‘What do you like eating?’
‘This and that.’ I think he must have learnt that expression at school.
‘Come on, buddy, you’re going to have to help me. Do you eat meat?’
‘No.’
‘Fish?’
‘Sometimes.’
I ordered him an omelette and some chips. When the food eventually arrived I realised that he had not washed his hands and that his eyes were darting around the room and then staring at the food. By the time I had taken him to have a wash the food was cold and he had given up. He pushed the food around the plate with his right hand (no one eats with their left hand here) and played with the straw in his coke.
‘Sunil, you must have some food and drink.’
He didn’t say anything and I didn’t know what to do. I put the mobile phone on the table and turned it off.
‘If there is no power to the phone it doesn’t work. Do you see? Your body is a bit like that. It needs food and water to work.’
He looked at me and started to cry.
‘Let’s go, Sunil.’ I left some money on the table and we left.
We walked along the beach road pretty much in silence, looking at the stalls of the traders who were already returning. Commerce is like a weed here, it grows everywhere and fills any gaps. I bought him some more clothes, some soap and a towel and then went back to my hotel with him. I had also got some bottled water, sweets and chocolate from one of the stalls and started feeding the sweets to him on the way back so as to get some sugar inside him.
‘I’ll make a deal, Sunil. If you drink a glass of water for me I’ll give you that chocolate.’ I think that the sweets must have sparked off his hunger because he agreed and then wolfed down the chocolate so quickly that I thought he would be sick. Sitting in a hotel room with him the smell was overpowering and so getting him to wash was the next thing that really needed to be done.
‘Sunil, you need a wash, a shower.’
He didn’t reply.
‘Come on buddy, let’s get that shirt off.’ It stank and was filthy.
When he took it off I could see what the problem was. He was emaciated and still bore the marks of the injuries from the tsunami. The scratches had mostly healed over but had left scars on his trunk and he still had the residue of bruises which his shirt had been hiding. I realised that I hadn’t even talked to him about what actually happened to him when the wave hit the train. Sunil was so compliant and so shut-off that it was very easy to overlook him while we all dealt our own problems.
He stood with his shirt off and his arms folded in a way that hid as much of his body as he could and seemed to flinch when I turned the shower on, making it plain that he was not going in it however much I might try to coax him. So, in the end, we had to compromise. I filled a sink with water, wet a towel and showed him how to wash with it by rubbing the soap and the towel over my top half and head. Then I wet another towel and helped him to do the same although there was no way he would wash his bottom half. At least when he got in to clean clothes the stench was not so bad.
We spent the rest of the day together, much of it just wandering around on the beach helping with the clean-up operation; there was even a bulldozer on the beach by then that was piling up some of the rubbish that was still strewn around and Sunil was allowed to sit on the driver’s lap at one point. He seemed much happier when with local people and I remember feeling like a trespasser and wondering if I should just walk away. My only role seemed to be to nag him occasionally to eat sweets and drink; I learnt pretty quickly that I could always dose him up with things called Rave bars and with Elephant House lemonade.
Before the tsunami he had lived a life that centred around his family and the hotel business, so after the tsunami, although he had friends and was well known, he didn’t turn to them or their families for comfort or support. Every family had its own problems at the time. As a result, he was a very lonely little boy who hid his sadness behind a veneer of politeness and submission, only much later finding comfort with Raja who, at the time, was so bowled over by his own problems that he had nothing left to offer Sunil. That’s how, I suppose, I slipped into the role of being his self-appointed guardian in those early days at Unawatuna. It was far more difficult than I could possibly have imagined; a lot of the time I did not know what I was doing or how to go about it. Certainly, until Josh came back and we had sorted out our own lives, Sunil did not get the attention that he should have had from me.
Sunil now is very different to how he was then. Then he was a stinking scrap of an orphan, an emotional refugee. Now, once engaged with someone, he tends to smile a lot with an open face and to move around excitedly on his very thin but agile legs often pumping grown-ups for information about places that they know and about the meaning of things. But, when he is not engaged, or switched on as I used to describe it to Josh, there is a deep reflectiveness about him and he watches what is going on around him like a quiet observer, his mind whirring with thoughts. He has a depth and maturity that way exceed his years but still, every now and then, he plummets downwards and needs comfort, sending out the distress signal of a twelve-year-old boy who has known far too much sadness. The nearest I can get is to describe it like seeing someone suddenly falling through the ice on a frozen pond.
He is also a handsome, kind, warm and clever boy. The boy who offered me so much kindness after Josh died and who understood that I had to go away. The guests in the hotel think he is wonderful and almost all of them lighten up when he entertains them with his antics. But much more importantly, he has found his place with his uncle, who loves him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
That first night of my return to Unawatuna Raja eventually came back and I left them to sleep in the tent. The next day I explained to him and Sunil that I needed to go to Galle to see if I could find the charity where I had intended to work. I promised Sunil that I would be back in a few days, which he said that he understood although I can well remember the look of resignation on his face at the time.
