six sixOn the Interstate 70 from Denver to Snowmass, Anita’s daughter Kristiana asks me what a ghost town is. Her question startles me. For this is how it used to be. Four and something years ago. Me answering their questions, explaining things to her and Vik. About dung beetles and ant colonies, about capital cities and the rings around Saturn, about duck-billed dinosaurs. Sometimes I’d throw in a silly story to make them laugh. “When I was little, my friend in Sri Lanka ate the ants on her bottle of Orange Crush saying they were full of vitamin C. And they didn’t bite her tongue.” “Did she eat a whole ant colony?” “No, just half of one, I think.” But now when Kristiana asks me about Colorado ghost towns, I offer only a stilted sentence. How can I answer her questions when Vik is not here? When Vik is not here to savour my replies or frown in distrust. How can I bring myself to tell her what I would have told them both? If Vik were here, they would have stories of the gold rush and prospectors, of exploding rocks and of railroads, of blasting tunnels in the mountains to find silver ore.
They were like siblings, Kristiana, her sister, and my boys. The familiarity, the ease, the irritation, the fury, it was all there. Our families had been neighbours in London since Kristiana and Vikram were six months old. Alexandra and Malli didn’t know a world without each other. And over the years, through combat and cooperation, the older two and the younger two became more and more alike, their interests and personalities calibrating to such an extent.
I can see us all on a Friday night. Anita, Agi, Steve, and I are in our kitchen. The table is scattered with bottles of red wine, the smell of the garlic and rosemary that Steve has stuffed into a leg of lamb escapes from the oven, and Abbey Lincoln’s “When the Lights Go on Again” warms us. In the playroom, Vik is reading to Kristiana from A Field Guide to the Birds of Sri Lanka by G. M. Henry, his latest obsession. Sweet-natured as always, she tries to be eager about wingspans and the nesting habits of some obscure bird. The younger duo make regular trips to the toilet, taking turns to crouch and peer while the other does a wee. Their faces are thickly painted with crayons. An overturned sofa is a castle. And as the evening progresses, our conversations in the kitchen are interrupted by the sounds of our children’s mayhem. But the wine is so good that not one of us wants to emerge from our mild stupor to investigate.
And now I am in a trance, travelling in the Colorado Rockies with Anita, Agi, and these girls who are so infused with my boys. Expressions, gestures, mannerisms, pronouncements all overwhelm me, coming at me fast, each a reflection of Vik and Mal. I want to avert my eyes, but I furtively seek them out, hungry for every one. Alexandra watches television, resting her chin on her fists in concentration. That’s just how Malli would sit, and he would glower at me if I entered the room. Leave me alone. Now I see the four of them, rapt in an afternoon TV program, a blue bowl with tangerine pips balancing on the arm of our red sofa.
My mind fumbles. They should all be here. Vik and Malli should have gone skiing with the girls. The boys’ faces should now be flushed from the sun and the wind and from jumping in and out of the hot tub. The four children would often bathe together in Anita’s oversize bath, elbowing each other for a bit more space, soap bubbles popping on their cheeks. I can see it as if it’s happening now. I want to lift Malli out of the tub and smell crayons on his face.
When the girls speak, my heart listens in fear of being blown apart by the knowledge of what would have been. When I project on my own what the boys would be doing now, my thoughts can be as nebulous as I want them to be. Not so with the girls’ chatter, no fog to veil what they say.
One evening we talk a lot about Vik and Malli. We recall amusing incidents. The girls’ faces shine as they speak of how Vik wanted a crow as a pet. I tell them about the three pet terrapins the boys had in Colombo. Malli named one of them Rover because what he really wanted was a dog. And when the terrapins got sick and died, I tell them, Steve and I worried that the boys would be sad, but Vikram fed the dead terrapins to the crows. Vik was so funny, says Alexi. And as her blue eyes flash in remembering, I am made acutely aware that so much of Vik and Malli still remains embedded in these girls. So how can I now want to escape from them? How can I shield my eyes and ears from them, even as they unwittingly send piercing bits of shrapnel my way? It all ended so impossibly for them, too. We went to Sri Lanka for Christmas, as usual, and never returned. Vikram is a good swimmer, he will swim through the wave, Kristiana kept saying in those bewildering early days. That was also when she began bouts of burping, loud and deliberate, something she never did before. It was our Vik who was the maestro of ear-splitting burps. It’s like she took on Vikram’s spirit, Anita told me later. The more annoying bits of it, at least.
