Saminda’s uncle regrets waiting for the morning light. He’s sorry now and should have woken him earlier. And they should have got going sooner. But he’d heard the roads wouldn’t be safe in the dark. And his wife thought they should let the boy try to get some rest. Saminda pulls his t-shirt down over his stomach and looks up at his uncle.
‘I didn’t sleep,’ he says.
* * *
The Galle road is already crammed with traffic in both directions. Buses, ambulances and tuk-tuks lined up and patiently advancing, no horns, no weaving, as if in a funeral procession. His hands gripped tight on his uncle’s shirt, his eyes blur and slip shut. The noise of the motorcycle is familiar but distant. It sounds just like his dad’s.
Saminda pictures the four of them on it, coming back from the fish market with plastic bags snapping in the wind. His dad with his knotty hands clasping the handlebars, his little sister in front, her skinny thighs held tight in place, her ribs bouncing against the inside of his sinewy forearms, black eyes peering left and right. Saminda is wedged between his father and mother, his chest compressed against his father’s curved spine, his mother behind him, her breasts soft and damp against his bony back. The winds snatches thin wisps of hair out of her long plait and whips them forward about his cheeks.
* * *
Once past Moratuwa, where the road turns back down towards the coast, his uncle’s motorbike slows and stops. He opens his eyes and it’s like sleepwalking off an edge. Debris covers the road. Tall piles of it. Sections of roofs, splintered wooden planks, windows and doors popped out of their frames, looking stunned, asking, ‘How did I get here?’
The air is still and humid, coating everything in a sticky gleam. And perched atop the piles: buses, cars, tuk-tuks, fishing boats. The boy and his uncle sit on the motorcycle and pick through the landscape in silence. Little by little, fragments of the recognisable emerge from the mass of charcoal grey and muddy brown. A whole coast of soil and sand churned up and thrown down.
He makes a note in his mind of what is still there: a red plastic bowl, a pink doll’s head with pale orange hair, a silver-framed wedding photograph, an unopened green-and-yellow packet of biscuits.
* * *
‘Just two,’ his auntie decreed as she handed him the green-and-yellow packet of Hawaiian Cookies and closed the pantry door.
‘Thank you, Auntie,’ called Saminda, already back in front of the television.
‘And that’s another six. Two sixes in the one over.’ The commentator paused, as the camera jumped from the umpire’s raised arms to the batsman’s raised bat to the defeated bowler. ‘And Warne is not happy.’
‘Warne is not happy. Warne is not happy,’ he imitated, slapping his bony knees and bouncing on the plastic-covered seat of the sofa.
He scanned the Pakistani players cards laid out on the coffee table in front of him, snatched up the image of Youhana, the new captain, and danced it around the edge of the table till it was face to face with Shane Warne’s, taunting the bowler’s ruddy, zinc-smeared cheeks.
‘Murali is the King of Spin.’
‘Saminda, what are you doing?’ his aunt called from the kitchen.
‘Watching the cricket, Auntie,’ he replied, replacing the cards and sitting back down on the sofa.
‘Who is winning?’
‘It’s a Test match, Auntie. Can’t say who is winning.’
‘Stupid game,’ he heard her mumble from the kitchen, as she put away the breakfast dishes.
* * *
Soon after the tea break at the MCG, a news flash interrupted play. The reporter spoke of an earthquake near Indonesia. Early reports of a large wave hitting the coast of Sri Lanka. They called it a tsunami. He’d never heard this word. He called out to his auntie and she came and sat lightly beside him on the edge of the sofa.
‘Are Mummy and Daddy safe?’
‘Shhh! Listen, child!’
‘Could it have hit our house?’
His aunt didn’t respond. She just sat stiff and still, leaning towards the television screen, her mouth open, her lips pushed forward, as if inhaling the reporter’s words. Her nephew turned and raised himself up on his knees, his head twisted towards her, watching her face for a sign. The plastic sofa cover squeaked and sighed as he shifted his weight from one knee to the other. Then, as if someone had yelled ‘Action!’, she closed her mouth, turned her head towards the hallway and screamed out, ‘Raja! Come quickly!’
