A grief like no other

Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave is a difficult book to read. I had to put down this memoir of life after the Tsunami, several times, just to catch up on my breath.

The writer and her family – husband Steve, two boys Vikram and Malli, and parents – were vacationing at a beach side hotel in Yala, Sri Lanka, when they saw the “sea come in” for them. Not yet comprehending the strange sight, they fled towards the hotel entrance where a jeep was waiting to rescue them. Her parents left behind unwarned in the urgency of running away, the four were bundled into a jeep that could only go so far before the wave caught up with it. In an instant, everything was wiped out. When Sonali regained consciousness – sand in mouth, naked from waist down, badly bruised and barely able to breathe – the dream-like landscape of devastation hardly registered in her mind. There was no chance her boys could’ve survived, she knew.

From then on, along the writer, we’re witness to a pain so raw and cruel, the repertoire of ordinary human experience seems unable to accommodate it. It is so far removed from the wailing and shrieking that we’re used to associating with suffering, it is shocking to see how quietly, insidiously it distorts and destroys, inch by inch, any sense of normality in the grieving person’s life. For a fellow survivor, a small boy who probably had lost his parents in the Tsunami, the writer has no sympathy. “I didn’t try to comfort him. Stop blubbing, I thought, shut up. You only survived because you are fat…Vik and Malli didn’t have a chance. Just shut up.”

A beautifully written, horrifying portrait of extraordinary personal suffering this book is, but step back a little and it is also a meditation on the nature of grief. Before it cuts you up to be more sympathetic to the crushing sorrows in the world, it makes you selfish, puzzled, angry, mad, distraught, suicidal. The writer goes through the whole spectrum of this bitter experience – not letting herself sleep dreading that she’ll forget her loss and will have to wake up to relearn the reality, locking herself up in a dark bedroom to avoid a world without her family, finding comfort in the suspended state of reality that alcohol and sleeping pills bring, attempting to end her life for only that seemed logical in the face of the bizarre disaster, raging against the new occupants of her parents’ house in Sri Lanka for taking away the memory of what was left of her earlier life…The darkness is relentless.

There’s no let up as she keeps revisiting Yala, to reaffirm what happened to her. Once there, she finds a sheet of Steve’s research paper. “It had survived the wave? And the monsoon in the months after? And this relentless wind?” It’s the first time Sonali allowed herself to sob. Thereafter, she went about recollecting pieces of her past life. And the narrative begins to breathe again.

It is only after two years that Sonali walked into their London home. She leads us in to the warm glow at the centre of her household. It’s one of the best passages illuminating a rich family life full of friends, laughter and sharing. You come to love the boys, getting to know how different from each other and full of promise they were. You keep step with Steve’s enthusiasm for work and life; you join in as they laugh over a family joke. And then, pulled back into a life full of their absence, you mourn it bitterly with Sonali.

It’s a dual life for her – one she lives with them in her mind, the other she lives without them. She does move on, picking up a job in the US, going back to Sri Lanka often, stopping over at London to meet their friends and imagining how Vik and Malli would’ve grown like their children. The lump in your throat never quite goes away.

The book ends with Sonali finding it in her to live with their memory, the picture of her family frozen in sunshine in her mind. Never again can I say Tsunami without thinking of Sonali and what she lost. Her sparse, unsentimental prose has had the profoundest effect on me.