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.
I can see us now, on the day he was born. What bliss. Malli asleep on me. Vik, who was quickly bored by his brother, clambering precariously onto the handrail of my bed to look at a crane hoisting some steel rods outside the hospital. Steve too elated to worry the boy might fall. A Voltaren suppository nicely numbing the pain of my cut. I think of that day now, and I cannot reconcile it with the impossible horror of how they were severed from me in an instant.
We talked about birthdays the day before the wave, sitting in a jeep under a weera tree, while gabbling hornbills flitted about. Vik was to be eight in a few months. Malli was annoyed that each year Vik’s birthday was before his. He asked us when he would be eight. Steve explained that he had to be six first, then seven, and only then eight. “Will Vik still be eight when I am eight?” Steve confessed that Vik would be ten then. Malli’s outburst of “Aw, why do I always have to be younger?” sent the hornbills scattering, and we too drove away.
Vik’s eighth birthday arrived not even three months after the wave. I was in the bedlam of my mind. He is dead? For his birthday he’d wanted a camera and a new cricket bag.
I recently opened Vik’s cricket bag. I’d avoided doing this for four and something years. I looked at his bat and in every dent saw the flourish of his hands striving for the perfect stroke. His red ball was flecked with grass and mud. He nearly broke Steve’s middle finger once when bowling to him in our garden — it wasn’t his fault, Dad was stupid not to wear gloves. In that bag were a helmet and kneepads and sweat-soiled guards and yellowing white gloves. And amid all that, a single leaf. A small dark brown leaf with a pointed tip, I couldn’t say what kind, dried up and crisp but still intact, its threadlike veins and jagged edges undamaged after all these years. It crumbled a bit when I picked it up, dust on my hands. Where did this come from? Our garden? Or maybe Highgate Wood. Steve and Vik would play in the cricket nets there while I kept watch on Mal as he climbed a pyramid of logs and twigs or hid among the trees awhile before shouting out “Mum!” in a slight panic that I might have lost him.
Mum. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I was their mum. Even as I remember fragments of their birth or recall how I reassured Malli as he peered from behind that tree, the truth that I was their mother is veiled in confusion. It is distant also. Was I really? Was it really me who could predict a looming earache from the color of their snot, who surfed the Internet with them looking for great white sharks, and who cuddled them in blue towels when they stepped out of the bath?
I know it was me, of course, but that knowing is cloudy and even startling at times. Strange. For one thing, they are dead, so what am I doing alive? I must be heartless. I am their mother. I am tortured, true, my dreams howl for them most nights, I am still as mutilated as I was in those first weeks when I couldn’t step beyond the door because they weren’t beside me. But this is hardly enough, surely my reactions nowhere near match the awfulness of their death. Yet nothing can, I suspect, fantasize as I might about hurling myself into that heaving ocean in Yala, doing it properly now, no clinging on to branches this time.
Is it because I am still dazed that I can’t grasp the reality of being their mother? Is it because I am stunned by the way it ended that the truth of being their mother is muted? Maybe I willed it this way, in shock and desperation, when in an instant they were gone. I was so tightly wrapped around them, their moods and needs tugging at me always, but then I tried to unwind from them, determined and furious, insisting to myself that it was pointless keeping close to them, because I was no longer their mum. And even now, some four years on, I am hesitant to grab them with my heart, fierce and tender, the way I used to when they were alive. How can I bear to do that in this void? So I shy away from knowing Malli’s weight in my arms as I carried him indoors when he’d fallen asleep in the car. I don’t want to hear Vik ask me if he’d played well at his football class, in that uncertain tone he used when he knew he hadn’t but needed me to reassure him with a lie. If I allow any of this, I will go mad for wanting them.
Won’t I?
And maybe I forfeit being their mother because, at times, I feel helplessly responsible for their death. We took them back to Sri Lanka that December, Steve and I. Although we were only doing what we always did, and although it was those tectonic plates that slipped, I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I led them to harm when they relied on me. So I am hesitant to evoke the intensity with which I watched over them. I can’t tolerate knowing how they always counted on me. Yet occasionally, for a few moments, I cannot resist peeking into that life. When Google street maps went 3D in London recently, I looked at our street, and I was catapulted into being who I was with them. We walk to school, I tell them to zip up their jackets. Now they run ahead of me. “Don’t tread on that dog shit, Vik,” I hear myself say. If I didn’t watch out, he always did that.