His uncle joined them and they all watched in silence. They sat and listened as reports started to come in from Trinco, then Batticaloa. There was news of a train overturned. On its way from Colombo to Galle. The same train they’d been going to take together the next morning. His uncle tried to call Saminda’s parents. The phone system wasn’t working. For an hour they waited for the newsreader to speak of Galle. Nothing. His uncle dialled his parents’ number again, then again five minutes later, then again two minutes later, then over and over, until suddenly he stopped and put the phone down on the coffee table. He looked at it, then stared at Saminda, before slowly turning his face back to the television, his eyes suddenly deep in their sockets.
The television reporters talked of massive destruction all along the coast. Thousands dead. People washed kilometres inland. Sucked out to sea. And each time the reporter said the word dead, Saminda saw his auntie’s left eyelid twitch.
* * *
By mid-afternoon his uncle had spoken to friends and neighbours. No trains or buses were getting through south along the coast. He called Saminda into the entrance hall and told him that they’d try to get back there on his motorcycle. It’d be slow, but it should be possible on the inland roads. It was too late to leave that afternoon. It would be dark before they got very far. The roads wouldn’t be safe. And his headlight wasn’t working. Best to wait till the next morning. Saminda nodded. His auntie called him to come have something to eat in the kitchen. Walking through the lounge room, he glanced at the television screen.
‘Stumps,’ the commentator said. ‘Stumps at the MCG.’
* * *
When they reach the coast road, the rain begins. A constant light drizzle and, before long, pools in every hollow. His uncle tells him to close his eyes, but he sees them all the same. Bodies. Men and women, old and young—arms and legs splayed as though they’re exclaiming, What was that? Eyes looking skywards, asking, What has happened here?
And those who are still alive standing amid the debris, looking down. No one talking, or just in three- or four-word phrases, and to themselves, to the air.
‘Look at that. All dead. No one left.’
Their skin is lighter, greyer than normal, overcast like the sky. Their eyes, when he sees them, are emptier, like they’ve pricked them with pins and let the water run out.
Concrete telephone poles lean into the wind like palm trees. Railway tracks twisted and continuing on their way above emptiness, the earth swept away from under them. The sounds of traffic, motorbikes, bicycles are dampened in the sodden soil. The birds are silent too. And all the dogs are gone.
Men sitting on debris, standing with their hands behind their backs or arms crossed in front. Women with hands on hips, not in defiance, but to keep their shoulders up. To stop the sinking of their chests, holding off the gasping.
Small slivers of walls, right-angled corners with serrated edges. Already, on the remains of a wall, someone has put out an offering of food for the dogs and crows—the first handful of rice on a banana leaf.
The sea is what he notices most. So calm, hardly moving, watching. As if it had absent-mindedly done its job, like it didn’t have a choice. Had just come and then retreated, without even looking back. ‘What do you want me to say?’ it shrugged, like it had just tossed and rolled a piece of driftwood that was the town.
Leaning his forehead against his uncle’s shoulder blade, Saminda keeps one eye closed and narrows the other. The world flickers through moist eyelashes like his grandfather’s old Super 8 films.
* * *
By late afternoon, they have reached Balapitiya and the bodies are starting to smell. Not overpowering yet, but sour, pungent, like a pot of buffalo curd left out too long in the sun. There are people stepping over debris, lifting their knees up high and gently placing their feet where it’s safe, covering the bodies with cloths. White flags of mourning have started to appear, but also clear plastic or strips of red-and-white shopping bags.
He sees a Bo tree draped heavy with large coloured flags. As they get closer, he sees they are not flags but pieces of clothing—sarongs, t-shirts, shorts, skirts, baby clothes. Around the tree and along the path to the temple, monks walk, heads down. At the base of the Buddha statue, a little girl sits cross-legged with a cut on her head. Damp blood, still red, strings a ruby necklace round her throat. She looks up at Saminda’s face as the motorcycle rolls slowly by and the middle of her top lip forms a tiny v, just like his little sister’s.
