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myself with a butter knife. I lashed at my arms and my thighs. I smashed my head on the sharp corner of the wooden headboard of the bed. I stubbed out cigarettes on my hands. I didn’t smoke, I only burned them into my skin. Again and again. My boys.
    I don’t have them to hold. What do I do with my arms?
    Soon, very soon, I have to kill myself.
    I was never left alone. An army of family and friends guarded me night and day.
    Natasha kept hold of me, not leaving my side for half that year. Ramani infuriated me by tapping on the bathroom door if she thought I was taking a suspiciously long time, but my body was so clenched that I had to sit on the toilet with all the taps running for ages just to pee. I chased Keshini out of the bedroom at night, accusing her of snoring too loud, yet she took six months off from her job in the States to watch over me. Amrita warmed me and distracted me, her job abandoned, children left in other people’s care. Gunna and Darini coaxed me to take a few steps outside that room. Ruri snuggled into bed with me to cry.
    Sometimes I would drag myself into the kitchen—maybe I can slit my wrists—but someonewould steal up behind me. Besides, they had hidden all the knives. My aunt gave me a sleeping pill at night, carefully rationed, just one. I tried to hoard them, together with some bottles of painkillers I’d found. Then Natasha discovered my stash and yelled at me like I was a bicycle thief. I thought every day about throwing myself under one of the buses that hurtled by outside. But Natasha assured me that if I didn’t succeed and instead became paralyzed, she would leave me all day in my wheelchair in the middle of the garden, alone.
    I insisted I never wanted to see our friends in London or Steve’s family again. That life was over. But they turned up.
    When our friend Lester walked into my blackened room and told me he was so glad I was alive, I shouted at him. Didn’t he get it, stupid man, I wanted to die. Lester had been in Colombo with us only a few months before, in the summer. We’d gone to cricket matches where he impressed Vik by drinking too much beer. We went to the rain forest where Malli woke him too early each morning to go for a walk. And now Lester is here because they are all dead?
    I was bewildered when Anita appeared sobbing in my room. We’d said goodbye to each other after the school Christmas concert weeks before, shouting at our children not to trip on their costumes as they raced down the road. And now? Anita kept tellingme that I had to live, without me she couldn’t raise her girls. Fuck off, I thought.
    Steve’s family came to Colombo, again and again. When his brother-in-law Chris began telling me about the memorial service they were planning in London, I asked him to stop. Memorial service? That was outlandish. Still he persisted, asking me to choose some music for the service, cajoling me gently by mentioning that my mother-in-law had remarked, “Well, when Stephen was a boy he liked some band called Slade.” I braced myself and told Chris to play some Coltrane. Just saying that word made my heart convulse. I saw Steve in our kitchen, grilling fish, listening to
A Love Supreme
.
    Steve’s sister Beverley sat on my bed wiping her tears. On the morning of the twenty-sixth of December, she had woken up in London, weeping. At the time she hadn’t been able to imagine a reason for this, it was the morning after Christmas, they’d had a typically happy and raucous family gathering the previous day. But before someone phoned her with news of a tidal wave in Sri Lanka, she had been crying. As she told me this, I could only think, her chin, her chin, her chin is Steve’s.
    I didn’t want to step out of that room. The only time I willingly raised myself from that bed was to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I brushedmy teeth diligently and often. I shuffled to the bathroom every few hours and carefully squeezed toothpaste onto my brush. I brushed hard.