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My arm hurt, but I kept going, “giving it some welly,” as Steve would say. I tried not to think of Steve’s words as I looked in the mirror and focused on my frothy mouth. I liked the sound of my frantic brushing, but I hated the toothpaste, it tasted of cloves and made me gag.
    I resolved not to leave the house, ever. How can I go outside? Outside was where I went with my boys. How can I walk without holding on to them, one on each side?
    There were all those first times. The first time I came downstairs in my aunt’s house, frightened, knowing I wouldn’t see a heap of shoes by the front door, as there was at home. The first time I walked on a Colombo street and couldn’t bear to glimpse a child, a ball. The first time I visited a friend and was nearly physically sick. Steve and I had been here with the boys just weeks before, my children’s fingerprints were on her wall. The first time I saw money, I was with my friend David, who wanted to buy a comb, having come from England without one. I trembled as I peered at that hundred-rupee note in his hand. The last time I saw one of those, I had a world.
    There was the first time I saw a paradise flycatcher. I thought then I should never have allowedmy friends to open the curtains in my room. I had been much safer in blackness. Now sunlight splintered my eyes, and that familiar bird trailed its fiery feathers along the branches of the tamarind tree outside. No sooner I saw it, I turned away. Now look what’s happened, I thought. I’ve seen a bird. I’ve seen a flycatcher, when all the birds in the world should be dead.
    The first time I saw a photo of my boys, I was unprepared. I was searching the Internet for ways of killing myself, as I often did then, when one click led to another, until the London
Evening Standard
screamed, “I watched as my whole family was swept away,” alongside a large photo of Vik and Mal. That photo, it was taken at school, Malli wore a red shirt, and he was proud. An image I knew so well overwhelmed me now. My mind had not fixed on their faces since the wave, it couldn’t endure them. I fell on the bed and pressed a pillow over my face.
    And that headline, “I watched”? I hadn’t spoken to any journalist, I had barely left that room. How dare they? I seethed. If Steve was here, if Steve was here, I’d tell him to go find those
Evening Standard
journalists on a dark night and beat them to a pulp.
    Steve and Malli were identified four months after the wave. All that while I’d told myself that they’ddisappeared into the depths of the ocean. Vanished. Magically became extinct. This kept their deaths as unreal and as dreamlike as the wave. Then at the end of April, I was told that they had both been identified by DNA testing. It was just days before Steve’s birthday. He would have been forty-one.
    I didn’t know then that their bodies had been exhumed from a mass grave sometime in February. I didn’t know that the DNA testing was being done in a laboratory somewhere in Austria. When I was told they were found, I smashed things into pieces. I didn’t want them to be found now. Not as dead bodies. I didn’t want them in coffins.
    I went to that mass grave with David later that year. It was a scruffy plot of land next to a Buddhist temple in Kirinda, a few miles from Yala. Some children from the village rushed over and told me more than I wanted to hear. “The bodies were brought at night, in tractors and bulldozers,” they said. “Some were clothed, some were not. No clothes at all. The people in the village were scared, but the priest in the temple allowed the bodies to be buried. Then the police came one day, some of them were white policemen, and dug it up. They told us not to watch, but we did.”
    I didn’t tell them I did not want to hear this. I didn’t walk away. I just listened. It was Steve and Mal they were talking about. Steve and Mal. “My motherwent mad when she saw the dead bodies,” said one of the boys.