Near a hotel in Hikkaduwa he picks out suitcases, plastic chairs, a pool umbrella like a javelin in the ground. Wrought-iron screens caught against trunks, woven through with fishing nets, newspapers and leaves. Further along, a woman’s body is caught in the branches of a tree. Her long black plait wrapped like a noose around her neck. Children walk around silent, women drift with bundles on their heads, young girls with crying babies on their hips.
Before the light begins to dim, they continue on towards Galle. Going through the old Dutch gate to the fort, things seem almost normal. But as they emerge they see the cricket ground, completely flooded. In the centre, balancing awkwardly on the pitch, are a red public bus and a battered yellow freight container. Water lies in stagnant pools covering the grass with a brown sheen. Dead fish stare at the sky. They avoid the bus station, entombed in metal and wood, and strewn with stranded bodies. They turn off along the beach road and weave their way through the turmoil at a walking pace.
Among the debris, they search for kilometre markers. It’s difficult to know how far they’ve come otherwise. Saminda knows they must turn off at the one-hundred-and-eleven-kilometre mark. One hundred and eleven. Like Youhana’s score. When his uncle taps his knee and points to the marker, Saminda looks for the house of his best friend, Asanka. He looks for their food stall in front—the baskets of red rice and lentils, the heavy hanging stalks of bananas and clusters of yellow king coconuts, the bars of soap and packets of milk powder. He searches but it is nowhere to be seen.
As his uncle slows to turn off down the road that leads to Saminda’s house, he sees a single plank of wood still partly covered with the bright red handbills advertising mobile phones that Asanka’s father had used as decoration when he rebuilt the stall just before Christmas. The monks had come down from the temple for the blessing. There is still a strip of the blue plastic bunting snagged on the broken piece of wood.
Entering the mangroves, the dirt path alongside the river becomes too slippery for the motorcycle, so they dismount and walk. As the river turns to face the coast, they first see the vehicles, then the shoes and clothes, and finally the bodies. Before the turn-off to his parents’ house, the surface of the water is no longer visible. Just metal and cloth and tangled hair and bloated skin. And a sour smell like overripe wood apple pulp.
When they arrive at the house, they understand at once. Pieces of furniture that have tumbled down to the paddy field. Strewn sandals and toys, cooking pots and carpets caught in window frames and bushes. A fragment of his father’s radio balanced on the fence. His uncle says nothing. Just presses down on Saminda’s shoulder, fixing him to the place he’s in, and turns to enter the house.
Saminda waits without moving, eyeing his toes as they drill into the black sludge smothering the front porch. In pooled water by the edges of the concrete, a frayed shred of blue sky passes and unravels. His arms hang heavy by his sides with dread, and his tongue is swollen in his mouth. And still he stands and listens for a sign of life from inside the house, until the quiet starts to squeeze his chest and he has to get away. He runs up between the paddy fields, his feet skidding out from under him as he veers left and right around scattered objects. He crosses the main road, and heads up behind the temple and towards the school.
The water has reached only as high as the school’s front gate. He runs up the steps to the junior secondary section and to the grade seven classroom. Placing his foot on the ledge of the windows, he hooks his fingers through the mesh grating and pulls himself up. With one hand he reaches up into the damp space on top of the window frame. His fingers skim over the splintered wood and stop as they touch the faintly curled edge of a card. He slides it off the edge of the wooden beam and brings it level with his eyes. He studies the image, the vivid green background and the white-shirted figure sweating in the bright sun. Murali doesn’t look at him. He’s leaning forward, eyes wild and glaring at the batsman, mouth wide open, his left forefinger pointing skywards. Saminda knows he’s the best spin bowler ever. He knows he’ll beat Warne’s record once again. His dad says he’ll do it next year for sure. His dad says they’ll go see him next time he plays in Galle. Saminda brings the card close to his face and smells the dust and damp. He squints until his eyes are focused on the sweating bowler’s face, on his bulging eyes, and then he brings it closer still, until it fills his field of vision and the image becomes a blur.