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.
The 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.