Coming Together: Special Hurricane Relief Edition

by Alessia Brio

  Around through the familiar flower market. All that stood now was the old Colonial Armory—its windows and doors gone and water gushing from the broken sills—and Sadhu's restaurant, made entirely of brick, gutted, the tables and chairs all gone. There were fish in the street and piles of oozing sand and sea wrack. The ornate iron lampposts leaned crazily; torn bamboo screen and furniture blocked the seaward exit from the square where the wave had left them behind. A young girl's body lay atop a tilted table, her doll still clutched in her hand, her dress filthy with mud and leaves.

  Kali would not let herself look, denied herself permission to feel. She ran on through the puddles of water, stepping around the broken glass. Here, closer to the harbor, there were more brick buildings from the colonial era, and here the streets were scoured free of debris: everything had been washed out to sea except for piles of sand and bigger pieces of furniture and trees. Water spilled out from beneath closed doors and even from second floor verandahs. Kali saw more bodies now, but they were not easy to see: everything was slathered with a brownish gray coat of muck. It was the color of the women's saris that caught her eye.

  Never mind. Don't stop. Samanathi Street then down to Harbor Road where the wreckage was just shocking. Trees had jammed crossways between the brick buildings creating dams behind which furniture and trash piled up: cloth, papers, a television set, even a motorbike and a refrigerator; the black water was ankle deep and running fast towards the sea, gurgling like a mountain stream.

  Kali spun round the corner, grabbing on to a lamp post as a pivot to slow herself. She spun around the corner and stopped dead. Kumar's house was gone. The entire two stories, gone. Nothing but shards of posts, splintered and tilted, pipes, a bunch of muddy carpets and a toilet jammed up against what remained of the seaward wall. A large blue sofa lie on its back, swollen like a dead thing, covered in sand and muck. Kali knew that sofa. It had been new just two months ago.

  She looked around in confusion, ignoring the panic in her heart. Across the street was the family business, the brick garage where Kumar and his brothers repaired motorcycles and marine engines. The building was from colonial days and solid as a rock. It still stood, and Kali splashed towards it across the water streaming through the street. The doors were pushed inwards, the hasps ripped from the wood, and Kali forced the door open enough to step into the gloom. Mud and the overpowering stink of gasoline, wreckage and confusion. Light from the shattered windows reflected from the moving water on the floor and cast wavering, undersea patterns on the ceiling.

  From outside came a distant, sustained booming, a sound that shook the very ground beneath her feet. Kali ignored it.

  "Hello?" she called. "Hello? Kumar? Niddhu? Anyone?"

  No answer, and then she remembered that it was Sunday, and on Sundays Kumar would be down at the harbor with his brothers working on the Christian's boat engines.

  The ground was still vibrating beneath her feet but the booming had stopped, and Kali noticed that that the water was no longer pulling at her legs as it streamed seaward. It had stopped moving and was swirling around her feet in confused, lazy eddies, like a serpent ready to strike. No, it was rising.

  She heard a burst of screaming from outside, the roar of surf and crack of splitting wood. Another wave! Another wave was coming, had already hit the shore and was flooding up into the town.

  Kali turned to see a chest-deep wall of water surge into the garage, flinging the doors off their broken hinges and flooding against her. Before she had time to think, it was surging around her waist and she was half-swimming through the oily, debris-strewn water, desperately trying to reach the stairs in the back. As long as the garage didn't collapse and crush her to death, the real danger would be in the suck-back as the wave receded, dragging everything along with it back down into the sea, herself included.

  She hit her foot on a submerged tire and lost her balance, fell into the swirling water and got up choking only to be knocked down by another surge that pushed her back down beneath the surface. She was frightened now and her fear made her angry, and Kali's anger was formidable. She jumped up and fought her way to the stairs

  The water was to her chest and still rising by the time she grabbed hold of the railing and pulled herself out of the flood. She stood on the stairs coughing, then ran up to the roof where the family had a patio for eating and relaxing. If any of them had been in the garage and escaped the first wave, that's where they would be. Kali threw open the thin wooden door at the top and stepped out onto the roof. She saw the tables and chairs, cushions and sunshades all in disarray. She was alone.

