I remember that night, the night of his party, well because I can picture now how we walked along the beach quietly together, mostly in silence, his hand in mine. When I swung his arm he would smile a bit, I think, but said nothing. By the time we started to head back it was dark and he was exhausted so, after a while, I carried him on my shoulders and then, once back, I lay down on his bed next to him and we both fell asleep.
I woke a few hours later, sat up and watched him sleeping – that is the image that sticks in my mind of that evening. The image of a little boy sleeping, exhausted by all the burdens that he bore, resting and very alone, despite the people around him. I remember wondering how many millions of children there must be like him and thinking how little is done to help them despite all the wealth that there is in some quarters of this world. I lay back down next to him, put my arm around him and slept, as peacefully as he did, not even hearing Raja when he came in to sleep on the other side of the curtain in their cabana.
Another early morning conversation that we had after Ben had just gone back to France went a bit like this:
‘Simon, how long will you stay here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can’t stay forever, can you - like Ben?’
‘No, Sunil. I can’t.’
‘When you leave, will Josh go too?’
‘Yes, Sunil, he will.’
‘Do you and Josh love each other?’ I realised that this was the point that he really wanted to ask me. I had seen that question coming a mile off and had discussed with Josh how we should reply. ‘Let’s be as honest as we can,’ Josh had replied and I had agreed.
‘Yes, Sunil. We do.’
‘It’s strange.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘But Sunil, we both also love you, too. Just in a different way.’
I do remember very well how he looked at me and smiled. And that was it. The difficult conversation with Sunil done. And that is how he viewed things afterwards, I am sure. That Josh and I loved each other and, although it was strange because we were both men, it didn’t matter. What could be more simple than that?
Raja was somewhat different. He didn’t ask questions and, once he began to trust us after a process that I want to describe later, he just treated our relationship with a respectful but slightly distant fondness on a don’t need to know the details basis. Raja knew, too, that Josh and I would not stay forever but, slowly, he became able to transfer some of the power and weight of his grief to a fierce and loving protectiveness to Sunil, his last surviving and available relative. So, in time, Raja took over the emotional governance of Sunil and they became like father and son. It was a beautiful relationship to see developing and then flowing. They look very much like each other. They have the same mannerisms and exude the same sense of being noble.
To try to help Sunil, Josh and I decided that we would put together an account of his life. Despite all my past knowledge of family law and of how important life story books are, it was Josh who suggested it. I had seen life story books being used in the UK when a child is placed for adoption as a method by which a child is helped to remember something about the past in a book that is a bit like a personal scrap book. I wonder what Martha’s book is like – they will have done one for her, too.
Sunil’s book wasn’t just writing, we also did it with drawings and newspaper cuttings as well as by sticking things like photographs into it. Some of the writing in it was done by me or Josh, acting as scribes for what Sunil told us and then getting him to correct it before we wrote it out neatly in his book. Sunil also did some of the writing but most important for him were the drawings and colourings that he did, rather than the words he used.
Some of his drawings took him days to complete and caused him deep frustration; he tried to draw his parents and found that he couldn’t. So I tried to draw them at his instruction. It was difficult because, other than a formal picture of them when his father was in police uniform, there were no photographs of them which had survived the tsunami. However eventually I managed to produce something that left Sunil saying that I recorded some sort of impression of how they looked, possibly just out of politeness or tiredness at my failing efforts.
Sunil’s colouring was vivid. I encouraged him to paint and colour things as he felt them to be, rather than as an attempt at reproducing how they looked. It took some months before he would even begin to show how he felt but Josh and I persisted and slowly, slowly, the tormented flower of his mind opened up to reveal the immense burdens and grief that he still carried. How he felt about the events in Peraliya when the tsunami struck the train. How he felt when searching for his parents. How he felt about his parents now. How he feels about himself now. How he felt about the future.
‘Shouldn’t we just let sleeping dogs lie?’ I remember saying to Josh once, concerned that Sunil had seemed to settle down and we were just putting him through a lot of pain for nothing.
‘They don’t lie. They come back to bite you if you don’t deal with them. You know that.’ Of course he was right and I felt like a complete clot.
Sunil used strong colours, as children do, but the dominant colours were black and red to begin with. As time went on his drawings softened as I encouraged him also to paint the beach, the sea, the sky and the trees, the headland and the brilliant whiteness of the temple of Devol Deiyo. We learnt to draw together and would keep one drawing on the go for several days as we built up the picture that we saw, encouraged by Josh who would make suggestions but left the drawing to the two of us. Then, sometimes, Sunil would colour in the drawings, taking hours or even days to do so. Occasionally, if we met a particularly nice guest at the hotel, Sunil would show off some of his pictures. One guest, an Australian woman, joined in with a painting of the beach and, when she left, she emailed to me a copy of the picture.