Kristiana has a stomach ache and is asleep on my lap. Vikram would sleep on me like this, the weight sinking into me, the intermittent wriggling to get comfortable. This could be Vik. A strand of hair falls across her face, and I push it back. Her hair is not drenched in sweat. Vik always sweated when he slept on my lap. And now as I sit here and look out at the snow peaks of the Rockies glowing in the lowering sun, the refrain Vikram will never sleep on my lap cinders me. Kristiana stirs, clutches her stomach, and whimpers a little. I run my fingers through her hair to keep her asleep until the Calpol makes her tummy ache better, exactly as I would do with Vikram.
The blackout blinds in the boys’ bedroom never really did their job. They wouldn’t pull all the way down, so in the summer the light came in way too early. A strip of sun stole across the carpet and lit up an open book or made one of yesterday’s green socks glow. That was all it took to stir Vik. In an instant he’d be at the window, telling his brother to wake up quick, the foxes might be in the garden. I’d give up trying to sleep through their shouts of “Fox! Fox!” and stagger downstairs to free them into the glorious morning. Those faulty blinds meant hours of fun before school. Five summers ago, that was, yet it seems like no time at all.
Each time I return to our home, I am nervous. Maybe it’s best to go another time, I tell myself. How can I even glimpse the intolerably fresh green outside?
The garden bulges with early summer, now as it did then. Late-evening shadows darken the grass. Rosebushes flicker in the smattering of last light that leaks through next door’s willow. Two plump robins drift across the lawn to swing on the honeysuckle, so tame they almost flick my arm. I spot a purple manta ray. Malli would skip along this flowerbed with armfuls of plastic ocean life. Steve and Vik would sit under the apple trees and eat sardines on toast. Five summers without them in this garden.
But it’s different, my visit to our home this time. When I returned previously, I could endure only cautious glances at my family. I looked now and again but mostly wanted to keep them a blur. Now I can hardly take my eyes off them, quite unlike when they were alive. So I investigate, constantly. I am rediscovering them, almost. I amass details of them, and us.
These five years I’ve been so fearful of details. The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I’ve told myself. But now increasingly I don’t tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won’t make me any more inconsolable. Or less.
This house sparks and almost still chimes with them.
On a counter in the kitchen there are a couple of CDs, out of their covers. In those last months, Steve played these for the boys, music from his youth. Vik would jump up and down gracelessly to “Our House” by Madness. The three of them would belt out Ian Dury’s “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”—yelling the words “ ‘It’s nice to be a lunatic, hit me!’ ” That energy, I can retrieve it now. It still crackles within these walls.
An old shoebox lets out the smell of Sunday evenings. It’s Steve’s shoe-polishing box. I rummage in it. Together with the polishes and the brushes, there is the rag he used for that final buff, the same one he’d had for years and years. He’d sit on the stairs on a Sunday evening and shine his shoes and the boys’. I hold that rag to my nose, and it still smells of the start to our week. My face is wet with crying. Yet how welcome, this old rag that tells me it was true, our life.
This is my worst day of life. These words are written in Vik’s handwriting on the sofa in the playroom. I’m taken aback. I’ve never seen this. Not before the wave or after. Why did he write it? Something I did? A playground fight that upset him and I ignored? Then I see some football scores he’s written on the arm of the sofa—Liverpool lost. For some moments I’m relieved. But then, how much I want to console him, and I am helpless.
In these past years, I’ve pushed away thoughts of my children’s everyday hurts and fears, suggestions of their frailty and tenderness. It’s easier to remember my boys with humour or to recall their cheek. But now as I dare to peer more closely at them, they emerge more whole.