  The water was not four feet below her, boiling and swirling and licking at the roof, filled with bits of wood and leaves and papers. She saw a child's shoe, a bunch of flowers, magazines swirling in the turbid and foaming water. She stood up and looked around her and all she saw were trees and power poles emerging from the foaming broth, not another structure standing except for the old Government Tariff house that stood across from the garage and the buildings at the flower market.

  The city was dissolving around her like a lump of sugar in hot tea: buildings collapsing, trees and power poles falling over. The air was filled with the roar of the water and the shouts and screams of people swept up in the flood, the grinding crash of cars and vehicles swept along like leaves in a raging river.

  The water peaked and stagnated, then began to recede, tendrils of scum starting to find direction and race back towards the beach, turning Harbor Street into a raging torrent as the flood squeezed between the canyon formed by the garage and the Tariff house and formed a big, sucking tongue of dirty, debris-laden water. The garage shook as massive trees and logs slammed into the building. A heavy wooden desk shot by, bobbing like a sinking boat. Kali ran blindly to the other edge of the roof and looked for someplace safer to jump to, but all was submerged.

  There was a massive shuddering crash as an uprooted palm tree lodged itself crosswise between the two buildings, forming a dam over which the filthy water frothed and sprayed. Kali turned and was horrified to see a man clinging to the sodden trunk, arms wrapped around it, chin just above the flood as the water tore at him with the violence of a hurricane: a westerner with red hair, shirtless, a big silver watch on his wrist. He turned his face to Kali and she saw the pure panic in his eyes as the water spumed over the back of his head.

  She ran to the edge of the roof and held out her hand to him, but he was too far. If he let go of the trunk he'd be instantly swept away. She saw him reach his fingers for her, afraid to move his arms, then there was a massive jolt as something else smashed into the tree, knocking the far end free. With a horrible creaking groan, the tree began to pivot, the far end swinging out into the flood.

  "Grab my hand! Take my hand!" Kali screamed.

  He was too far, just out of reach. Kali looked around frantically, then ripped the tablecloth off the overturned table and threw one end to him. The man grabbed the cloth and wrapped it around his wrist and Kali passed the other end behind her back and held on. The water caught the cloth and yanked her savagely towards the edge, pulling her over so that she fell on her bottom. She braced her feet against the roof cornice and pulled with her legs, desperate not to lose him.

  The current was very strong and the man was big, almost twice her size, but Kali was filled with furious anger and strength now and she would not lose him. There was nothing she could do about anyone else but she wouldn't let this pale stranger get away. She swore at him and leaned against the straining cloth with all her might, and the man made a desperate lunge for the garage roof. One wet arm grasped the tile cornice and then a foot. Kali heaved on the wet cloth and the man slithered over the edge and fell flat onto the roof like a fish, gasping and choking, the tablecloth still wrapped around his arm.

  For the first time that day Kali felt the blind surge of real fear and adrenalin. The water was falling rapidly now and as the speed of the stream diminished, she could make out bodies, bodies being carried alo
ng in the retreating water, limp and twisted, lifeless. She fell to her knees and covered her face with her hands.

  Kumar gone, his family gone. His grandfather, his grandfather's brothers, perhaps the girls she'd gone to school with. The entire town destroyed. She covered her eyes with her hand and fought back tears, determined not to cry.

  The westerner was saying something behind her. He was up on his hands and knees, saying something, still coughing. Kali knew little English, but she didn't have to understand his words to know what he was saying: thanking her, disbelieving. Through her fingers she could see the wave receding below them. As it fell below window level, water began to gush from the empty window frames of the wrecked houses; the entire town spewing water like a drowned man pulled from the surf.

