In the evening, we went down to the beach to look for Sunil and Raja but they weren’t there and so we returned to the hotel, had some food and then I crashed out again. For the first time since the tsunami I slept through the night like a log.
By the time that I woke it was nearly mid-day. Josh had already gone out and didn’t return until mid-afternoon. He had been back to the beach, to where I had shown him that Raja’s hotel had been, and had met Sunil and Raja. He had obviously spent some time talking to them and had been told that they had found no sign of Sunil’s parents. Then he had spent the rest of the morning travelling back to the camp, it was only about four miles away and by then the roads were more clear, and had bought a tent from one of the charities for Raja and Sunil to sleep in. God knows how much it cost him. But he had then gone back to the beach and helped them put it up. Otherwise they would have had nowhere to sleep.
Back at the hotel, Josh told me that Sunil had been asking after me so we made our way down to the beach. Raja explained that, after they searched around fruitlessly in Peraliya for signs of his brother and sister-in-law, he and Sunil had gone to Colombo to see Saira’s family and tell them what had happened to Saira and Tamana. He had wanted to see if they would help him look after Sunil but that was a non-starter as they had made it quite plain that they wanted nothing to do with him – he was no blood relative of theirs and, Raja said, they made it quite plain that they did not want to look after a mixed race child – half Tamil and half Sinhalese. So much for charity.
Raja was in a dreadful state when we saw him and that is hardly surprising. He explained that, since he had got back, he and Sunil had searched everywhere for Tamana and had looked at loads of photographs that had been pinned on to boards in a hotel that was still doubling up as a makeshift hospital. After telling about the misery of his searching, he started to wander around the wreck of his hotel, tidying up debris without any purpose, just moving things around and talking to us about what had been there. It was obvious that he wanted to describe his former empire to us.
‘This is where the restaurant was,’ he said, pointing to an area where the concrete base remained along with part of a low wall that had surrounded it. ‘There were flowers and plants everywhere around it. And this was the kitchen where we cooked for our guests. Where is it now?’ It was a skewed shell of a building.
Raja was getting himself deeper and deeper into misery. I went over to him and put my arm around his shoulder but his body was rigid and people here don’t embrace for comfort. He just turned and walked away, leaving me feeling stupid. We left him alone and stewed some sweet tea for him on the fire he had built on the beach.
That, therefore, is how we spent that first night together in Unawatuna, on the beach at the centre of Raja’s world, eating food from tins and bananas heated in the flames of a fire while Sunil and I watched Josh and Raja washing the food down with a bottle of cheap arrack and coke. Most arrack is like Indian feni – rough to the point of being poisonous.
And, over that evening, Raja slowly told his story. The more he drank, the more open he became. I cannot record the way he told it, because his English was quite broken and his account only came out with prompting, but I can give the gist of it borrowing again from what I have learnt since.
CHAPTER FORTY
Raja’s family came from the northern province of the island, a place called Mallaittivu which is about 75 miles north of Nilaveli, where I was when I started writing this. In July 1996 a huge battle had been fought at Mallaittivu as part of the civil war and the LTTE had driven the government forces back from the land and sea with the loss of many lives. There were accusations that captured army soldiers had been doused in gasoline by the LTTE and burnt to death, so God only knows what sort of retribution will happen there now that the government forces are back on the move.
Raja’s family regarded themselves as part of the indigenous Tamil community and, like most people from that area, they were all devout Hindus. His father had risen through the ranks of the police force and had worked for most of his life in Colombo. As a result, his family had been protected from the brunt of the conflict in the north and east of the island but two years before his death his father had been promoted to sub inspector of police.
In December 2001 a ceasefire had been declared in the civil war and, in the following year, the peace agreement, brokered by the Norwegian government, was signed leading to a suspension but not a cessation of fighting. It was during that lull in the fighting that Raja’s family moved back to its place of origin. Raja described how proud his father had been to wear his new uniform with the single star on the orange epaulette but also how unprepared he had been, only eighteen months after his promotion, for what awaited him when he was transferred from Colombo to the north east. His superiors had told him that they thought it prudent to send a native from the area to help restore peaceful order there.
With promotion, therefore, had come additional responsibilities for maintaining law and order in an area ripped apart by civil war. It also exposed the whole family to the anger of those within the local community who bore the deepest hatred for anyone of their own kind who gave any appearance of siding with the state and, thus, with the Sinhalese majority.
A particular issue arising from the ceasefire was how land that had been occupied during the fighting should be restored to its rightful or previous owners and how those owners could validate their claims to it. By the time that Raja’s family arrived, the war had been waging for 18 years and so the task of peacefully restoring order and property rights was impossible. The feuds did not just lie between the Tamils and Sinhalese; there were feuds and sub-feuds within the local communities in which leaders and factions fought for supremacy; returning land to its rightful owners meant taking it away from those who had seized control of it.
