Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (2 page)

“They claim lots of storm orphans are being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.

“Everyone,” the producer responds. “It’s being reported all over the place.”

“We’ll look into it,” I respond, which is usually the only way to end such a conversation.

Child trafficking is a major problem, especially in Southeast Asia, but when we start checking the kidnapping story being reported on other networks and papers, it seems slim on facts. It’s mostly just aid workers worrying that children separated from their parents by the disaster may get kidnapped. Part of the aid workers’ job is to get relief, and one way for them to do that is to raise red flags, warn of impending problems. Warnings, however, aren’t facts.

We’ve hired a Sri Lankan newspaper reporter named Chris to help us get around, and when I ask him about kidnappings, his eyes light up. “Oh, yes, it appears a very big problem,” he says, his British-accented English accompanied always with a peculiarly Sri Lankan shake of the head.

Chris shows us a headline on the front page of one of Sri Lanka’s daily papers:
TWO KIDS, RESCUED FROM WAVES, KIDNAPPED BY MAN ON MOTORCYCLE
.

“There have been a lot of stories like that,” he says. “It’s all very dramatic stuff.”

“Is it true?” I ask.

“I have no idea,” he says, “but it makes for a great headline.”

When we check with police, it turns out there have only been two complaints of child abductions filed with authorities, and neither of those cases has been confirmed. We decide to track down the story about the two kids kidnapped by the man on the motorcycle.

Sunera is seven, his sister Jinandari is five. They haven’t been seen in nearly two weeks.

“I believe that they’re alive,” their aunt tells us when we track her down in Colombo. She speaks in a whisper and clutches a photograph of Jinandari dressed as a ballerina.

Sunera and Jinandari were in a car with their parents when the tsunami hit. The wave swept them off the road, carrying their car like a piece of driftwood some three hundred yards into a water-filled ditch. It ended up submerged upside down underwater, not far from the Lighthouse Hotel and Spa, a strikingly modern waterfront hotel near Galle.

When we arrive, the place is packed. It somehow survived the storm, and is now filled with reporters. They’ve converted the parking lot into a satellite-feed point. When we finally locate the manager, Ananda de Silva, he tells me, quite confidently, that the children are dead.

“From our staff, three people came and tried to turn the car,” he tells me, pointing to the now dried-out ditch. “We couldn’t do it, but after about thirty minutes, we were able to get the girl and boy out.” The parents were dead, de Silva says, stuck in the car underwater. When they got Sunera out he was dead as well. Jinandari was unconscious.

“Her eyes were shut, her head like this,” de Silva says, flopping his head forward.

“The paper says the children were kidnapped by a man on a motorcycle,” I say, showing him the headline.

He waves his hand at the front page. “That is just rumor,” de Silva says, insisting that he saw Sunera’s body handed over to Sri Lankan soldiers passing by in a truck. As for Jinandari, he says a man named Lal Hamasiri took her to the hospital on a motorbike.

Lal Hamasiri lives a short distance from the hotel. When we arrive, he is at first unwilling to speak, furious that local papers have made him out to be a kidnapper.

“I saw the child lying on the ground,” he finally tells us, beckoning us into his home, away from the prying eyes of suspicious neighbors. “I immediately picked her up and gave her mouth to mouth. She had some white foam on her lips.”

At the urging of the crowd, he flagged down a passing motorcycle and took the girl to a nearby hospital. “The body was a little warm, and I believe she had a slight pulse,” he says, but by the time they got to the emergency room, he was sure she was dead.

“I went up with the good intention of saving someone’s life but in return I got a very bad name, and everyone looks at me like I’m a criminal, like I’m a kidnapper.”

At the hospital, it quickly becomes obvious how a little girl can go missing. The emergency ward is washed away. Hospital beds sit abandoned in the courtyard, waterlogged papers and medical records litter the ground.

A short, squat man in a sparkling white suit waddles out of the main door, trailed by a fast-moving entourage; UN relief workers, Sri Lankan underlings, a few local news crews try to keep up with him.

“That’s the fucking minister,” our guide, Chris, tells me, pausing to watch the political parade pass by. According to him, this particular government minister was caught by his wife screwing another woman in his office. His wife created such a scene that the police were called, and the local tabloids had a feast.