When I arrived at the place where the charity had been in Galle I found that it had been devastated; there was nothing left of it except the shell of the building that had once buzzed with so much good intent and I can only imagine what had happened to the children there. It was near to the bus station and was therefore in an area that had borne the full force of the water’s destruction. The bus station itself was still littered with the shells of a few overturned buses, debris and thick black silt; it stank and was filthy although the clearing up operation was well underway. There were people milling around everywhere, some with cloths over their mouths but every one of them bore a look of revulsion at the mess.
There were pictures in the newspapers of the famous cricket ground which is near the fort area in Galle and is bordered on two sides by the sea. It was ripped up by the tsunami and, at that time, had become a refugee camp for hundreds of survivors and also a helipad for the delivery of emergency supplies. The President, Rajapakse, re-opened it about four months ago, in December 2007, after eighteen months of restoration. Everyone loves cricket here, it bears a national pride and the cricket ground in Galle, traditionally called the Esplanade, is said to be one of the most beautifully located grounds in the world.
Many of the streets were still impassable and all of them still bore the signs of what had happened. The noise was also overpowering with people trying to fight their impatient ways through the sludge and debris as the bulldozers did their best to clear the rubble amongst the chaos. I wanted to get away as fast as I could but had no idea at all about where I would go; I can well remember walking around the bus station, surrounded by the stinking chaos and thinking, once again, ‘what am I going to do now?’
So, for want of better, I drifted back, without any purpose, to the field hospital where I had met Josh and where I found that an increasing number of tents had already been erected all over the spare land, with displaced families occupying them in a way that seemed to lack any f
orm of organisation. The social consequences of what had happened were immense and when large scale events like this do occur, I suspect that human instinct is for people to gather together and form refugee camps with all the social consequences that then arise due to the lack of organisation. There seemed to be a steady influx of people coming to the camp, with their remaining possessions dragging behind them in carts or strapped to broken and lopsided cars. I had seen things like this on the news but being in it was very different. It felt aimless.
Those who had tents were lucky; many people had nowhere to sleep and no money at all. There was no sanitation and water supplies were as haphazard as the food supplies. There were also increasing numbers of aid workers but there was no co-ordination, just masses of people milling around with every type of social and medical need imaginable and mingling with unorganised groups of well-meaning people trying their best to cater for them.
I, too, wandered around the camp without any particular idea of what I was doing, dumbstruck by what I was seeing. Eventually, I came across a group of French aid workers from Médecins Sans Frontières who had arrived recently and I fell into conversation with some of them; they allowed me to slot into the work that they were doing and sleep on the floor of one of their tents. So I spent the next few days there, witnessing the extreme poverty and hardship that had befallen so many entirely innocent people. I dug latrines, carried water supplies in plastic containers for as long as my leg let me and erected tents. I have no particular skills in medicine or in building work – what good is a former lawyer in circumstances like that? But I can dig a latrine and put up a tent, just.
Despite the call of the camp when I first went there and the friends that I made, I wanted to get back to Unawatuna to see Sunil as soon as I could; the images of the little and underfed boy that I had seen when I came back from Colombo and of the cowering nine-year-old whom I had first seen crouching at the end of the hospital bed in Batapola played over and over in my mind. So it was that, after a few days working in the terrible circumstances of the camp, I went back to Unawatuna, stopping at the hotel room where both my clothes and I had a very thorough wash before going to the beach.
Nothing had changed when I got back there. Raja remained drunk, elusive and obsessive about the work of trying to rebuild the hotel. Sunil was the same sad and shut-off little boy. I know that he saw me coming down the beach when I arrived because he looked up in my direction but then just went back to hacking at a stick with his penknife.
‘Hi, Sunil.’
‘Hi.’
‘You OK?’ Stupid question that was.
‘Yeah. Fine.’
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Nothing much.’
That’s pretty much how the conversation went. He barely raised his eyes and still looked horribly neglected and thin - I don’t think Raja had done anything about feeding him. By then his clothes were filthy and stank again. I don’t think he had changed, even though he had some other clothes that I had bought him.
‘Come on. Let’s get some food.’ I went over to him and put my hand on his shoulder but he didn’t look up – he just got to his feet and said ‘OK.’
We walked along the beach and I tried to talk to him but got nowhere. He didn’t even join in when I started skimming stones but just looked on in silence. We found an open air bar, not a hotel this time, and I bought him some chips, which he picked at.
‘Let’s have another go at tidying you up, Sunil,’ I said when it became obvious that he was not going to eat. Back to the hotel, same routine, pretty much the same result. He hardly said a word and I remember thinking it was like being with a child who was deaf and mute. So we bought some more Rave bars and lemonade and I asked him to show me the path over the headland to Jungle beach where there had been a café before the tsunami. Then we went up to the temple and looked at the view across the sea to Galle and over the tree tops. For the rest of the time we just knocked around together on the beach.