  Kali pulled herself together. She turned into the man and looked at him. "Are you hurt?" she asked. "Are you all right?" But then she realized he couldn't understand Singhalese. She tried to smile. "Okay?" she asked. "Okay?"

  He nodded. "Okay."

  He was a big man, athletic and beefy, the way most meat-eaters seemed to her; American or British, possibly Australian but she didn't think so. Anyhow, it was all the same to her. He wore nothing but a pair of tan khaki shorts with a leather belt and that large, expensive-looking watch. She noticed the droplets of water still clinging to the hair on his thick forearms. There was a ring on the third finger of his right hand, and seeing that, Kali looked at him once and then looked away, ashamed to meet his eyes. He had brought his wife here to her pretty village, and now this.

  There was another rumbling boom and Kali put her hand on his arm to make him stay. Another wave was coming and she knelt down beside him on the roof as once again water surged through the streets below, feebly this time, as if all the fury were spent. The water almost seemed embarrassed.

  His knee was bleeding but he seemed able to walk all right, so she led him down the stairs and through the wreckage of the garage and into the street, which was now filling with noise and commotion, the sounds of weeping and cries for help. Though it was quite warm, the man was shaking. He threw the wet tablecloth around his shoulders like a scarf, like a weight he had to bear.

  He seemed utterly bewildered and Kali really didn't have time to help him now. She had to get down to the harbor and search for signs of Kumar and his family, but the man wouldn't leave her side and she couldn't really tell him to go. Frantic mothers ran past, or wailing children, everyone muddy and looking like a ghost.

  Kali faced him and searched her mind for the correct English word. "Hotel?" she asked him. "Hotel? Yes?" If she could just get him back where he belonged, her obligation to him would be over. She had to shout at him as if he were a child, and finally the man seemed to understand.

  There was only one resort hotel in Tengalla, and that was by the harbor. Kali took his hand and pulled him along after her. The streets were filled with wreckage, piles of furniture and palm fronds, bamboo screens and entire tree trunks. Everywhere there were dazed people wandering around, too shocked to even ask for help. Kali kept on going. To stop for one meant she'd never get there.

  It was obvious long before they reached the harbor that it was hopeless. They started passing boats piled up like children's toys in the street, great mangled sections of wharf tossed about like playing cards. Kali recognized some of the boats. To see them leaning crazily against wrecked houses and offices was horrifying.

  When they got to High Street she could stand it no longer. There was no sense in going on: the harbor was just gone. The docks, the boats and warehouses, the piers and wharfs, the very shoreline were all gone, wiped from the face of the earth. She dropped to her haunches and hid her face in her arms and wept.

  She hated tears. She hated tears and she hated grief and she wept she screamed at the world in anger for making her feel this way

  The man touched her shoulder, but how could Kali tell him what had happened, what had been lost? She could see the harbor as it had been, as she'd known it since childhood, and then she could see the towering wave striking the flat beach, ripping the boats from the moorings and washing them up into the town, the docks collapsing and breaking up, the people swept away like froth on the wave, slammed and tumbled about and then sucked back out to sea, battered by floating debris, pulled down by the undertow. It was horrifying, unimaginable.

  Was Kumar still alive? It was impossible to say. It would be a matter of luck, nothing more. As for everything else, all was gone. It hardly seemed to matter if one more person lived or died. Her life was gone, her world washed away.

  Kali felt a rising wave of panic and despair so thick and fetid that it threatened to strangle her with grief, but she would not let herself fall into it. She swore once, one wild and bitter shriek of rage, then she stood up and turned her back on the harbor. She looked down and saw her pretty osariya soaked in dirty water and she let the tears come, hating the feeling.

  "Come with me," she said to the man in her language. Of course he didn't understand but she took his arm and pulled him along as if he were a child. "Come on. If your wife is still alive, she'll come to the hotel. Everyone goes to the hotel."

