Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

Author:Sonali Deraniyagala [Deraniyagala, Sonali]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7710-2538-9
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2013-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Mum. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I was their mum. Even as I remember fragments of their birth or recall how I reassured Malli as he peered from behind that tree, the truth that I was their mother is veiled in confusion. It is distant also. Was I really? Was it really me who could predict a looming earache from the colour of their snot, who surfed the Internet with them looking for great white sharks, and who cuddled them in blue towels when they stepped out of the bath?

I know it was me, of course, but that knowing is cloudy and even startling at times. Strange. For one thing, they are dead, so what am I doing alive? I must be heartless. I am their mother. I am tortured, true, my dreams howl for them most nights, I am still as mutilated as I was in those first weeks when I couldn’t step beyond the door because they weren’t beside me. But this is hardly enough, surely my reactions nowhere near match the awfulness of their death. Yet nothing can, I suspect, fantasize as I might about hurling myself into that heaving ocean in Yala, doing it properly now, no clinging on to branches this time.

Is it because I am still dazed that I can’t grasp the reality of being their mother? Is it because I am stunned by the way it ended that the truth of being their mother is muted? Maybe I willed it this way, in shock and desperation, when in an instant they were gone. I was so tightly wrapped around them, their moods and needs tugging at me always, but then I tried to unwind from them, determined and furious, insisting to myself that it was pointless keeping close to them, because I was no longer their mum. And even now, some four years on, I am hesitant to grab them with my heart, fierce and tender, the way I used to when they were alive. How can I bear to do that in this void? So I shy away from knowing Malli’s weight in my arms as I carried him indoors when he’d fallen asleep in the car. I don’t want to hear Vik ask me if he’d played well at his football class, in that uncertain tone he used when he knew he hadn’t but needed me to reassure him with a lie. If I allow any of this, I will go mad for wanting them.

Won’t I?

And maybe I forfeit being their mother because, at times, I feel helplessly responsible for their death. We took them back to Sri Lanka that December, Steve and I. Although we were only doing what we always did, and although it was those tectonic plates that slipped, I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I led them to harm when they relied on me. So I am hesitant to evoke the intensity with which I watched over them. I can’t tolerate knowing how they always counted on me.

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