But I let my children go, when I was their mother. That jeep turned over in the surging water, and in all those minutes after, I have no idea how long, I didn’t think of what became of them. There was that terrible crushing in my chest in the water, true, and I thought I was dying. But there was no shrieking refusal to leave, I didn’t lament for them, for our life. It’s over, but what to do was more precisely the thought that fluttered in my mind, and now I am startled by how wispy and casual this seems. I would have expected different. We were in our hotel room only moments before, it was Christmas the previous day, for crying out loud, and now in this ferocious water, all I could muster was a what to do? Although for some moments I wanted to stay alive for my boys, I soon gave up. Some mother.
When that jeep turned over, we dispersed. We just slipped out, I guess, no moment of separation, not one that I was aware of anyway. It was not like I tried to cling to my children as they were torn from my arms, it was not like they were yanked from me, not like I saw them dead. They simply vanished from my life forever. In order to survive this bizarre and brutal truth, do I have to make murky the life I had with them?
That Malli wanted us to kiss his toe better whenever he stubbed it running barefoot in the garden. That a wave came for us when they were playing with their Christmas presents in a hotel room, when we weren’t even in the ocean. Not knowing how to allow these two realities to coexist, I perhaps dim them both, intentionally or not, I don’t know.
But I wasn’t there when they most needed me. I know I was too powerless in that raging water to get to them, not that I knew where they were. Even so, I failed them. In those terrifying moments, my children were as helpless as I was, and I couldn’t be there for them, and how they must have wanted me. Their helplessness I can’t bear to consider, just as I turn away from the memory of Vik crying in fear as we sat for a few moments in that jeep before the water filled up. How can I hold the truth of being their mum when I have all this to live with?
There’s more. I didn’t even look for them. After the water disappeared. I let go of that branch, and I didn’t search for my boys. I was in a stupor, true, I was shaking and shivering and coughing up blood. But still I berate myself for not scouring the earth for them. My screams should have had no end. Instead, I stared at the swampy scrub around me and told myself they were dead. I remember now. I even then wondered what I was going to do with my life. And in those weeks and months after, when my relatives and friends were combing the country for Malli, I took no notice, or I insisted it was pointless. Why did I so readily accept this hideous reality? Because I was desperate to protect myself from hope in case that hope became dust? Or because I truly knew? I cannot say. But I was their mother, and I should have reached for them in whatever way I could, however futile or impossible it seemed. I did not, I abandoned them, and that sickens me.
I might feel more like their mother if I was constantly weeping and screaming and tearing my hair out and clawing the earth, I think sometimes. Over these years I’ve only infrequently even come close to this. But why? My reactions are not natural, they are feeble, I feel, and I find this abhorrent. I am paralyzed without my family, true, but I expect something different. I remember being about eight years old and sitting cross-legged on the floor of our balcony at home in Colombo and swatting mosquitoes while listening to a woman from the shantytown nearby wailing because her sister had died. For days and days, her shrieking and her swearing sliced the neighborhood with hardly a pause, and I was mesmerized, believing that’s what you have to do when someone dies. That thought must still lurk in me, for every time I read about England winning a test match, or about Pluto no longer being a planet, I loathe myself for not howling endlessly, knowing Vik would be so rapt in all that. I might be less bewildered about being their mum, if I did. Then again, it’s not like my mind isn’t teetering when I read those words, it’s not like I’m not wild inside.
I do have times of clarity, though, when I reunite with the truth of being their mother, quite unreservedly, without wincing or clenching. Sometimes vast isolated landscapes allow me this. Recently, my friend Malathi and I were in sub-Arctic Sweden, on the deserted shores of a lake of ice, surrounded by naked birches sheathed in frozen fog, each branch glowing like a stag’s antlers in velvet in that mellow light. Immersed in that endless white, I knew I was their mother, my horror dormant, or not that relevant even. I burned with the knowledge of Malli’s coziness on my lap. I allowed myself to know how his legs curled around me as he sat squeezing the hump of his toy camel, which blared out an Arabic pop song that irritated before long. And this was different from my usual hesitant, misty remembering. Perhaps that shimmering emptiness melted my defenses and untangled my mind and untwisted my heart. But I was startled by my boldness in trespassing so wholly back into that life.
It can also be like this when I am in our home in London, which is something I can’t tolerate too much. On my last visit, I sat in the boys’ bedroom wondering, was it really me who laid out their clothes on these beds each morning? I found Vik’s favorite black sweatpants, faded to white at the knees. I touched them, and my confusion about putting out their clothes vanished. And lying on the floor, the pants clasped to my chest, I sobbed into them a good while, as a mother should. I only stopped when I looked in the pockets and found a wrapper from those Love Hearts sweets that boy was so greedy for. Steve would have given in and bought him that rubbish, not me. And I was as narked as I was then, remembering how Vik would suck on those sweets with glee, showing off what Daddy had got him, rolling the heart-shaped candy in his mouth, his tongue alight with that bright lemon, E-number-rich coloring. Disgusting.
You were spinning,” she said. “Imagine that.”
She’d been searching for a crocodile skull when my friend Caryll met one of the men who found me in that muddy jungle on the day of the wave. The crocodile skull was for the museum. Vikram and Malli’s primary school in London, Holly Park School, had a fund in their memory, and we used the money to modernize the small wildlife museum in Yala. It was on a bench there that I sat in a daze in those first hours after the wave. Caryll organized the renovations — she gets things done — and that museum is now wonderfully transformed.
She related to me what this man, my rescuer, told her. Until now I’d not been aware of this.
“He told me about finding you. It was definitely he who found you. He gave the same story as you. He said something very strange. It still gives me the chills.
“The man is a park ranger. He said that on the day of the tsunami, he was driving to the park with some others when they heard something about a tidal wave. They turned into the road to the hotel, someone said the hotel has been hit. But the road was flooded, they couldn’t go on. They got out of their van. It looked like the end of the world, he said. No one knew what had happened. One of the men with him started screaming, about demons destroying the world. Then they shouted, asking if anyone was alive, asking people to come out.