Sea Swallows Their World in Southern Asia

After the cataclysmic waves that washed so much away, the houses of worship still stand, their walls now stacked with rations, their floors lined with sleeping mats, their roofs sheltering survivors left almost speechless by the tragedy.

In a Buddhist temple, a 16-year-old girl ponders her new status as the eldest in a family of orphans. In a Roman Catholic church school, a 41-year-old mother describes how the waves vaulted a bridge facing her family’s riverside house. In a mosque, a businessman weeps for the loss of his mother.

Before the undersea quake and resulting tsunami, Galle was a port and agricultural market center on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, where tourists came for the quiet, palm-lined beaches, the scenic views and the history. Old hotels, a fort, a lighthouse reflected the colonial influence left by first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British.

Today, amid the rubble of smashed buildings and stacks of freshly made coffins, people queue up in long relief lines, in a scene repeated across the coastal areas of a dozen nations devastated by the waves of Dec. 26. Some try to look ahead; many cannot yet.

These are the stories of three survivors.

*

Sulochana Gunawadena sat on a bench, staring at the ground.

“I can’t understand what’s happening,” said the barefoot 16-year-old, who was seeking refuge in a hall at the Buddha Sinharamaya temple, a group of concrete buildings set amid lush vegetation. As she spoke, a monk in an orange robe scurried past a blackboard announcing mealtimes for the refugees who crowd the temple.

Tragedy is nothing new to Sulochana. Nine years ago, her mother died in childbirth. Her father, distraught over the loss of his wife, committed suicide three months later by drinking a chemical mixture, according to friends and a cousin.

Sulochana, her two sisters and two brothers moved into the house of their grandparents, who took care of the orphans. One sister married and moved to Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, and Sulochana became the oldest child left in the house. Fourteen months ago, a police motorcycle struck and killed her grandfather.

Sulochana’s grandmother buckled under the burden of taking care of four children as well as selling snacks and betel leaves, a mild stimulant, at a kiosk at the bus terminal. So the girl quit school to help care for the younger children.

Then, the morning of Dec. 26, the waves hit.

On the temple bench, Sulochana was reluctant to talk about the moment when torrents of waters first ravaged the family’s house from the sea side, then from the opposite side as the enormous waves retreated.

She let other homeless people nearby recount how she and her siblings fled the house, scrambling onto a wall to escape the tide. When the wall crumbled, they clambered onto a roof, and when the roof started to shake, they jumped onto another building. Finally, they climbed to safety on a main road.

Their grandmother was left behind. Afterward, her body was found, crushed between two floating buses. A telephone kiosk lay on top of her. The children had no way to arrange burial, so the body went into a mass grave.

For now, Sulochana stays in the temple, where monks hand out toothpaste, mosquito coils and other supplies.

Her hair tied in a ponytail, Sulochana shows little sign of grief or anxiety. Like many Sri Lankans who lost loved ones and homes, her quiet demeanor suggests acceptance of her fate, or possibly shock. She says she might live with a cousin, though her two uncles cannot serve as guardians because they are heroin addicts.

Her siblings are all she has left.

“I want to stay with my brothers and sister,” Sulochana said. “I know this isn’t the proper age to take care of children. But I don’t care because they’re my brothers.”

One of the greatest natural catastrophes in generations was just another milestone on the trail of this shy girl’s ill fortune.

“It’s hard to bear this tragedy,” she said softly, “but I have to.”

*

The outlines of a basketball court marked the floor of the auditorium at the school of St. Mary’s Church, where displaced people staked out corners amid piles of donated clothing, supplies of rice and other staples. On a far wall was printed the Latin phrase, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam,” which means, “For the greater glory of God.”

P.K. Pushpa brought her children here, the ones who survived, and kept them close.

Seated on a plastic chair, the 41-year-old woman spoke passionately about the moment the waves came.

She was in the kitchen of her riverside home near the seashore when she heard the cries of her children: “The water’s coming! The water’s coming!”

Her home was among the most vulnerable because it nestled at the water’s edge, below the Mahamodara Bridge at the edge of Galle’s municipal area, on the road to Colombo.

The first wave came under the bridge and flooded the kitchen. Pushpa and five children huddled in another room as the waters receded. They grabbed the most valuable item in their house, the television, and ran for the door when the second wave struck -- this time, hurtling over the bridge.

“The seawater came all at once,” Pushpa said. “Then everything was gone in the water.”

She survived by clinging to the fronds of a palm tree that was felled by the force of the current, she said.

Asok, her 20-year-old son, was washed downstream but saved himself by grabbing some roots on the riverbank.

“I can’t remember how many times I went below the water,” he said. Though sand was filling his ears, he added, “I heard my mother screaming, ‘Where are you?’ ”

People across the wave-stricken areas say they have trouble remembering precisely what happened as the waters raged. In Pushpa’s case, it’s not clear exactly how, but when the flooding subsided her mother and a 19-year-old daughter were gone.

The family found the body of Pushpa’s mother on the day after the flood. Neighbors found the dead daughter, the body battered and swollen, identified by a traditional Tamil bracelet on her ankle.

Now Pushpa and her remaining family, joined by her husband, a baker who wasn’t home at the time, have taken shelter at St. Mary’s Church, an imposing gray structure at the crest of a hill in central Galle. Cinema actors showed up later to donate pillows, soap, rice and noodles.

The future is a blank for the family, as for so many others.

“We don’t have any ideas,” Pushpa said. “We have our land only.”

Those few square meters of land consist of an eroding sand bank, the shattered concrete base of a house that no longer exists, a few tree roots protruding from the muck, and some big stone slabs washed ashore like pebbles.

Asok, the son, isn’t so sure he wants to start life again in a place that seems so exposed.

“We think if we stay here,” he said, “what will happen to us next time?”

*

Galle’s Mohideen Jumma mosque is a pastel green two-story building with small minarets and open sides that reveal the busy interior. Inside, the low murmuring of Muslim prayers mixes with the milling and occasional shouts of an aid-distribution station.

Mohammed Yusuf has come here. A pensive man wearing a white embroidered cap and a sarong around his waist, he reflects on how the freak waves changed his world. Yusuf, 44, lost nine family members, including his mother. His wife and five children survived.

Yusuf is a gem dealer, and he was to meet with a client the morning the waves struck. He had finished cleaning a batch of gems and placed them on a table, awaiting a seller who was to pick them up. For two years, the seller arrived before 9 a.m. But Yusuf had told him to come after 10 a.m. that day, and the waves hit a half-hour before then.

The sea swallowed up his jewels.

“Only God knows why I told him to come later,” Yusuf said as he sat on a bench in the hot sun outside the mosque. “I can’t go back into the gem business. Maybe I’ll work in a tea house, or clean in a hotel. If people don’t have money to buy a cigarette, how can they buy gems?”

At the same moment his livelihood was lost, Yusuf watched as his 11-year-old son was swept out to sea to almost certain death -- and then flung back, landing alive on the roof of his home. He doesn’t comment when asked about this.

Yusuf said he was determined to live inland, fearing that thieves would scare people away from their homes with false warnings of another tidal onslaught, then raid empty houses.

To this point, Yusuf’s voice had been steady and clear. But then he began to cry. He told of speaking by phone with his brother in Saudi Arabia, who sobbed, “I want my mother.”

“Maybe it’s better to be dead,” Yusuf said, as old clothes burned in a pile on the mosque’s lawn.