Hikkaduwa Chronicles

Tsunami Second Anniversary 26 December 2006

I was on my way to Prasanna’s almsgiving, when I saw these boats freshly painted and this boy and some of his friends fishing under the bridge.  I’ve passed this bridge many times since but has never seen the same number of boats.

Benny, my father was born no.6 in a family of seven boys in Hikkaduwa to Sellakapuge Pinto Hamy – a 4 foot something and some say a formidable lady, others like my Aunt Maya says she was a wonderful warm loving aunt who had a special place in her heart for Maya as she  didn’t have any daughters.  

Benny was the second son born in the house that was built by Pinto Hamy’s husband and my grandfather building contractor Kaluappuwa Hennidige Bastian.  Vinnie [Vincent] the no 5 in the family was the first born in the house and was Pinto Hamy’s favourite. He later went on to become the Vice Principal of Ananda College, now a leading Buddhist school whose seventh Principal was P.de S. Kularatne ( Aunt Maya’s father), Pinto Hamy’s younger brother.  

Bastian is credited with building many upcountry bungalows in tea estates and the Hatton Post Office. In 1911 he completed the house “Siri Niwasa.”   My father called it the “Garden on Sea,” and added many extensions.  He converted into a cottage the “outhouse” which in the good old days stored giant bundles of cinnamon quills waiting for the correct market price, coconuts and the cinnamon twigs used as fire wood for cooking.  Food cooked with cinnamon twigs had a wonderful aroma. As a child I used to love to pick a piece of clean charcoal straight from the hearth to brush my teeth and get them squeaky clean. 

The house that Bastian built was solid.  So solid that most of it withstood the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. All the extensions that no.6 son Benny built including my room that had a panoramic view of the sea and the garden collapsed like a pack of cards in the tsunami.  Benny, my father was raconteur par excellence.  As children going to school from Panadura, my mother Manel’s hometown, we had to write a letter every week.  This practice was carried out most of my life and when I married and was in England, I received on average 3 letters week. One lament of my father’s in the periods I was in Sri Lanka was that I didn’t write as often when I was in the country. I had asked him once to start writing about Hikkaduwa.  It was never completed but many of his letters are with me and what I write here now are extracts from his letters. 

All good things start he says with love. He lived in this “wonderful and unique village by the sea in what was then the largest house on the sea front without realizing it.  “My father who built it was dead by 1933,” Benny says. He was schooling in Kandy at Dharmaraja College when his father died.  The obituary notice didn’t mention his name or the youngest brother Bertie’s name. “The school mates doubted whether the two brothers were adopted and had no direct claim to the Principal Mr. P. de S. Kularatne.   

Significantly in the first letter I got him to write about his Hikkaduwa memoirs he writes about the proud parents who came to sea bath with their children in a buggy cart drawn by a single bull.   The youngest a son was born to them after an interval of about 7 years after two sons and a daughter.  “The little boy of about one and a half years was afraid of the sea. He was put on the sand where the waves licked his feet.” He says the “vivacious mother whispered to him that he was an accident!”  The phrase had sounded novel to young Benny as he had “little learning.”  Much to my father’s amazement and chagrin this same imp after a quarter of a century came again to the beach and to Siriniwasa as a student of Botany and a scuba diver – there lies another story of love, wanderings, submerged activities and eventual partings… 

“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.” –Kahlil Gibran

This is a truth that some of us forgot in the tsunami recovery swamped by statistics.  We got side tracked by numbers — the 100 metre no built zone, number of houses being built, amount of cash grants, goods dispersed etc. We failed in many instances to value our own compassion and to recognize and support the tough resilience of the survivors.  The handful I kept in touch with and met repeatedly said they are driven by one focused need –to see that their children get a good education.  This is a first look at mothers and a grandmother who are striving to do that with an abiding love for their offsprings shining through.

A Grandmother’s Love   

She was shielding herself from a hot sun under a black umbrella but the gentle face the buxom figure clad in a traditional cloth and jacket instantly reminded me of my relatives of yester year from the South. In her hand was a “pan malla” – a bag woven out of grass reeds growing near rivers and marshy water ways. 

Stopping her in the middle of the road and starting a conversation with her was easy. Her smile was wide and warm her name was a grand Sinhala name Leelawathi. She was on her sales round selling treacle – coconut sap extracted to make a sweet dark  honey  used widely to make sweets.  She also had in her bag dried gamboge a sour fruit dried and used extensively in fish curries like the famed “ambul thiyal” of the South. 

Returning after her delivery round she invited us to see her rebuilt house with LKR 100,000  [approx. US$1000]given to partly damaged households within the buffer zone. The house has been rebuilt and she had to take a loan of LKR 60,000 [approx. US$600]in addition to the money she received from the government to complete the repairs. A mother of four sons and two daughters she lost her husband early in life. Her memories of the good times she spent with her husband fills her face with a tenderness bringing tears to her eyes. She recalled how at New Year’s festivities she laughed and played the Sri Lankan version of draughts with cowrie shells with her husband.   