For years I’ve told myself it’s pointless to cherish my children’s personalities and their passions, for they are now dead. But here in our home I am surrounded by proof of it all. I unlock my mind a little and allow myself to know the wonder of them.
Our friends often remarked that our boys were remarkably focused on what enthused them, almost unusually so for their ages. I sometimes wished Malli could be distracted from his theatrics, so he might learn to spell. Everything in our living room—a brocade throw, a carved wooden window frame from Nepal, a brass cobra—was a prop for the “shows” he plotted and fervently rehearsed. That fantasy world he moved in. With his collection of puppets and his swirl of costumes, he was constantly morphing a new story into being. His imaginings were often curious. In our study I find a typically toddler painting of blue and brown blotches. Malli did this when he was about three. “Nice, nice, Mal. What is it?” I asked him then, distractedly. “A man who lost his hands in a puddle,” he replied, not stopping to think.
Steve and I encouraged our son’s meanderings, defending him when his teacher complained that he held up the science lesson by insisting that cars were alive. But I worried about Malli’s five-year-old cunning the day he deliberately tripped his brother up on the street. I wasn’t there, our nanny described what happened, and Vik had a gash on his head. “And the police saw you doing this and called me to complain,” I scolded, taking my own story too far now. He believed me but was undaunted. “They didn’t say what time it happened, did they? They didn’t say what colour the two boys were, maybe the boys were white, some other boys.” “Will he be a criminal or a judge?” I later asked Steve.
Their promise, my children’s possibilities, still linger in our home.
Everywhere in this house are sheets of A4 filled with Vik’s calculations, all sorts. Vik was quite astonishingly quick. I sit on our bed and remember those hours before bedtime when he would be beside me, intent on some math problem he’d pestered me for. The boy grasped concepts effortlessly, and Steve and I had to keep him curious. He’d recite to us minutiae about some aspect of the natural world he was fanatical about. He inhaled information about whatever creature stirred him, and often it seemed he became one with them. When he was younger, he’d stand in front of the brachiosaurus skeleton in the Natural History Museum in London (that place was our second home, Vik could walk through it blindfolded), his neck stretching out, his body contorting, as he fused with the giant sauropod. More recently, I’d noticed how he watched eagles, easing into their glide, the raptor’s eyes in his.
Vik and I would lie together on his bed and chat, in that calm half-hour before his bedtime. His eyes would be afire as he told me about the theatre group that had visited his school that day, everyone in his class took part in The Tempest, it was brilliant, he was Prospero. Or I’d flick through his cricket magazine and say, “Wow, he’s handsome,” at a photo of Rahul Dravid. “Aw, who do you love, Mum, Dad or Dravid?” he’d admonish me, quick to look out for Steve, the king of dads. Now I sit alone on the same bed, and our easy companionship, Vik’s and mine, returns with such exactness. I can see him, rolling up his pyjamas to carefully peel away a scab on his knee. And I don’t insist myself back to reality as I usually do. Maybe it is not so overwhelming after all, to dissolve the divide between now and then.
But this does make me mad with wanting them. I let myself miss them more unreservedly now, at times at least. I rein in my yearning less. So I lie under the apple trees at the foot of our garden, on a mat still flecked with our picnics, and look up at two empty bird feeders that Steve once tied to the branches. And I want more than anything to hear my boys natter on a Saturday morning as they fill those feeders with “birdie nuts.”
Maybe yearning for them more freely gives me some relief. When I tried to tame my ache for them, especially here in this house, it didn’t ease my pain. On my earlier visits here, in the evenings especially, their absence came bounding at me off walls and trees, the desolation clobbered me. There is a difference now. Their absence is not so heavy, not so leaden, it seems. I sleep wearing Steve’s sarong, and I remember trying to inch away from him as he insisted on sleeping wrapped up in me. And how badly I still want that. Yet I am warmed by this knowing and this wanting. It helps me to better tolerate the bareness of our bed.
By knowing them again, by gathering threads of our life, I am much less fractured. I am also less confused. I don’t constantly ask, Was I their mother? How can so much of my life not even seem like mine?
I can recover myself better when I dare let in their light.
