lined his four daughters up at the men’s barber’s and ordered severe short haircuts so they’d be unattractive and no boy would take a second look. Then there were descriptions of my grandparents’ later attempts to arrange suitable marriages for them. Michael, their squint-eyed gardener, would be the first to glimpse and pronounce on these proposed suitors.
“Eeya, haamu, eeya”
(Yikes, madam, yikes), he’d whisper through the window to Ma and her sisters as a hapless, oily-haired man stepped out of a Morris Minor.