“Oh, we went to town on that one,” Chris says, his eyes wistful at the memory of it all. “Photos, eyewitness accounts, the whole nine yards.”

When we finally track down the hospital administrator, she confirms that Jinandari was dead when she arrived. Because the morgue here had been demolished by the tsunami, they transferred her to another hospital. Even if she had been alive when she was pulled out of the water, the travel time alone to and from the hospitals would have killed her.

We decide that the least we can do is try to find Jinandari’s body. Since we’ve come this far, it only seems right to see it through. When we reach the second hospital, we’re directed down a long corridor and into a large, sun-filled room. It’s the temporary morgue.

From outside, the room looks like an art gallery in New York’s East Village. Hundreds of small photos line the walls. At first it’s hard to tell what the photos show. You have to go up close, and even then it takes a moment for the images to snap into focus. They are pictures of the dead. More than a thousand of them. Every body that was stored here, every corpse, had its photograph taken, in the hopes that someone might be able to identify it.

No one ever talks about what the water can do. It’s all here, however, color captured on film: the submersion, the struggle, the exhaustion, the fear. Water flooding into lungs, babies coughing and vomiting, hearts stopping, bodies convulsing, heads snapping back, startlingly white eyes popping from mud-smothered faces, tongues swelling into blackened balloons, necks bloating like those of giant toads, bones breaking, skulls crushing, teeth being ripped from heads, children from their mothers’ arms.

In movies, people drown peacefully, giving in to the pull of the water, taken by the tug of the tide. These pictures tell a different story. There is no dignity in drowning, no silent succumbing to the water’s ebb and flow. It’s violent, and painful, a shock to the heart. Everyone drowns alone. Even in death, their corpses scream.

Nurses with face masks scrub the mottled floor with stiff brushes and brooms. Until a few days ago, the room was filled with bodies lying side by side on the floor. They’ve now been buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of town. It’s the third time nurses are trying to disinfect the floor, but the rot and puss have seeped into the cement. There are flies everywhere. Phil puts his camera down for a moment to change batteries. “Don’t put that on the floor,” the head nurse warns him, worried it might pick up bacteria. Hard as they’ve tried, they can’t get the smell out. The stench of bodies is still there, buried under layers of bleach.

I’ve brought with me photos of Sunera and Jinandari—school portraits, the kind for which kids have to dress up, comb their hair, sit still. Each child smiles straight into the camera lens. I know Jinandari is somewhere on this wall of the dead, but staring at the pictures of the corpses, I know I’ll never find her. The bodies are too decomposed.

“We should go,” Charlie says, and I know he’s right, but I keep forcing myself to look at the photos, stare at each face. I figure it’s the least I can do.

Finally, we head out to find the mass grave, and reach it just as the sun is starting to set. There are no signs, just a swath of red clay stretching for hundreds of yards in a clearing in the woods. A bloodred slash in a forest of green, upturned earth as far as the eye can see.

Two women stand at the grave’s edge. They live just behind it, in a small clearing.

“Why did they have to dig the graves here?” one of the women asks. “Now the ghosts of the dead will haunt us at night.”

There are no headstones, no markers. The bodies are carried in by bulldozers and dumped into pits. New graves continue to be dug. No one knows for whom. The dead have no names. As we leave the burial ground and head back to the hotel, I check my watch. I notice the date. It’s January 5, the day my father died.

I DIDN’T KNOW
it was going to happen. I guess kids never do. I was ten. My father was fifty. That seemed old at the time; now its frighteningly young. My father died on an operating table at New York Hospital while undergoing heart bypass surgery. January 5, 1978. That was the date. I still mark it on my calendar every year. I should celebrate his birthday, of course, gather together friends who knew him, tell stories, keep his memory alive. Twenty-seven years later, it’s still too painful even to try. Too raw. The nerves are still exposed. For years, I tried to swaddle the pain, encase the feelings. I boxed them up along with my father’s papers, stored them away, promising one day to sort them all out. All I managed to do was deaden myself to them, detach myself from life. That works for only so long.