There are red pen marks rising up a wall in our living room where Steve and I would measure the boys’ heights. I see those inexact squiggles and instantly lean right back into who I was. I know it was me who settled those squabbles about who had grown the most. I know it was me who scolded Malli for standing on tiptoe to be taller, his heels right up on those slightly peeling skirting boards on that wall. And yes, it was me who’d tell Vik that it was silly to drink half a pint of milk just before I measured him—you won’t get instantly taller, now will you? And without thinking I lightly kiss those red Biro marks just as I would the tops of their heads. Then I slump to the floor with my back against that wall.
Here in our home of all places, I am surprised to find that, sometimes at least, they leave me alone. In the green dusk of our garden, a daddy longlegs stumbles along the rim of my chilled wineglass. Then I remember. It was at this time of year that we moved into this house.
It was one of those rare hot June days in London, much like today. I’d always coveted these strapping Edwardian houses, their redbrick exteriors radiant in the sun. And we’d found one just right for us, easy, inviting, not likely to be ruffled by our chaos. For now we could live with its imperfections, such as the swirling green and mustard carpet in the hallway that looked like it belonged in a pub in the 1970s. We’ll pull it up soon and repair those cracked original tiles underneath, of course, but no rush.
And I can see our first evening here, Steve spread out on the lawn after the removal men had left, hands locked under his head, sun and relief and a smile on his face. Vik and Malli, then four and nearly two, hiding in packing boxes indoors, a little lost because they could no longer shout over the fence to their friends next door. And Malee, our nanny, insisting on cooking kiribath and boiling milk in a new clay pot until it spilled over, for plenty and good luck. For even more good fortune, Steve insisted on playing the pirith tape my mother had sent from Colombo. He’d kept it on repeat all day, and I turned the volume down so the removal men wouldn’t be distracted by chanting Buddhist monks.
We had lived in this house three and something years when we left for Colombo that night in early December. And we still hadn’t got rid of that hall carpet. But we had plans for the next summer, to redecorate the whole house, move the boys into separate bedrooms. By converting the loft, Steve and I could finally have our own studies.
With each visit back to the house in this last year, I grew more and more impatient with the ugly hall carpet. Yet how could I throw it out? The boys would sit on it to put on their shoes every morning, that’s where they’d fling their jackets down when they came in from school. Still, despite my hesitations, that carpet is now gone. I rebuked myself once I was rid of it. How could I have tossed their footprints out? Yet I keep admiring my new floor, the hallway is so much brighter now. But why does it matter, why do I care? They are not here. So what am I doing? Playing house?
Malli often did that, with his friend Alexandra. Played house. And that’s exactly what she did the first time she came back to our home after the wave. She walked straight into our playroom, pulled out the dolls’ house from a corner, and played house, as if she’d been here just yesterday. She remembered it, she said, although she was last in that room more than four years ago, and then she was not yet five.
In those months and months after the wave, I could hardly bear to hear the names of my children’s friends. And when I began to see them again, I was afraid of being reminded of how my boys would be, of knowing what they are missing. I see my children’s friends often now. They are bubbling over when we meet, I enjoy their sparkle. And they make my boys real, so they are not beyond my field of vision, as they were in those first years.
Kristiana and Alexandra are over whenever I am back in the house. They help me water the garden, we discuss their homework, they punch the doors wearing Vik’s boxing gloves. They drum on Malli’s tabla. And I remember him twirling frenetically but with quite remarkable rhythm to the soundtrack from Lagaan, delicious in his Jaipuri turban, with its long tail wafting behind him, the quickening pulse at the end of “Chale Chalo” making him utterly dizzy.
But I am an empty-handed mother. I can’t offer Vik to these girls to make them laugh at his silly jokes. I can’t give them Malli, so he and Alexi can talk about getting married—or “merried,” as Malli would say—as they often did. “You are mad to get married, Mal,” Vik would say to his brother. “Your wife will boss you around, she will shout at you from the upstairs window when you’re coming home from work.” Where that boy got his ideas about marriage from, I don’t know.
