The Water Is Warm

by Jennifer Stawska

  That then is how I learnt that God is love and how I found God in Sri Lanka. Josh, you were not God, I know, but you were part of God and what we shared together was God. We shared love, we shared compassion and we shared everything else. We became inextricably linked in every way. I learnt a new state of mind and understood purpose. But most importantly for me, for the first time in my life, I learnt peace because all that I found is all that I could ever want. How could I ever want more than we found together?

  Enough of religion. I’ve said my piece and, yes, I really do believe what I have written and I know now that I can retain my faith even on my own and despite everything that has happened. It is my faith, rightly or wrongly. It defines who I am now - it belongs to me and I belong to it. It means that I can move on now as part of God and it means that all this has not been a charade.

  God is love. And I know God. So did Josh. And when I have finished writing this story and carving this headstone, not for me because I have no interest in myself but for you, my man, and for Sunil, it is to God that I want to go, not in suffering but out of choice. In faith and in love; having written for this long, I know now that I can do it. I want to be where you are – and that is the choice I make. Nowhere else will do.

  I survived my father’s death, I have moved on from my mother, I have moved on from my legal career, if Penelope had died three years into our marriage I have no doubt that by now I would be playing the widower card over her but she didn’t and I have moved on from her. I abandoned Catherine – and Martha. You are not going to become the next on the list as I retreat into the margin again, my conscience cleared by writing this. And anyway, there is nowhere to go and my location – wherever I might live – will not cure anything. I would just go mad, wherever I lived. But there is one thing that does come from your death, if I take the opportunity now. I can join you, I can be the same as you. Then this story will be our truth, our one compassionate truth and nothing will ever be able to change that.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Having written all that, got it out of my system, I realise that there is another thing to which I have found an answer. It is this - craving for you isn’t wrong. You are now part of God and craving to be with God isn’t wrong. It can’t be. Life’s very purpose is to join with God. Christian scripture is full of it. I know it is – I have kept your English Bible and I have found loads of examples in the book of psalms. Hymns are full of longing for God, as is music.

  You are now with God. That’s what we believed and now it has happened. So, if I still crave for you now, and only for you as I do, it means that I crave for God because you and God are now indistinguishable. And that cannot be wrong.

  So, I can dream of being with you. It’s OK for me to do so. I can reach out for you. It isn’t a sin. I can let my mind loose, as I want it to be. I can be free. I can dream of you showing me the beauty of the Swedish countryside. I can walk with you in the forests of snow laden pine. I can swim with you in the cool mountain rivers in the hot summer sun and lie next to you in unblemished snow under the unending winter’s sky. I can sleep next to you again because you are now everywhere and everything. Fantasy and God can combine.

  Your death has created the dream, a dream more precious than anything else to me now. It has opened up a boundless universe in which everything in the past three years has been infinitely good and, now, will always remain that way. It calls to me and I can let it call and own it. All the time. You, Josh, can call to me and I can hear you in my head and feel you in my body. And I can call to you. From every inch of my being. Searching, scanning everything around me, sucking in my surroundings. Smelling your clothes, talking to you, holding you, ignoring everything and everyone else around me. It’s OK for me to do so. It is a denial of nothing.

  And, when I don’t find you, when you don’t answer, I know I can rely on things that are unseen. I can hold you in my mind, make myself feel you, hear you and see you. When I am awake I can fill my mind with your image. I can think of your body, every bit of it and own it in my mind. Your chest, your warmth, your hands, your weight, your face that I long to stroke again. All of it. I can anoint you again in the quiet of the shack and smell the rising sweetness of the coconut oil as my hand glides across you. I can trace your face with the tips of my fingers, my eyes closed as I explore the rings of your eyes, your cheeks, your nose, your forehead, your mouth, softly, repetitively, round and round, feeling your breath on my hand. I can think of your voice, your tone, your laugh. I can search for mistakes in your English again and hear your speech in my mind. I can go to sleep next to you, pretending that you are there, comforting myself in what I know is in one sense fantasy but in another sense is God, curled up in safety. I can feel that I belong again. It isn’t wrong.

  I have asked myself repeatedly, what does it mean to experience another person other than through my brain, my senses, anyway? In my brain you are still there because I can make myself sense you. If I don’t let you go then you exist – cogito ergo es?

  But for how much longer can I keep that up? How long can I maintain the fantasy, dream the dream? For how long can I keep you caged in my head when I know that you are not there? In the long term it doesn’t work, does it? It gets nought out of twenty in the reality test.

  I know this is all contradictory and will read very messily, but this is the first time I have written it all down. I may have thought it and we may have spoken about some of it but I have never had to really think it all through. Writing it down, even in this stream of conscience, makes me see the words, it forces me into the here and now. Having just written that I want to keep you in my head, maintain your existence there, I know that is not possible. I know I have to let you go, release you from my mind. You no longer exist. I can’t avoid that – your life is now a fantasy that is not sustainable. I cannot be two people in one body. I’m so, so sorry. I have tried, really tried. You can see that, I hope.

