B009Y4I4QU EBOK (15 page)

We had rented a house in central Colombo during that time. Whenever I’ve passed that street in these years since the wave, I’ve looked the other way or pretended to myself it was of no significance. Now I drive down this narrow lane with my in-laws. And I can see them, Steve and Malli, walking up here. Malli has his doll in a stroller, they are playing “Dads and Dads.”

Time snaps back. It was just this morning we were all here, surely. Vik grew big and strong that year, I can feel now how the muscles on his thighs were hardening. He was seven, but I was buying clothes for a twelve-year-old. In Colombo, he was always playing sports, exciting Steve with his skill at cricket, keeping pace with his dad when every evening they sliced across the large swimming pool in my old school. I’d tell them to get lost when they played football on blazing afternoons and came back wet and shirtless with arms stretched out for
a hug. I can’t bear to walk into those playing fields, where I feel their footprints must still be fresh.

I’ve berated myself continually for bringing my family back to Sri Lanka that December. What was the need? We had only recently returned to London. We did too much, rushing between two countries, wanting it all, we couldn’t get enough. I had it all, and I blew it, I’ve thought. In the early weeks after the wave, I’d have recurring dreams of my very mild-tempered friend Fionnuala striding down our street in London, screaming at me furiously for taking my children back to Colombo that Christmas.

But this summer, as I am more alive to those months we spent here, I accuse myself less. I can see why Steve and I decided to return. We wanted some continuity with the life we’d established.

That year, away from our usual routine in London, we had time. Steve and I worked on our research projects and papers. On holidays and weekends the four of us traveled.

We hiked in the rain forest, often. We’d wake in the dark for the dawn chorus. I haven’t heard that divine song in some six years, I can’t bear to, but I remember it vividly now. The distant bubbling erupted into cooing and pealing interspersed with the panic of parakeets and the
kruk-krukking
of jungle fowl. And above all that, the fluting of a spot-winged thrush, and higher still, the clarion whistle of a warbler.

We were frequently on the beach. Vik and I
would walk on the empty morning sand to watch arrack-breathed fishermen draw in their nets as the crows went wild. Steve made sashimi with the freshest tuna that was just off the boat, he relished that, proclaiming it “the dog’s bollocks.” Now I have a memory of us on a beach, eating gunnysack loads of mussels, steamed only in their own juices on an open fire. The clatter of slurped-out shells on a tin plate, salt on the children’s eyelashes, sunset. Malli called this time of day “the sky is upon the table time.” That was his version of the early lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I don’t know quite why, I often recited them to the boys.

We went to Yala many times. We’d been taking the boys there even before they could walk. We explored the scrub in a jeep, the heat rising off cratered tracks, our hair matted with powdery red dust. Vik understood the jungle, and I loved that. He’d be the first to spot a stone plover on a showery beach, he knew the long lush whistle of a bush lark. We always stayed at the same hotel. Each time we were there, Vik bought a “Checklist of Yala Birds” from the souvenir shop. I found these booklets in that same bag where Steve’s 2004 diary was. Vik had marked off in them the birds he’d seen on each trip. I flicked through quickly, on each page his happy little ticks in a red pen.

I’ve been returning to Yala over these years, and on the drive from Colombo when I’ve approached the Udawalawe reservoir, I’ve always looked away. Vikram
loved this spot, where hawks sail upwind above the gleaming water. On the night of the twenty-sixth of December 2004, when I was being driven back to Colombo, I hid my head between my knees as that van raced along the reservoir. I can’t look because Vik will never see this again, I thought then. Six years later, I am on this same road with Steve’s sister and her family. But for the first time since the wave, when we come to the reservoir, I am able to look.

Our nine-month stay in Sri Lanka in 2004 ended on the first of September. We were back in our garden in London just as the apples were turning red. In school, the boys got badges at morning assembly for settling back well. So when Steve and I discussed plans for the Christmas holidays, it wasn’t hard to decide. The boys had rooted themselves well in Colombo, we should keep that connection close. Even a short trip would be fine. Just three weeks.