Now Alexi is in our living room wearing the same red school uniform that my boys wore. A long thread dangles from the frayed cuff of her sweatshirt, the boys’ sweaters were always worn around the cuffs like this. I look at Alexi, and for a moment I wonder, really, am I in this life or that?
She snaps me out of it, this nine-year-old girl. “Why did they have to die?” she asks suddenly and loudly, with great drama, throwing herself on a pile of cushions. “How can five of them die?” I have no words. “Was it scary when the wave came?” she goes on, never mind my discomfort. I tell her it happened fast. She ponders this for a while before saying, “If you and Steve had died and Vikram and Malli had survived, will they have come to live with us?” As she waits expectantly for my answer, I realize that this is her preferred scenario, and it’s something she’s been wondering about for years. I say, “Yes, of course.” She smiles. “Oh good. So my mum has your house keys, right? So we would have come and got their things and brought them to our house, right?” For days later I carry that image, a forlorn Vik and Malli standing outside our front door, having come “to get their things.”
Five years, and how my children’s friends have grown. My boys would have too. I am increasingly curious now when I see their friends. My eyes can’t stop probing, so I can better picture Vik and Mal. I meet Vikram’s mates Daniel and Joe for the first time in five years. Joe towers above me as he hugs me so gently. He is nearly thirteen. A fist flies out of nowhere and knocks me down hard. This is how Vik would look. I am transfixed by the changes in these two boys. I stare into what I will never know in my own life, a speck of acne, broadening shoulders, a hint of facial hair. It is strangely satisfying, projecting my boys into the present like this. But Vik enjoyed the company of his mates so much. And here am I with them, when he can’t be. I feel I am handling contraband.
Our life is also kindled when I go back to our old haunts. I avoided these places until recently, and I insisted I’d never return. But slowly I am finding the nerve to revisit them. Sarah and I go walking on the borders of Hampstead Heath, one of Steve’s favourite places in London to roam. The four of us were here just some days before we left for Colombo that December. And I have not been back until now. The hedges along the paths are quick with finches, and it’s as though I’ve never been away. It’s hard to believe that we were not together here last Saturday. I know each tree we would picnic under, I know where the boys tried to play rugby with their dad. I see the spot where Steve led them to tackle me to the ground as I foolishly ambled over to throw back the ball they’d lobbed at me. The ground was all muddy, I was wearing white jeans, and they were wildly hysterical. Amused I was not.
Malli was about two when he began telling us about his real family. We were his family, too, but he had another family, his “real family.” “I am going back to them,” he’d say. “I am staying with you only a little time.”
“So what’s your real dad’s name?” Steve would ask. “Tees.” “Tees? What kind of weird name is that?” “Don’t laugh, Dad, it’s a real name.” “And your mum?” “Sue. And I have a sister. Her name is Nelly.”
He said he loved his sister the most. They lived in America. “Our house is near a big lake, we have a boat even, we do. It’s in Merica.”
Malli was undeterred by Vikram’s smirks and the incredulity of his little friends. “But you don’t have a sister, Mal. Where is she? Show me.” “Don’t be silly, Alexandra, she can’t come here. She’s in another country, Merica.”
My mother and our nanny, Malee, insisted that he was talking about a past life. “This is just the age some children remember their previous birth,” they’d say. They sometimes asked that Steve and I “do something” about it, go to the temple, talk to a priest.
All we did was entertain our children by pretending to be Malli’s “real” parents, we’d do it for whole weekends sometimes. Steve proposed they lived in rural Mississippi. The boys had raucous fun when he acted as Tees coming to London to visit Malli. In his rather comic version of a southern accent, he would launch into tirades about how crowded the big city was and how he missed the mosquitoes of the swamps. “Again, again, Dad. Do Tees again!”
Malli ended the story of his real family some months before the wave. “Mal, where are Sue and Tees now? Are they still in America?” Vik asked him one day, teasingly. “They’re dead,” came the reply. “They went to Africa and were eaten by lions.” “All of them? Lions don’t usually eat so many people at once,” said Vik, ever the naturalist. “Yes, all of them. I just got the message.” “Message from whom, Mal?” He didn’t reply.