The morning my father went to the hospital, I was sick and stayed home from school. He came into my room and kissed me goodbye. He said he’d be back soon. He was hospitalized for nearly a month, and I got to visit him only once. They didn’t allow children in the intensive care ward. I hated seeing him like that: lying in bed, an IV in his arm, a brown disinfectant stain on his hand. He seemed so weak, waiting for his heart to fail once again.

For Christmas he’d asked my mom to give my brother and me audio cassette recorders. I think he wanted me to tape my feelings, my fears. I never did. I wish now he’d recorded his voice, left me a message, one for each year he’d be gone. We planned to go to the hospital on Christmas Day, record our conversation. He had an attack that morning, however, and I never saw him alive again.

I was asleep when my mom came into my room to tell me he had died. I can’t remember what she said, but I know she was crying. Soon my brother and I were as well.

She brought us into the living room. Al Hirschfeld, the cartoonist, was there with his wife, Dolly. They were close friends of my parents, and must have been with my mother at the hospital. I remember that Dolly told me about how she felt when her father died. From then on, every time I saw Hirschfeld’s drawings in the Sunday
Times,
I thought about that night.

The day my father died, my life restarted. The person who I was disappeared, washed away by the turn of the tide. From time to time I still catch glimpses of the child I was when my father was alive: swimming through warm water in a crystal blue pool. Playing Marco Polo with my mom and dad. Dissolving into giggles as they get close. My hands reach out, touch their arms underwater. My legs wrap around my father’s waist. My mother’s hair is pulled back in a bun; my father smiles as I hold him tight. A seashell wind chime gently blows in the breeze. I can hear waves crashing somewhere through the hedges and over the dunes.

ON A STRETCH
of pale sand, a group of novice Sri Lankan monks in crimson tunics, children not yet teens, play with the outgoing tide. A thin boy in hand-me-down shorts and a mud-stained T-shirt watches from a distance. His name is Maduranga. He’s thirteen years old, and his brother and sister were taken by the sea.

We’re in a village called Kamburugamuwa. We found it quite by chance. There are no stores, no main street, just a cluster of simple homes and a mud path to the sea. Before the tsunami, visitors to the village were told to look for a Buddhist temple between the main road and the water. The temple is gone now; a slab of concrete, the building’s foundation, is all that remains. There are children’s schoolbooks and small colored plastic cups scattered about in the sand.

When the tsunami struck Kamburugamuwa, the temple was crowded. A Buddhist ceremony was taking place. Fifty-nine people had squeezed into the main room. Most sat facing the head monk, who was seated on a slightly raised dais, his back to the sea. Had there been a window behind the monk, perhaps some of those assembled would have seen the water coming, would have been able to escape. There was no window, however, no warning, no siren. There was chanting and incense, then water and death. Out of fifty-nine people in the temple that morning, only nine survived. Fifteen of the dead were children.

Phil Littleton, my cameraman, is South African. He’s worked in Africa for much of his career and has developed both a strong dislike of authority and a wildly inappropriate sense of humor. I don’t need to tell him what to do here. We all know why we’ve come.

“I’m going to go shoot around the temple,” he tells me. “You know, ‘the cups that the little hands will never touch again,’ that sort of thing.”

At first I’m shocked by his comment, but then I find myself laughing. He’s making fun of us, of course, of what I’m thinking, of what Charlie is thinking as well. We’ve all seen the cups, all know what they represent; Phil has just spoken the words out loud. As a journalist, no matter how moved you feel, how respectful you are, part of your brain remains focused on how to capture the horror you see, how to package it, present it to others. We’re here because children have died. Phil is just cutting to the chase. He’s just getting what we came for.

Maduranga doesn’t speak much English, but he shows me around what’s left of his village, walking slowly through the labyrinth of huts and small houses made of cheap brick. He pauses by a muddy ditch and points to a spot about five feet away. “Sister,” he says, and I realize that this is where his sister’s body was found. A short distance away is his house, and next to it, in the backyard, is a mound of earth covered by a worn wooden board. It’s his brother’s grave. The wood is used to keep the rain off. Maduranga has no photos by which to remember his brother or his sister; soon even the mound will disappear. There will be no sign that either of them ever existed.