As always, Steve wrote in his diary various tasks he had to do in those three weeks. A deadline for a paper, a conference call, chores. I saw he’d written the date and time of our flight from London to Colombo, nine p.m. on December 8. There was no note about our flight back on the thirty-first, maybe he meant to do that later. But scrawled across the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth was the last word he wrote in that diary for 2004.
Yala.

T
hey never left. The wave didn’t scare away the pair of white-bellied sea eagles that nested by the lagoon near the Yala hotel. When I first came back here after the wave and spotted them, I didn’t dare watch. These were Vik’s eagles, not mine. Then I became compulsive. I needed to see them each time I returned. I couldn’t leave until I had at least a glimpse. I wanted their reassurance. But, please, I asked myself, reassurance of
what
?

Maybe I just needed their distraction. I’d gaze at the two eagles gliding the air thermals with such graceful abandon, unconcerned to hunt even. Other birds—waders, crows—are always in an alarmed frenzy when these great raptors approach. They screech warnings or fly behind them as a mob to harass them away, but the eagles are untroubled. Diverted by watching them, I could tolerate being here, perhaps. Here where I was robbed.

But there is a surprise. I am standing on the shore of the lagoon years later now, and don’t realize for a while that the two eagles I am watching are a different pair. Their wing feathers are smaller and not black but a dark brown. These are juvenile birds. Vik’s eagles have bred, and now there are four.

I’ve never seen this before. The young eagles are learning to fly. They lunge off from a branch, drift a few moments, then flap back to the nearest tree,
urgently. Now they try again, but they tumble. They drop through the air for some moments, almost entangling their wings.

And look. An upside-down eagle. One of the young sea eagles is attempting to dive but is the wrong way around. It’s falling on its head, looks like. Legs splayed, talons pointing at the sun, white belly gleaming, head looking up at the sky, not down.

W
hen it comes to pancakes, my mind goes blank. Try as I might, I can’t remember how to make a pancake. I am thrown by this, I who made pancakes so often. Am I so estranged from who I was? The boys ate their pancakes with a syrup of lemon juice and sugar. Steve had his with chicken curry and dhal. And they haven’t done this in six years now. I startle myself as I say this. As though it’s a new truth, I am stunned. I want to put a fist through these last six years and grab our life. Claim it back.

I want to be in our kitchen late on a Saturday morning as Steve walks in with a paper bag filled with bagels for lunch. I’d toast them with mozzarella, and tomato and basil and chopped green chilies. Steve and I will have a glass of Sancerre. The bagels at our local bakery were nowhere near as good as the ones we bought from the Brick Lane Beigel Bake when the two of us lived in East London long years ago, before the boys were born. We went to late-night movies at the weekends then, and on our way home stopped here for the steaming hot bagels that were pulled from those ovens all night. At
three a.m. it was just us and London cabbies cramming into that brightly lit shop where you got a dozen bagels for a pound. We would tell the boys about our lost carefree nights. “It was so good then, we went out all night, and we didn’t have you to bother us so we could sleep as late as we wanted on Sundays.” They’d look downcast.

In the summer, at weekend lunchtimes, Steve lit up the barbecue. Squid marinated in lemongrass and lime and chili flakes. Slices of salty
haloumi
cheese and lamb chops and sausages from Nicos, our local Greek Cypriot butcher. Nicos always doubted that Steve was English. “The English know nothing about good food, how is he English?” he’d ask, and I’d tell him it was my good influence, and he accepted that.

And often, at the weekends, Steve cooked big meals, and we had friends over. Or his family visited and there would be more than twenty of us for Sunday lunch. He’d make our version of
raan
, an Indian lamb roast. We’d marinate a leg of lamb for two days in a mix of yogurt, almonds, pistachios, lots of spices, mint, and green chilies. Steve watched the roast, concerned that it would not be tender enough, throwing some gin on the meat when basting it. The meat, he’d say, must be so soft, it can be eaten with a spoon.