Raja had been aged 28 at the time that his family moved from Colombo. His brother, Sunil’s father, was called Pakeer and was three years older than Raja. They had followed their father in his chosen career and were still police constables - there are four classes of police constable in Sri Lanka and so it takes quite some time to achieve promotion to the next level. When their father, also called Raja to Raja’s evident pride, had moved from Colombo, the two sons and their families had gone with him to assist with the re-settlement efforts. The effect was that each member of the family had been a sitting target for the war-scarred people that they had been sent to manage.
They had only been in post for six months when their home was attacked at night by a gang. Raja, Pakeer and their respective families lived in an annexe to the main house where their father and mother lived with their daughter, the younger sister of Raja and Pakeer. Raja described how, that night, he was woken by the sound of gun shots and screaming from the main house as the gang murdered his parents and his sister. Pakeer had collected Sunil and Abetha, his wife, while Raja had collected Saira and Tamana, his daughter. The two men had bundled their families into a car and driven away from the compound with their attackers firing after them. They were not pursued and drove across the island back to friends in Colombo, too afraid to return to witness the inevitable plight of the rest of the family.
Traumatised by the realisation that they had never stood a chance in the work that they had been sent to do, Pakeer and Raja left the police force and, with the money that their parents had bequeathed them and the little savings that they had, they had moved to the peaceful environment of the south of the island and had built the hotel in Unawatuna. The hotel had opened in the summer of 2003 after they had been there for about nine months. It represented a new beginning for both families and they put everything that they had into it. There was, of course, no insurance and so everything had been swept aside and lost in the tsunami.
I watched the faces of Raja and Sunil as their terrible story unfolded. Raja is a handsome man with a moustache, hair that is smoothed down with coconut oil, impeccable manners and a strong sense of pride and duty. He stands with
a very straight back and bears his immense burdens with quiet resignation, rarely speaking unless spoken to. But as he spoke that night there was no avoiding the strain and sadness that he felt; they were ingrained into his face, his voice was flat and his dark rimmed eyes had a vacancy about them that gave him an appearance of looking into the distance.
Sunil just squatted in one corner of the tent watching his uncle as he was talking; having lived through the events of which Raja spoke Sunil knew the story already. But I watched him as he listened to his uncle and what I saw was a boy, a painfully thin little boy, smothered by grief and crying out for comfort. He was only nine years old, slightly older than I had been when I lost one parent, and the corner of the tent provided the only comfort for him, a comfort made of canvas, as he listened to his uncle speak of the tragedies that he had faced. And I knew what to do and, for once, I did it.
I moved across to where Sunil was sitting, put my arm around his shoulder and, as he looked at me, I said ‘I’m sorry. Do you want to go for a walk?’ I thought he might want to get away from hearing what Raja was saying.
‘No. Thank you. I will just stay here, please,’ he replied.
Sunil kept looking into my face and I saw the tears well up into his eyes, so I moved his head and rested it against the side of my body as I stroked his hair. There were no more words to be said, not that I could find, but we sat like that until, eventually, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.
While I watched Sunil as he slept I can remember so very well the warm injection of sorrow that I felt for him and the connection that I made in my thoughts to the comfort that my grandmother had shown me after my father died. I knew that was what he needed and I realised that here, in that child, there was a solution to what I could do. I could try to make life better for him, I could try to give him some of the comfort that I knew he needed. How could I do otherwise? Sunil will be the only judge of whether I have done so.
Well, that was how we spent our first night together in the tent, Josh and Raja drunk on arrack but with all of us sleeping soundly in the warmth of each other’s company, despite Josh snoring, as he always did after drinking.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The next day was Monday, three days before Josh was due to leave on 6 January; he was on a two week holiday which ran from Thursday to Thursday. I woke early and lay with my eyes closed and with my head full of thoughts. I had rested Sunil down on the floor of the tent before going to sleep and he had slept next to me. So, as soon as I shifted he woke up and immediately got up and went out of the tent. I joined him on the beach and hobbled with him along the shoreline, as he threw stones into the sea and kicked over bits of debris. Then we sat down on the beach, sifting the sand with our hands.
Sunil broke the silence. ‘My parents are dead aren’t they? We will never find them.’
‘I don’t know the answer to that, Sunil. I wish I could tell you.’ Then, I added something stupid like ‘I’ll do my best to look after you, Sunil.’
‘It is not the same.’ He was looking out to the sea and was crying again.
‘You know, my father died when I was a bit younger than you are,’ I said, after a period of silence. ‘Tell me about your dad - what is he like?’ I used the present tense deliberately.
Sunil didn’t reply for a long time. ‘He is very handsome and very brave.’
‘And what about your mum.’
‘She is very kind.’ He was fobbing me off.
‘What do you like doing together?’
‘With my dad, fishing, mostly. We have a boat and take tourists out fishing in it. And we catch fish for them to eat in the hotel.’ He always pronounced ‘hotel’ as ‘hottle’. ‘We used to go and watch the dolphins and porpoises diving through the waves just outside the bay.’ He used his hands to act how the dolphins skimmed and flew through the water, making a rushing sound with his lips.