  But when they got to the hotel it was no better. It still stood, but the entire first floor had been gutted, the furniture gone, all the windows smashed. The big swimming pool was awash in sand and mud. There was no water, no electricity. Survivors walked around dazed and bewildered or shaking with grief, wailing out the names of their loved ones and missing family members. There were few westerners, and apparently none that the man recognized. There was no wife.

  His apathy grew worse, and Kali wondered whether he might already be falling in to that state of helpless grief she had seen so often before. She desperately wanted to get back to the harbor but she couldn't leave him alone like this. Perhaps it had been a mistake to bring him back here. She told him to wait while she found someone in charge, someone who could help. He stared at her dumbly, but seemed too confused to resist.

  There was no one in charge. There were three hotel employees screaming into cell phones and a crowd of frightened and nearly hysterical people, and Kali gave up her search. She came back to the man to tell him she was leaving, and was surprised to find him standing up and ripping strips from the wet table cloth. A teenaged boy sat at his feet, bleeding badly from his head, and the man was tearing the cloth for bandages, wiping the blood away and talking to the boy. He was working quickly and surely, but having trouble with the long strips of bandage. Kali watched him for a long moment, then took the cloth from his hand and began tearing off more usable strips, cutting the cloth with her teeth.

  The boy's injuries were bloody but not severe, and by the time the man gave him a cloth to hold against his head, other people were approaching, injured and bleeding themselves, or helping others, or just stunned and bewildered, drawn by the man's efficiency and sense of purpose. He seemed to come alive as he helped them, examining them quickly and directing the less injured to wait while he saw to the more seriously wounded. Those not too badly hurt or bereaved stayed to help, and soon they had a small emergency clinic set up outside the wreckage of the lobby. Someone came down from an upper floor with a pile of sheets and they ripped those into bandages, doing what they could.

  As the crowd grew, Kali took charge, acting as the man's nurse and coordinator. He worked quickly and efficiently, and though they couldn't understand each other, Kali was comforted by the man's knowledge and expertise. Here was someone who knew what he was doing, who had a sense of purpose. She forgot about Kumar and the harbor. She was needed here.

  They worked into the night as the flood's survivors emerged like ghosts from the wreckage. They bandaged and splinted, comforted and soothed as best they could. They laid the dead and the dying along the deck of the pool, and when Kali saw a familiar face she looked away. There would be time for that later.

  The moon came out and from someone's radio they heard the first news of the extent of the damage. Kali hardly listened. She
wanted to stay busy and not think, and yet as the night came on, the number of patients decreased and dwindled until there was nothing more to be done. She heard the sounds of helicopters over the ocean, and wearily she walked across what had been the pool deck and stopped near the beach. A helicopter was playing its searchlight over the water, searching for survivors, but Kali knew none would be found.

  The sea was calm, and the night was as clear and beautiful as any she could remember. The mild and steady surf beat upon the wreckage of the shoreline, the wind sighed through the trees on the steep hills behind them, hills that had gone untouched by the wave's fury. Kali thought about her family in their village in the hills and wondered whether they were worrying about her. They must have heard by now. The entire world must have heard.

  The helicopter banked low and flew off, and in the quiet she heard the steady, reassuring sound of the surf on the shore. She saw the man sitting at the foot of the broken stairs, Singhalese fashion, his elbows on his knees, his head down. He seemed exhausted, and Kali remembered the ring on his finger.

  She walked down the stairs and stood by him, and when he looked up she said the only thing she knew how to say: "Okay?"

  The man had been crying. His eyes were red and still wet, but he smiled now at her attempt at English. "Okay," he said.

  Kali dropped down into the sand next to him. She didn't want to leave him alone. She wanted to talk to him, to comfort him and even apologize and explain, but she didn't have the words. She wanted to tell him that it was a tsunami, a tidal wave, a freak of nature, and that it could have happened at any time. They'd had them before in Tangalla, though not like this—nothing like this. It was part of the price they paid for living here.