Sonali Deraniyagala - Wave

The men were impatient. They talked among themselves. They couldn’t leave me here. “But we can’t take her like this,” one of them said. “She has no trousers on.” What? I thought. He took off his shirt and tied it around my waist. They pulled me along, I still felt heavy, my legs dragged through mud. It was deep, knee-high slime. A few times I fell over, and they hauled me up.

We saw a man lying under a bush. He was wearing only a loincloth. One of the men with me went up to him. He’s dead, he came back and said. He mentioned a name, and I recognized it. He was a fisherman who lived in a small hut on the beach by the hotel. Steve and I would talk to him, he would try to sell conch shells to the boys, they’d press those shells against their ears to listen to the hum of the ocean. I looked away from this man, now motionless in the sand. I didn’t want to see anyone dead.

They took me to a van, and we drove a short distance. When the van stopped, I knew where I was. We were at the ticket office at the entrance to the national park. I knew this building well. I’d been here hundreds of times, since I was a child, to buy tickets and to pick up a ranger to guide us in the park. Vik and Malli sometimes went into the small museum in this building, at the entrance to it was an enormous pair of elephant tusks.

The building looked no different now. All intact. No trace of water, no puddles or uprooted trees around it. This dry breeze on my face, it’s a normal breeze.

The men carried me out of the van and took me inside. I knew several people who worked here, I could see them now, milling around, staring at me, looking concerned. I turned away from them. I didn’t want them to see me like this, shaking, sopping wet.

I sat on a green concrete bench in the museum, which had half-walls with peeling green paint and thick wooden pillars that held up the roof. I hugged my knees into my chest and stared at the palu trees outside. Was it real, what just happened, that water? My crumpled mind couldn’t tell. And I wanted to stay in the unreal, in the not knowing. So I didn’t speak to anyone, ask them anything. A phone began to ring. No one picked it up, so it rang and rang. It was loud, and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to stay in my stupor, staring into trees.

But what if they survived, I couldn’t help thinking. Steve might come here with the boys. Maybe someone found all of them, just as they found me. If they are brought here, the boys will be clinging to Steve. Daddy, Daddy. Their shirts would have been torn off, they will be cold. Vik would always be shaking and shivering when he went swimming, the water in the pool was a little bit chilly.

A white truck pulled up. A young girl was carried out. There were bruises on her face, and twigs and leaves stuck to her hair and clothes. I’d seen this girl before. She was in the room next to us in the hotel with her parents. Vik and Malli will look wet and scared like this girl if they are brought here now. Will they have leaves tangled in their hair? They both had haircuts before we left London. Haircuts. I couldn’t hold the thought of haircuts.

There was a boy sitting on the same bench as me. He looked about twelve, a little older maybe. This was the boy who called for help just before those men found me. They brought him here with me in that van. This boy wouldn’t stop talking now, shouting. Where are his parents, he wants them, he was having breakfast with them at the hotel, they saw the waves, they ran, he was swept away. He said this over and over, but I ignored him. I didn’t acknowledge his presence or respond to anything he said.

The boy began to cry now. Are his parents dead? he asked. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, and his body was shaking, and his teeth chattered, and he kept walking around the glass cabinets, which displayed skeletons of marsh crocodiles and pythons. There was also the nest of a weaverbird, which always intrigued Vik. “It’s like a real house, Malli. Can you see the different rooms?”

The boy kept walking back and forth and crying. I wanted him to stop. Someone brought a large towel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Still the boy sobbed. But I didn’t speak to him. I didn’t try to comfort him. Stop blubbing, I thought, shut up. You only survived because you are fat. That’s why you didn’t die. You stayed alive in that water because you are so fucking fat. Vik and Malli didn’t have a chance. Just shut up.

I was taken to the hospital in a jeep. The man driving was very agitated. He told me he didn’t know where his family was. He was going to the hospital to look for them. They had been staying at the hotel, same as us. But he went on safari early in the morning. He went alone. He wasn’t at the hotel when the wave struck. He told me this again and again. He spoke too loudly. I sat in the front seat next to him. I didn’t say a word. I shivered and I shook. I stared out of the jeep. The road we were driving on was bordered by thick forest. There was no one on that road but us.

There was another man sitting at the back of the jeep. I recognized him, he was a waiter in our hotel. The waiter had a mobile phone in his hand, he kept waving it about. He stuck his hand out of the jeep and held the phone up high. He jumped across the seats from side to side. He was trying to get a signal, he said. His movements, I couldn’t stand it, I could feel each thud. Why can’t you just sit still, I kept thinking. I wanted to fling his phone out of that jeep.

They could already be at the hospital. Steve and the boys. Even Ma and Da. They might have been found and taken there. I kept thinking this, then stifling the thought. I had to stop getting my hopes up. I won’t find them, I must prepare for this. But if they were there, they’d be worried about me. I wished the jeep would speed up.

When we got to the hospital, it was Anton, Orlantha’s father, who came rushing out. He had no shirt, his trousers were ripped, his toes were bloody. He peered into the jeep, looking confused. Why is Orlantha not with you? Where are Steve and the boys? he asked. He thought this was the same jeep we’d driven off in, leaving him lying on the ground. I told him it wasn’t, that I didn’t know where anyone was. I didn’t tell him I’d hoped they’d be at the hospital. Now that I was sure they were not.

I dragged myself into the waiting area. My legs felt battered, they were unsteady. I noticed deep scratches on my ankles, they were bleeding, there were cuts on the soles of my feet. What happened? My mind could not sort anything out.

All around me people were talking. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, so I didn’t look their way. The waiting room was small, but their voices seemed distant, they kept getting softer and trailing off. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a tidal wave, there was a tidal wave, he said. I nodded. I tried to seem casual, as if I’d known all along. But a tidal wave is real. My heart tumbled. I sat down on a wooden bench in a corner, by a wall, facing the entrance to the hospital.

They might still come. We don’t get tidal waves in Sri Lanka. These people don’t know what they’re talking about. An image of Steve walking in with Vik and Mal kept sparking in my head. All three of them bare-chested, Steve carrying the boys, one on each arm. But they couldn’t have survived, they just couldn’t, I kept warning myself. Yet I silently and hopelessly murmured, there might, might just be the smallest chance.

Now and then a van or a truck came through the hospital gates. Everything very fast. Doors slammed, there was shouting, people staggered out from the trucks, others were carried, nurses and doctors ran outside clattering stretchers and wheelchairs down a ramp. A woman was brought in and left in front of my bench. She had long hair that was matted, it spread across her face. She was mumbling, but she wasn’t making sense. She was covered with a sheet because she was naked, but her feet stuck out, and they were crusted with mud. I couldn’t stop staring at her. I wondered if it was seaweed, all that slime twisted in her hair.