  You see, I do know the score, I am not completely mad, yet, and I have asked myself this. If I do try to cling on to you still, if I never let you go out of choice, what happens when I start to lose all that? What happens when I stop thinking of you, when I realise that an hour, two hours, a day have passed and I haven’t thought about you? What happens when the passage of time leads me to forget what it is like to lie next to you, when I stop being able to hear your voice, when I lose your touch? What happens if God, life, everything that happens, take me away from you?

  Well, then, if I haven’t let go of you through choice, I become trapped permanently in the margin – no, worse than that, in isolated madness. Someone who tries to live alone in the past but, as the past becomes increasingly out of reach, can’t. I would just close down on everything around me - where’s the sense in that? What is the point? So, it is simple, really simple. I am not going to let that happen. Easy. And I know exactly how to make it stop. If I am going to let you go then I have to let myself go as well. I have to follow you.

  How strange. Like father, like son. Rather than let go of you, I’m going to join you. And I can do it. That’s my choice. That’s me. That’s the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. It isn’t sad, it’s the very opposite. I know what it involves, too. Peraliya plus a few more seconds. That’s all.

  And, do you know what? I feel so much better now that I have worked that out. And, what’s more, I know that I can finish this story, because I have been asking myself why bother writing another word? Just do it. There’s no audience. There never is. Well I know the answer to that as well. So I can live the rest of the dream and, by doing that and writing about it, I can join you completely. I can finish the dream and make sure that our stories are inseparably and permanently linked by what I have written. Then the awakening will be more gentle. I don’t have to let go of you until I am ready to join you. Until I’ve reached the top of the mountain, where I want to be.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  So, enough about us, what about Sunil? That’s easier to write about.

&
nbsp; In the first months, while Josh was away, Ben didn’t just help with Sunil at the camp; he and the others really thought about how to make things better for him.

  ‘Don’t try talking to him yet, he’s only nine years old. Try doing things with him. Like colouring in pictures or listening to music.’

  It was good advice. I bought a colouring book and some crayons and got Sunil to sit with me, colouring in pictures and listening to the radio that Josh had bought him before he left. That worked, and we spent a lot of time doing it, hardly speaking a word except about the picture that we were working on together.

  I also bought some books in Galle and started to read him stories at night-time; sometimes I would walk back to Unawatuna in the evenings to read to him or one of the other guys would go in my place. That’s also when we started making up stories for him and getting him to make up stories himself to tell us as we ate.

  Another group of the guys had formed a small choir and used to lay on performances at the camp. It sounds odd I know, but when they sang, lots of people gathered round to listen. They got Sunil to join in and coached him to sing the round of Frère Jacques, which he then taught the other children.

  There was lots of stuff like that. But for me, the real breakthrough came one day when Sunil had disappeared on his own in the morning and was still not around by mid-afternoon. I searched for him for about two hours and with dusk at six o’clock fast approaching, was getting very anxious about him. Then, when I walked down the beach towards the headland I made out the silhouette of a boy, sitting there on the rocks overlooking the sea. By the time that I got to the headland it was beginning to get dark. Sure enough, it was Sunil. He was sitting looking out to the sea, with his elbows on his knees and his hands cupping his face.

  ‘Hi Sunil. Isn’t it a wonderful view?’ He gave me a half-smile. I sat down a few feet from him and said nothing else. We watched the waves breaking against the rocks and the light fading on the sea.

  I think that it must have been about ten minutes later that Sunil turned to me and said: ‘Can I go home now?’

  ‘I’ll give you a shoulder ride’ and I carried him home. When we got back, I read him a story and as I did so, I put my arm around him. He looked up at me and smiled, a proper smile. Then he shuffled across the bench so that he was closer to me and pressed into my side.

  I looked at him. ‘Sunil, that’s really nice. Thank you.’ And I kept on reading. That was the breakthrough. After that, when I could feel that he was sad, I would read to him, go for a walk to the headland, colour with him. We didn’t discuss things properly until much later, until Josh came back. Do, don’t talk.

  I also fixed up a battery-operated lamp for his bedside so that, if he woke at night, he was not in the dark. Raja often came to bed much later and so I realised that Sunil must have been scared when he woke on his own in the dark. Later, when there was electricity, Josh and I bought him a proper lamp with a very bright light. I would see that light shining at night from the window on his side of the hut where he and Raja lived. It still shines there to this very day. I used to lift the shutters on the window at night before I went to bed to check on him and to watch him sleeping.

  Another thing that I realised was that Sunil would wake up early in the mornings and spend time on his own then with nothing to do and with no company. So, once the shack was built I started to get up early as well. Six o’clock. When the sun rose.

  As Sunil became used to me getting up at that time, the first sound of my mornings there would be him shuffling sand outside the shack. If it wasn’t raining I would pull on my swimming trunks and go out like that. There was a no shower and so Sunil would watch me swimming and washing in the sea; later he would join me but it took a long time for him to be confident about the water. Not only was it a special time, it also gave me a purpose for sleeping at night time when I was on my own before Josh returned, because I knew that there was a routine for the following morning; it was something to which I could look forward. There were no trips to the market to buy fruit for the hotel guests at that stage, so we used to just wander around together or play on the beach.

