Fourteen stories written by the husband and wife team of Simon Harris and Neluka Silva constitute this rather quick, but emotionally charged volume. The first story immediately grabbed me since it was a celebration of life rather than a tsunami account. The delicate, swift evocation of an old man’s life in only a few pages, and the unsettling disappearance of his dog, all pointed to the terrible event about to happen but in fact focused much more on life and finding love.
The stories move through cultural and social issues with ease. Young characters struggle with desires to perform on stage, the dread of impending womanhood, dealing with the separation of parents, and giving up a furry best friend to someone who may need him more. Adults struggle through the end of marriage, verbal abuse from a chief minister, the ongoing pain of the loss of a young child, yearning to have children, struggling with poverty.
The use of two writers in this collection is a good move, since it ensures that the descriptive prose of Simon Harris is never overwhelming when balanced with Neluka Silva’s natural writing style, and more conversational prose. What is common throughout these stories is a focus on children and their experiences, and of people who may not have children but who desire them. There is also a common thread of relationships in trouble, uncomfortable silences and divorce.
Finally, it is striking that loss features heavily in many of the stories – though not necessarily of a person in the tsunami. This loss is expressed in many ways and continually expresses itself to the reader through the old man missing his youth, his dead wife and his dog, through a man understanding he has come to the end of his marriage and is losing the love he had for his wife, through a young woman faced with losing her childhood, and a young girl losing her teddy bear because she chose to send it to children affected by the tsunami.
These are just some of the areas of loss covered in this collection of short stories that stand out. Of course in many of the stories there are human losses as family members and friends perish in the waves, but these are often a detail while the stories focus more on the loss of often intangible things such as innocence, youth, love and hope.
The stories also point the way forward: in one a mother moves on from the death of her own daughter by helping others to deal with the aftermath of their own catastrophe, showing us that no matter what happens to us we can overcome when faced with the necessity of supporting others. It touches on the best of human nature when clowns, dance teachers and doctors fly across the world to make life a little better for people they hadn’t met before. It also shows how the influence of a few special people can transform lives and that they will be remembered, and their influences continue, even after they have passed away.What stayed with me after having read this book was a sense of unease. While the final story had a positive ending, as if to convince the reader that everything is going to be all right in the end, it cannot shift the overall message, which is one of the continual loss humans experience in the cycle of life. While this may make the tsunami seem part of the cycle of many lives, and therefore not quite so shocking, it adds a more universal shock that every person on the planet is a part of this process of revolving loss and grief that affects us all at some time or another.
It would be a mistake to miss out on this unassuming book of individual stories because of the word “tsunami” in the title. In fact the tsunami is simply a part of the background of each story, with the emotions of those affected by events in Sri Lanka on the morning of December 26, 2004, taking centre stage and often being clarified or affected deeply by this sudden event. The tear in your eye at the end of some of these stories may be from the sadness of loss, or from being touched by the goodness in humans – both of which were commonplace reasons to cry after the tsunami and will continue to evoke tears long after the memory of those terrible waves has faded.
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