Sunil and I taught each other a lot, it was two-way traffic. As I painted and drew with him I learnt so much and saw time and time again how my own life has been so centred on myself and the emotions of other adults around me. I realise that is precisely why I walked away from Martha and the mother upon whom she so depended. So, I was determined that I would try to do my best for Sunil, who needed, genuinely needed, my adult and considered help. Well, that is what I tried to do for him.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
By the time the hotel was up and running again in 2006 Sunil had a role to play and it suited him. But there was also the school and there were his friends from the village with whom he started to play as a child should. He took great pride when Josh and I went to help the children with their reading at the school and offered other families help with their English. Unawatuna has its own strong community that runs in parallel to the life of the beach and the tourist trade; the longer we stayed there, the more we saw and came to admire that community, although that is not for me to write about. That is their story, not mine.
Sunil and I also started to go on trips to some of the places that we wrote about in his life story book, except for the north east of the island which Sunil did not want to visit and Raja, Josh and I all thought would be too dangerous for him anyway. He loved travelling on the back of the motorbike and nobody batted an eyelid about a child of his age doing so here. We went to Colombo and also spent some time back at Peraliya. I even took him to Batapola, where I had first met him.
When we had finished his life story book, we spent time with Raja taking him through what Sunil had written and collected. It took a while to engage Raja in understanding the book but we did it by all sitting down together and working through it. Sunil’s wish to explain what he had written and drawn was so absorbing that Raja could not avoid being engaged. The book allowed Sunil to explain things that he could never have verbalised. It was a beautiful book, full of colour and overwhelmingly sad stories, particularly about the loss of his grandparents (and when Raja read that he cried in front of us, which for a man with his pride, was exceptional
) and the loss of his parents in Peraliya. With our help, he wrote a lovely poem about Tamana and his hope that she was OK and was resting in the arms of Saira, her mother. He and I drew a picture, based on the Madonna and child, to symbolise that hope.
If I have one pervading image of that time it is the one that I have already described. The picture of Josh sitting on the beach with Sunil resting between his legs with his head on Josh’s chest while he read to Josh and Josh, peering over Sunil’s shoulder following the words with his finger and quietly correcting Sunil’s reading when he stumbled over words that he didn’t recognise.
Josh would have made a wonderful father; he had a light touch with Sunil and could use humour to chivvy him along. I could watch them for hours and often did just sit and watch as they studied or played and I know that Josh did the same when I was with Sunil. Our favourite game, besides football and volley ball, involved drawing numbered squares in the sand and throwing a stone on to each square in turn in a sort of hopscotch routine. It was a simple game but we could play it for ages. Then, when we got too hot or bored, there was the sea and the sound of Sunil playing in the waves and launching himself underneath them as they broke. Watching him fall into the water sideways like a whale.
We realised that we had to be honest with Sunil about what the future held. We knew that we would not stay in Sri Lanka for the rest of our days and so we had to be upfront with him that his home and family were with Raja and not with us. We could only play a short-term role and I imagined it as being rather like the role of short term foster carers that I had encountered, but never really appreciated properly, when still at the family bar in England. We took in a deeply troubled child and our job was to put his life back on the tracks before handing him over to Raja, his permanent family. I had never realised how difficult a task that is and how, to begin with, each step forward seems to be mirrored by at least one step backwards.
However, by his 11th birthday, 9 September 2006, he was a very different child to the child that we took dolphin watching the year before. This time we held a party for him at home in the hotel. We decked out his room. We made a birthday cake for him and invited his friends to the hotel in the afternoon. Guests joined with singing happy birthday to him. We arranged games for him on the beach and took him and his friends on short motorbike rides. Raja, his uncle, acted like his proud father, rather than the shutdown figure of the year before. When the guests had left Sunil wanted to read through his life story book and Josh and I left Raja doing that with him, taking over the hotel work while they looked at it together, probably for no more than twenty minutes but it was twenty minutes well spent. That’s typical of how they became together.
So, now Sunil is 12 ½ and is well on his way to becoming a magnificent man. He is a handsome boy whose appearance blends the Tamil blood of his father with the Sinhalese blood of his mother. He is tall for his age, slim in build and quick on his feet. He has a somewhat thin face and straight hair which he flattens now with coconut oil having become conscious of his appearance in a typical 12-year-old way. He nearly always wears shorts and T-shirts but still manages to look smarter than we ever did, thanks to Raja. When I first met him his English was somewhat limited and his accent very thick but, having spent so much time with me and Josh, he now speaks English fluently albeit still with a detectable accent. He is also a very mature boy who has shown himself to be incredibly strong in personality. I have seen him pierced with grief over the death of so many of his family members, particularly at anniversaries, but he has an inner resilience about him now which, I suppose, is the only way for him to survive.
I have thought a lot of the effect on Sunil of what I have now decided about my own future. I am very aware of how it will affect him when he learns what has happened, as he must at some point. But I cannot make a life based on Sunil. I have to let go of him, as well as everything else, if I am to do this. I am so sorry, Sunil. I wrote pages trying to explain things to you but then I realised that there was no point and deleted the lot. Sorry is the best that I can do even though I know it is nowhere near enough.