  So, slowly, slowly, Sunil gained some weight and started to heal outside and in. He will never forget what happened, of course, and he will always carry his losses with him. You don’t get over life experiences like his, the best you can hope for is that you learn to live with them. But those first three months, I hope, helped him on his way and, when Josh came back, Sunil started to become the boy he is now.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  By the time that the hotel opened nine months later in December 2005 the early morning had become my slot for doing things. Raja did the evening and night shifts with Josh often helping until about 11 p.m.

  For breakfast in the hotel we always laid on as much fruit as we could and it was my job, with Sunil, to buy it from the market. Because of its climate, Sri Lanka produces a huge range of fruits and once the immediate effects of the tsunami were over, they could all be found in the local market. The list of fruits is too long to write but jackfruits, mangoes, coconuts, papaya, durian, avocados, wood apples, rambutan, guava and mangosteen were amongst those that we often put out in the mornings, depending on the season. There were many different types of bananas, some sweet but some also used in savoury dishes because they add a richness and depth to curries; so we used to lay out different types of bananas as well – banana tasting for the guests, I suppose. Besides fruit juice we also offered guests milk from green coconuts – slice the top off and put in a drinking straw, Bob’s your uncle.

  After the fruit, Sunil and I bought bread, fish and eggs before going back to the hotel to light the barbecue. There was a long barbecue that we built next to the eating area and the idea was that, for breakfast, guests could have barbecued fish or we could cook them omelettes or pancakes on pans that we kept hot on it, over the grills.

  Sunil had learnt the art of cooking with Ben and used to put on a show for the guests as he tossed the freshly cooked pancakes, his speciality, although we left the main events of lunch and dinner to the master chef, Raja. Josh and I bought Sunil a mini chef’s outfit one time that we went to Colombo for supplies and he used to wear it, including the hat, with tremendous pride as he flipped the pancakes as high as he could. Sometimes he flipped them, quite deliberately, over the barbecue, over the trellis and on to the sand where the dogs would scrabble for them.

  ‘Six runs,’ was his set patter for when he did that, lifting both arms and the spatula thing he used into the air.

  He would then look at me and I had to complete the theatre with: ‘Just don’t make it four runs, please.’

  The guests loved it.

  Breakfast there was full of colour, full of the smell of the bread and barbecue smells. The freshness of the new day on the beach which the sea and sometimes the night rain had washed clean, the guests showered and ready to start a new day and Sunil, by then, bubbling with energy and enthusiasm. Lots of people smiling.

  When Josh came back, how would my conversation with Sunil start? Well, here’s one example from much later.

  ‘Where is Josh?’

  ‘He’s sleeping.’

  ‘He is very, very lazy,’ I can picture Sunil making that sort of remark with the broadest grin on his face and with a side-to-side wiggle of his head. Josh did not do mornings. Mornings for him involved an appearance looking like he had slept under a hedge, endless throat clearing, moaning and a bleary- eyed hunt for coffee. Then he would suddenly spark into action and, usually when we were in Unawatuna, make a mad dash into the sea even in the rain, sometimes with Sunil trailing behind shouting, as all children do: ‘Wait for me.’ Then a shower. Then his day began. Mid-morning. It was a ritual.

  When Sunil and I met first thing in the morning after the hotel opened, our walk to the market would take us along the beach towards the village, skimming stones, chasing each other or just walking together. Sometimes he would hold my hand. It gave us a chance to talk, or just
be together. As he gained in confidence he developed a very enquiring way about him and a tendency to blurt out the most direct questions after his thoughts got the better of him. He would ask me question after question without any sort of order.

  ‘It’s like watching the lights flashing on a computer that is never switched off,’ I once remarked to Josh.

  ‘He’s got a lot to work out. You’ve done the hard work. Now he just needs to talk and talk.’ Josh was in his element.

  I remember asking Sunil one day when he appeared very quiet: ‘Sunil, are you happy?’

  He paused, looked down at his feet and said ‘Sometimes. When I am doing things or spending time with uncle, you or Josh. But then I remember my mother and my father and I am sad.’

  ‘And how are you feeling right now?’

  ‘I feel sad. Because I will never see them again. And they will not be there for my birthday.’ Sunil was born on 9 September 1995 and this conversation must have taken place in August 2005, just before the first birthday that he would spend without his parents and also just after so much had come my way on my own birthday that first year. Josh had bought me a 500 CC motorbike and had made a big thing of the day.

  ‘Right’ I said, feeling really bad that I had not done anything about this, ‘what would you like to do for your birthday?’

  ‘I would like to see the whales and dolphins again’ he replied, quick as a flash.

  So, over the next few days Josh and I made arrangements for a trip to Mirissa and booked us all on to a boat ride to see the whales. We also arranged for a birthday cake to be made in one of the larger hotels and for a birthday party to be held on the beach the day before. We saw the dolphins on the boat trip, there were no whales that day, and had a wonderful party on the beach. However, it was obviously difficult for Sunil and he finished the day overwhelmed and in tears, so in the end I took him by the hand and led him away from the party, down the beach.