Two of her grandchildren Trevin and Eshanie plays peak-a-boo with us

For Leelawathi now life is a struggle to help her children bring up the grandchildren. One daughter is sick with a nerve debility preventing her going out to work. Tears flow freely as Leelawathi recalls that horrible day when she lost a son. 

Another grandaughter Shenelka comes out to listen to her, and seeing her Leelawathi wipes her tears.  and the slow smile spreads across her face lighting it up.  “Now my main objective is to support my grand children and help them to find good employment opportunities in the best way I can,” she says.  

 A mother spins her love to create a cosy home

Shirani keeps her new two bedroomd house in Wellabada, Sri Lanka spick and span. She lost everything in the tsunami, and lived in a temporary shelter for one year and is rightly proud of her new home.

 Her brand new house was built in the same location of her tsunami destroyed house with Rupees 250,000 [approx$2500] from the Sri Lanka Government’s owner driven housing program, topped up with co-financing from Austria. 

Pre-tsunami Shirani had an additional income that came from spinning softened fibre from coconut  husks into rope, a popular cottage craft in the  Southern coastal belt. As most other families did she too lost her spinning machines and  has not been able to resume that work. He husband‘s daily wage as a laborer is their main income now. The children Thanusha and Raveesha missed school for about 4 months after the tsunami but are back in school and as most mother’s repeatedly told us Shiranee’s one priority is also ensuring that her children study well.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding” – Khalil Gibran   

The fragrance of cinnamon mingled with the salty sea breeze wafted in as I walked into the garden of our house in Hikkaduwa on the second anniversary of the tsunami. The cinnamon twigs were piled up on the back verandah. “we are  rebuilding the fence on the seaside,” said Gunadasa, our caretaker, a polio victim when young, he survived the tsunami.   

The twigs are from the small plot of cinnamon that my sister-in-law Padmini owns. Prasanna her husband and my brother who died in the tsunami looked after the cinnamon plot.  He normally would have been there supervising his workers. On that fateful day he was taking it easy reading the Sunday papers in an easy planter’s chair in the cottage just a few steps away from the beach.

The house remains forlorn but not forgotten. The contrast between the front portion of the house built by my grandfather in 1911, which largely withstood the tsunami onslaught and the hastily rebuilt back portion was heart breaking. There were no cement blocks where our little cottage by the sea was. An ipomea creeper growing lushly has removed every vestige of the cosy cottage and masking all signs of the of the tragedy.  

So what are we left with? Did we learn anything from it? Well, we certainly didn’t know how to forge a peace and reconcile the divided of this land. We who celebrate life so lavishly at birthdays, marriages, anniversaries are still uncomfortable with death. Our grief is suppressed; we talk fleetingly about death; trying to rationalize the passing away of a loved one so we can control the pain.   

What was the most difficult thing for us after the tsunami? It forced us to look at death and destruction mass scale. Some were not confronted with one death in a family but several.  There were bodies everywhere.  My lasting memory is not of the wave but all the bodies piled up on lorries, bodies lying on the cold cement floor at the rural hospital in Arachchiknade, Hikkaduwa. Memories are also of how we walked, hitch hiked looking for my brother’s body,  praying to gods I had never prayed before –asking for one favour –please, please let me see him one more time, let me find him.  

At first I didn’t see him. I only saw the others –children, young and old women, old men, The struggle to survive still visible in their faces, bodies bloated,foaming at the mouth. Numb with pain I turned away, sat on a step and cried.  Later my nephew Kanishka found me sitting on a wooden bench. It was with Kanishka going around the dead bodies for the second time that I found Prasanna. The red striped Tshirt — a gift from my niece Ranmali and her Aussie husband Aaron he was proudly showing off  that morning was gone. He lay on his back, injuries not visible and his face was peaceful.  Was death in all its brutality kind to him in the final minutes? 

Out of the womb of sightless night – bring out the word of healing strong 

Colombo, 26 December, 2007

Two years after Sri Lanka faced death and destruction of unimaginable proportions there is much soul searching. Many are the questions being asked — where did the aid  money go, how many houses were built, how many are more to be build, what went wrong and what did we do right, did we forget the people concentrating on statistics?– the search for answers continue….  One thing for sure we couldn’t do was to unite the people of this land. We did unite very briefly in the immediate aftermath but that was just a very very brief moment. 

This morning before I started on the track back to Hikkaduwa, I needed to read again a poem sent to me by my father many moons ago. In it he wrote about a Buddhist monk he knew who lived in a hermitage close to Hikkaduwa – Polgasduwa.  The monk, he wrote was weighed by asthma as I was then, but worked hard at his studies to forget his asthma.  Years ago my birthday gift to my father was an English translation of “Visuddhimaga” – the original. [a Buddhist Pali Canon], which is now lost forever. In the preface were these poems this monk had written one night at 2 a.m. because he believed my father said of “wearing out than rusting out.” 

Out of the womb of sightless night – bring out the word of healing strong

And put to flight the evil thoughts – that stood betwixt the eye and light

Where lies, friend, the golden mean? In giving up

Where’s the heart forever clean? In giving up

Where is life at its best seen? In giving up Where reaches one peace serene? In giving up 

More on the trek back South on Tsunami’s second anniversary follows…