When Raja came back that evening, drunk, there was still no point trying to talk to him, but I tried to get him to understand that I needed to talk the following morning because I wanted to discuss what was going to happen in the future - was I able to stay in Unawatuna with him and Sunil if I promised to help?
I spent that evening playing football with Sunil and trying to think through what I was going to say to Raja. I then returned to the hotel where I wrote to Josh about what I was doing and also to Jennifer, two very different letters. I found myself longing to write to Josh and desperate to hear from him; if I missed a call from him or did not hear from him on any given day I would find myself unable to shake it off. In time the number of calls from people expecting to speak to Josh reduced and I quickly got to know his new number by heart; so I ignored calls from other people.
Next morning, I told Raja what I wanted to do. I said that I would be at the camp at Galle for four days a week but asked whether I could be with him and Sunil for the rest of the time. I offered him help with rebuilding the hotel and said that I had money which I could give him (and I had to stress the word ‘give’). At first he seemed almost dismissive and was understandably suspicious of what I was saying, but eventually agreed; I have no doubt that he thought that I was trying to make some sort of business investment for my own financial advantage.
‘If that is what you want to do, it is OK,’ he said, ‘but I have nothing to offer you.’
In reality I had not the first clue what I was doing but the offer of financial help to Raja at least made me feel that I served some sort of purpose. I really did not want to come across as someone who was trying to buy into a way of life as a true credit card waving westerner but I can well understand why Raja kept his distance.
So, with that less than encouraging start, I began to split my time between the overpowering environment of the camp and the complex environment at Unawatuna where Raja was going to pieces and Sunil was trying to fend for himself.
Sometimes I would come home to Unawatuna from the camp at nighttime to make sure that Sunil was OK but other times I would sleep on the floor of a tent there. The camp is less than four miles from Unawatuna and it takes about an hour to walk between the two and so, after Sunil became more used to me, he would often walk over there and became well known to the guys that I worked with – they called him le jongleur, because he knew how to juggle, and gave him loads of attention. One of the guys, a medical student called Bénédict or Ben, managed to get Sunil to eat properly.
‘Sunil, will you help me cook, please?’ – that’s all it took.
Ben gave Sunil a role as his sous-chef and I would hear them discussing, sometimes throughout the day, what they would cook. That put food and the pleasure that it can give very much at the forefront of Sunil’s mind. Everyone heaped praise on him for his creations even though they were usually no more than rice and some sort of curry. When Sunil was there we made a point of sitting down together in the evenings to eat, so Sunil could not avoid joining in. It worked. And, because everyone else drank loads of water and carried a bottle around wherever they went, he copied them.
Ben used to teach Sunil French, especially how to swear in French, which made Sunil feel grown up and just a bit naughty. ‘Eh Sunil, nous sommes les gars ordinaires, n’oublies pas’ – we are the regular guys, don’t forget – became their motto and I would hear Ben yell it across at Sunil, giving him a clenched fist sign in play. When they met, they would touch clenched fists as a sign of shared manliness. Sunil loved it.
Coming to the camp also meant that Sunil had access to medical and dental care and the guys helped to chivvy him along to have injections and dental treatment that he desperately needed. There were plenty of doctors at the camp and there were several dentists, both among the displaced and among the helpers; everything was there.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
It would have been very easy to have spent all my time in the camp at Galle. There was a distinct community that built up in the area
where I worked, I got to know the families very well and I had a place with the French aid workers. We became comrades in adversity, each one of us with a tale to tell and a sense of important work to do; there were also endless tales of travel and I even told them a bit of my own background. In conversation I could hide as much as I wanted and did not need to be personally involved with anyone; most of them were students and much younger than me. It was all very different to how I lived in Unawatuna. I enjoyed speaking French again because it helped me to slip into my new identity and distance myself from the life I had left behind in London – I even started to think in French and pretend to a new French identity.
At the camp we were mostly left to our own devices, which is hardly surprising, I suppose, because there was no one there to tell us what to do. From time to time, attempts were made by the police and army to impose some sort of order about where tents were to be erected and, occasionally, it worked. But in many areas things just happened in a totally random way so the camp became a sprawl and any attempts at organisation were usually ignored. There were occasional bust ups when the police or soldiers tried to force families to move their tents but, most of the time, people were just left to get on with it. Among the aid workers there was no real chain of command, either, and so no one was in charge; although the army and police did try to tell us what to do it was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing much of the time, either.
More than anything else, water was the greatest immediate need. It is said that refugees each need at least 20 litres of water a day for sanitation and hydration but there was no way that that amount of water was available for all the people who gathered at the camp. So water was delivered in tankers and people queued with their plastic containers for as much as they could get; they then had to lug the containers back to their tents, sometimes carrying them a very long way. We would help out when we could and even had some trolleys to use when the ground was dry but there was no way that we could carry everyone’s water.
The Water Is Warm Page 21