Until December 26, 2004, Sri Lanka was not quite familiar with that particular peculiar word: Tsunami. The word, however, made waves, following the Boxing Day tragedy. That giant wave killed 31,000 people in Sri Lanka paving the way to a complicated situation in months and years to come.
How does it feel to die in a Tsunami? I cannot answer that. You cannot either, probably. But those among us who survived the tragedy will have some idea.
Every Sri Lankan saw, heard, smelt – or at least experienced it on the television – Tsunami. It was an unexampled experience for the country. The gravity of the experience was decided by your geographical location. For the southerners, it was a deceptive sight at first. The sea emptying itself fast much for the delight of fishermen who could walk dry-shod for fish. It was too late when they realised the nature of destination.
 Dr Sonali Deraniyagala |
Tsunami was the word. Yes, it is hardly the word now as many other concerns have surfaced over the period of 15 years. Yet, it was the wave that capsized one whole country. Sri Lanka entered a different order. The country had to grapple with epidemics, mass burials, overcrowded hospitals and many other agonies. In an interval, however, the mass media found interest in the word that sounds particularly peculiar. The Dinamina newspaper, during the days subsequent to the tragedy, published the editorial on the front page to highlight the previous knowledge of the word. Professor Sunanda Mahendra was among their discoveries. He has already translated a Japanese story of two boys caught up in the wave called Tsunami long before Sri Lanka was witness to it. The story includes a description of the Tsunami.
The Tsunami memory resurfaced recently with Dr Somaratne Dissanayake’s namesake film. For those who lived and survived the scene in 2004, the film will bring an intimate shard of a bygone memory. The visual outspokenness of the film encapsulates the horrors of the 2004 Tsunami in an inherently structured literary narrative uniting drama, suspense, soaring heartbreak and severe human suffering.
Kusuma Karunaratne’s collection of short stories Punchi Kete Wature Gihin (The Small Till Swept Away in the Water) is based on the Tsunami disaster. Affected by the devastation, Professor Karunaratne created 12 short stories.
Sri Lanka’s literary – or aesthetic, as a whole – input into the Tsunami catastrophe cannot be covered in a brief essay. Men of letters, wordsmiths have lived, narrowly escaped and survived the catastrophe.
That said, we cannot forget Dr Sonali Deraniyagala, a Sri Lankan-born economist in Britain. Dr Deraniyaga, her husband, and two young sons were on holiday from London visiting her family. The tsunami came their way in the morning killing Deraniyagala’s husband, sons and parents.
Deraniyagala’s memoir about losing her husband and sons in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami is available as ‘Wave’. The book opens doors to her account of life after that unimaginable grief of losing the whole family.
For William Dalrymple, a Scottish historian and writer, ‘Wave’ is possibly one of the most moving books ever written about grief.
Dalrymple writes on to say how anyone can sit watching the television pictures of the tsunami engulfing beaches and islands across the region, appalled. But it is only when you begin reading Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir that you come to terms with the full horror of what happened.
Dalrymple describes: “The first thing Deraniyagala saw was the sea rising – a sight that looked odd, but not threatening. Only gradually did the full import of what was happening dawn on her – “Oh my God,” she screamed, “the sea’s coming in.” She grabbed her children and ran with her husband behind the hotel and into a waiting jeep. They were driving away when the wave hit.”
Sonali manages to survive the drama of horror. But then she had to survive every minute with reality: she is the only survivor of the family. Deraniyagala somehow attempts to keep from syringing sentimentality into her memoir. Yet, the readers cannot escape the reality of her life.
“Someone suggested I take a sleeping pill. I refused the pill. If I sleep now I will forget. I will forget what happened. I will wake believing everything is fine. I will reach for Steve, I will wait for my boys. Then I will remember. And that will be too awful. That I must not risk.”
The Tsunami brought many things afresh to the country. The most disturbing, however, is that the country’s unpreparedness for such calamitous emergencies. It was already vexed with decade-stagnating war. Scribes and litterateurs, already burdened with words to bridge the two hemispheres of the country, had to divert their attention to a landscape elsewhere.
That landscape stank of mud and corpses abound. Youth resurrections and decade-old wars aside, Sri Lanka had to accept the newest unwelcome guest.
It crushed every living thing possible. Yet, it could not demolish the spirit of human civilisation, some say. Whether it could sustain the spirit of human civilisation or not is, however, doubtful. If the humans could stay above the natural calamity, the literary input woven around is mere braggadocio.
Percy Bysshe Shelley fits right in here when he said that our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.
Ironically, we cannot thank the Tsunami for inspiring Sonali Deraniyagala to produce a literary masterpiece. We can well exist without her masterpiece. But she cannot exist without her family – though she does.
Such is the legacy left by the Tsunami that shook a country.
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Excerpts from Wave
A phone rang indoors. It made me shiver. It was the same phone, the same ring. From my father’s study on the other side of this wall, the phone kept ringing, no one picked it up. Now I could hear my father push back his chair to go tell my mother that it is her sister calling, again. I could hear him open the door of his study. A bunch of keys always dangled on that door. They tapped against the door’s glass panel when it was opened or shut. I could hear them jingle.
In the past months, I’d been unable to focus on the death of my parents. I’d held back thoughts of them, so utterly bewildered was I by the loss of my boys and Steve. Now, as I lingered outside this house, my parents emerged, a little.
Then I saw through the branches of the mango tree that the windows of the bedroom upstairs were closed. That was my bedroom when I was a child. Then Vik and Malli slept there when we visited. Getting them to bed in that room took forever. They’d call to my mother to plead for yet another fizzy drink, and she’d gladly oblige. They’d squabble, trying to stretch a too-small mosquito net over two adjacent beds, and argue about how dark the room should be. Vik wanted some light, Malli did not.
The house I entered was transformed, empty and vast, bereft. Just a few pieces of furniture remained, repositioned, displaced. The floors now bare, no rugs to absorb my footsteps. The walls gleamed with new paint that concealed even the impressions left by the mirrors, the paintings, and old blue and white porcelain plates that had been taken down.I didn’t want this barrenness. I yearned for the house as it was, as we left it. I wanted to sit on every couch, on every chair they sat on, and maybe some warmth would seep into me. I wanted wardrobes full of their clothes, a mixed-up mound of the boys’ underwear in ours, a neat stack of my father’s white handkerchiefs in his. I wished I could pick up a book Vik had been reading from the table by our bed, and turn to the page he’d folded to mark where he had stopped. I wanted the green roll-on stick of mosquito repellant on that table, drying out because we had left the cap off. But none of this could be. Broken and bewildered, my brother had the house cleared and packed away, painted and polished, all in the first month or two after the wave. For him, that was the practical thing to do, to impose order on the unfathomable, perhaps. I had been collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house at the time and could not contemplate returning to my parents’ house. I quaked at the very thought of it.
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