On quieter days we cooked duck eggs, ate them with crumpets. The boys were impressed by duck
eggs. They cupped them in their palms to feel the weight, they tapped the hard shell. Vik would pretend to spin bowl with one, enjoying my agitation as he twisted his fingers around it and lurched forward, raising his arm. He eventually put the egg down, saying, “Calm down, calm down”—in a strange accent (meant to be Liverpudlian). This was something he learned from his father. Regular life. So I thought.

It was at the Sunday farmers’ market in Palmers Green that we bought duck eggs. Whenever we went there, Malli would get lost. We usually found him among a heap of purple-sprouting broccoli, his hair sticking up like a baby heron’s. We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe. And in the spring Steve bought artichokes. He steamed them with garlic and bay leaves, and we ate them hot. Steve showed the boys how to separate each petal and scrape out the pulp with their bottom teeth. He’d describe to them how he first ate artichokes when he was about ten, and was traveling in his father’s lorry somewhere in France.

For my father-in-law, Peter, the isolation of driving a lorry for weeks on end on European roads was redeemed a little by wine and food. Peter shunned the egg and chips served at the truckers’ stops. Instead, every evening he coiled his articulated lorry onto narrow country lanes to reach a French or Italian village where he’d made friends with a family who ran a small restaurant, which was usually their
dining room, and where each day just one dish was cooked. From the time Steve was about seven, he’d gone with his father on a long trip to Europe during the summer holidays. It was on those journeys that he first tasted risotto, and rabbit stew with bacon, and bouillabaisse, and ravioli that didn’t come out of a can, and he loved it all. His friends back home were envious of these trips. But if he began telling them about his culinary adventures, they looked at him blankly and said, “You wha—?” and got on with causing grievous bodily harm to each other playing football, accusing him of “eating foreign.” Foreign was not popular fare on an East London council estate in the early 1970s.

But for Steve’s family it was. Steve’s father was born in Rangoon and lived there and in western India until he came to England with his parents and three brothers in 1946, when he was ten. According to family lore, they were the first Lissenburghs to return to Europe after one Wilhelm Lissenburgh left northern Holland and sailed on a merchant ship to South India in the mid-seventeenth century. When they settled in England, in a small seaside village near Bournemouth, Steve’s grandmother and her sisters drove long distances searching for spices and ingredients for making
balachang
, a tangy prawn paste. My mother-in-law, Pam, when she married, quickly learned to eat spicy food and to cook chicken curry. So Steve grew up on curries she made
using Bolst’s Curry Powder, which came from Bangalore in a tin and which his father relished when he came home at the weekend from Italy or France.

Vik and Malli liked stories about Granddad being a lorry driver and about Steve’s travels in the lorry when he was a boy. We’d linger over lunch as Steve described how he slept in a bunk inside the lorry and did his homework as they drove through long tunnels in the Italian Alps. Vik was impressed to learn that Steve even helped Granddad unload his enormous container. Mal was incredulous that sometimes there were only tomatoes in there, so many tomatoes, that’s unbelievable. Or rather, unbel
eee
vable, in Malli-speak.

These conversations inevitably ended with Vik complaining about Steve’s chosen occupation. He was peeved that Steve had really bungled this. “Why can’t
you
be a lorry driver? What’s research? I hate research, it’s so
boring
, Charlie’s dad’s a policeman, that’s
even
better than being a lorry driver. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

He’d stop grumbling when I gave him his pudding. In the autumn I often made apple-and-blackberry crumble. The two apple trees in our garden go wild with fruit. We sometimes picked blackberries when we went walking in the woods, and Steve instructed the boys to only pick the clusters hanging high in the bushes. “My granddad called the ones lower down pissed-on berries,” he
would tell them, and they liked that. Later in our oven those urine-free blackberries burst under the crumble and trickled like purple lava across that buttery crust.