‘We sometimes went to look for the whales also.’
‘Did you ever see any?’ I asked. I have learnt that one of the attractions for tourists in the south of Sri Lanka is that there are whales to be seen in the deeper water. There are trips from a place called Dondra Point, near to Mirissa.
‘Yes, I have seen them.’
‘Maybe you could take me there one day.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Come on. We had better get back to the others. Time for breakfast.’
‘I’m not hungry.’ That is pretty much how the conversation went and then, as if in obedience, he got up, flung a piece of wood into the sea and walked back with me, skimming stones as we went; Sunil is an expert at that.
Josh was very much the worse for wear after the arrack. He greeted me, out of Sunil’s earshot, with ‘oh, my fucking head. That stuff was poison.’ It was the first time that I had heard him swear and I remember being really rather impressed. He sat down on part of a remaining wall and looked sick. Raja was clearly anxious to resume the search for Tamana and went off hunting for news, leaving us with Sunil.
That day saw a turning point in the healing of my leg wound; Josh had been helping me change the bandages and, when we looked at the wound he said that the stitches could be removed. So, we sterilised some scissors by placing them in water boiled on the fire and Josh, putting his nursing skills into effect, removed the stitches. My leg remained bandaged for about a couple of weeks after that but then was pretty much healed. I had been lucky. My ribs took longer to heal but I really don’t want to write further about my physical health.
We spent that day clearing up some of the mess around the remnants of Raja’s hotel. There were no foundations for any of the buildings, of course, but much of the base remained unaffected by the wash of the seawater, as did some of the breeze block walling. However, the wooden structures had mostly been swept away and what remained looked as drunk and skewed as Josh had been the night before. So we pulled the wooden parts down and, along with a lot of other debris and my crutches, threw them onto the fire. By the end of the day quite a few people had gathered around the fire after bringing wood to burn on it. Stories were exchanged about the tsunami and the losses that people had suffered. Seeds of new found friendships were sown and old friendships shored up as the community united in its adversity. There was a communal sympathy and fondness for Sunil who was obviously well known among the people who lived there and, for a while, he brightened up a bit as he talked amongst friends.
Sri Lanka is only a few degrees north of the equator and so the days and nights are of consistent length throughout the year with dawn at 6 o’clock and dusk 12 hours later. The gathering around the fire continued well into the night with people bringing food and drink and standing around watching the flames. Raja returned as forlorn as before and bearing another bottle of arrack. His eyes were red, whether from the smoke, crying or drink I could not say. Possibly all three.
When darkness had fallen, Josh asked me whether I would join him for a walk along the beach. I had noticed that he had become increasingly quiet as the afternoon wore on and I thought that it must be the effects of the previous night catching up on him. But the way that he asked me to walk with him bore such a tone of sadness and regret about it that I knew straightaway that he wanted to talk. It was just obvious.
The beach at Unawatuna is on the edge of a bay; at one end is the headland that has the white temple on it and at the other, easterly end the beach sweeps round sharply until it reaches a built up area, then destroyed by the tsunami. It is not possible to continue walking beyond that eastern area because the beach ends there; you would then have to walk inland and, after that for about ten minutes, along the main road that links the town to the trunk A2 road before reaching another sandy beach which continues for a long way, beyond Talpe.
I was not able to walk far and so we went towards the eastern end of the bay because it is quieter and away from the main part of the village. There was no artificial light on the beach and we were alone except for the crabs that scuttled across the sand making an almost roboti
c or metallic clicking sound as they went.
That was the night that we first found the tree, Priscilla, at the part of the bay that was diagonally opposite the headland and the temple which lay across the water. Josh put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘let’s sit’ and ushered me towards the tree. Neither of us was ready to walk back and so we sat down next to each other on the dry sand, with our backs against Priscilla’s branches as she shook her 1960s haircut to the beat of the breeze. But we were disturbed very quickly by some people who were clearing up ruined buildings behind the beach there and so we moved on to a more secluded part of the beach at the back of which there is a wooded area that follows the curve of the road away from the shoreline. There we were quite alone.
We sat with our backs against the remains of a boat that had been thrown into the trees by the wave and with our legs stretched out on the sand towards the sea, almost resting against each other and surrounded by the warm air that rose from the sand as it lost the heat of the day. I remember that Josh smelt of bonfire, as I am sure I did after burning the wooden remnants of the hotel, but he also smelt of cannabis which he smoked that night with its sweet smell of burning grass. We could hear the water at the edge of the beach and the deeper and constant percussion of waves breaking against the reef. From where we sat we could make out the phosphorescent lining of the sea some metres away from us down the beach before it disappeared into the blackness of the night. In the air there was the buzz of the night, full of excitement, and the hum of the road behind us with the ever present barking of dogs in the background. But it is the night sky that I remember most and which we looked at together that night for the first time, full of its infinite light and variety. Beauty beyond compare – and endless depth. And the moon, the silver moon, dancing on the water’s surface. That’s the scene.
The Water Is Warm Page 18