I know that, when I go back to Unawatuna, as I will in a few nights’ time, I will see the light that you always now leave on in our room. And I will look out for that light and it will be the last thing that I will see before I swim out to the sea. And that light will shine out to me as the brightest star in the heavens and that star, is called Sunil. If anyone does read this, then it is dedicated to you Sunil, the little boy that Josh and I loved so very much.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Raja had a long and bitter struggle with life after the tsunami. For the first month he drank like a fish and disappeared off on his own for most of the day, leaving Sunil alone. Then in about February 2005, when the preparations for rebuilding the hotel began after a month of site clearance, he threw himself into the work obsessively in a way that was tiring just to watch and that made it impossible to talk to him about anything else. It was as if he had his foot flat to the floor on the accelerator as he crashed through his daily life finding every new challenge more and more frustrating and overpowering.
‘Walk, don’t run,’ I would say to him.
But he would just grunt or say something like ‘there’s work to be done.’
In the evenings when it was dark or when the rains came and brought work to a standstill, he would be off.
‘Where’s Uncle Raja?’ I would ask Sunil.
Sunil would pretend to twist the end of his nose to act out that Raja was out drinking and then usually just say ‘guess.’
To anyone watching it was very obvious what was going to happen and the pile-up happened at the end of February 2005.
By then the shack had been built and Sunil and Raja were living in their equivalent breeze block palace. On the night of Raja’s collapse I had just gone to bed when I heard Sunil knocking at the door. It was raining, so I let him in quickly. He told me that Uncle Raja had gone out in the rain and had not come back and, as he spoke, the story unfolded of Raja drinking a bottle of arak, crying and then, about an hour before Sunil came to me, going out into the rain wearing only a shirt and a sarong. Sunil was soaking wet and had a look of panic on his face.
‘Please come quickly’ he kept saying as he hopped from foot to foot.
I got dressed and we started searching, asking anyone we could find whether they had seen him. But, of course, at that hour and in that sort of downpour nobody had.
It was pitch black and wet outside and so we just wandered around aimlessly, Sunil wearing my cagoule and me with my head pushed through a black bin liner. However, there was no way that we were going to find him.
‘He’s probably stayed with someone else, Sunil.’ Well, I tried, but Sunil knew the score.
‘He wouldn’t do that. Not like that.’
In the end we returned, drenched to the skin, and I stayed with Sunil until the morning, with him falling asleep at something like 2 a.m.
It was Sunil who woke me next morning after I must have dozed off too. The rain had stopped.
‘We must go and find him,’ was all he said.
Eventually we did find him, or rather somebody else did.
Between the town and Jungle Beach there is a clay path that goes over the headland, passing below the temple and through an area of dense vegetation until it reaches the sea. In the dry weather, the path is almost sand-like but in the wet weather it appears to be made of mud. At one point, after passing some barbed wire on the left, the path veers round to the right, past some large rocks that a walker must slide through. Raja had obviously not turned right there but had carried on into the dense undergrowth. Someone had heard him sobbing, had gone to investigate and had found him huddled under a tree. Then, that kind person had brought him back to where he belonged, to his home. Sunil and I were out searching for him in the town but we soon heard that he had been found and went back to be with him as soon as we could.
When I saw him my immediate reaction was to have a fl
ashback to when Catherine fell to pieces before my eyes in London. Raja was sending out that same siren call of hopelessness that she had on the night that everything went pear-shaped for her. He was sitting on a chair, looking at the floor, shivering uncontrollably and he kept clenching and unclenching his hands. I went over to him and put my arm on his shoulder. His body was freezing cold but the worst thing about him was that, when he looked up, his eyes were empty. He also stank of drink and filth.
The first thing I said was ‘We need to get him out of his wet clothes.’ That was no easy feat because Raja did not want to co-operate and said he just wanted to be left alone. Eventually we got him into some dry clothes and wrapped blankets round him before he sat down again on the chair. We got him to drink hot sweet tea and, when he finally stopped shivering, I persuaded him to stand up and let me usher him to his bed. He went out like a light. Once I felt that I could leave him I rang Ben at the camp to explain why I was not there and also to see if he could give me any advice.
‘J’arrive’ was all Ben said and, true to form, he did arrive less than half an hour later having come like a bat out of hell on a bicycle from the camp. He took one look at Raja and said: ‘He needs a doctor.’
I sent Sunil off to see if he could find a doctor and about two hours later a woman came and was pretty matter of fact about Raja’s condition; no doubt she had seen an awful lot of this in the aftermath of the tsunami. We just about got Raja to a state of very bleary-eyed wakefulness while she was there but, as soon as she had gone, he went straight back to sleep. The doctor prescribed a short course of Prozac and advised that the most important things were for Raja to sleep, drink more water, avoid stress and avoid alcohol. Good advice, I’m sure, and straight out of the text book but, avoid stress? Who was she kidding?
The Water Is Warm Page 30
