Samodh Porawagamage
I promise I didn’t know a thing about the Telwatta Train Disaster! When the science teacher brought it up to show even steel isn’t dependable, I was daft enough to ask what the incident was. Kids rolled eyes and groaned, and the teacher sighed before explaining it to me. The tsunami had derailed an express train and crushed it. Over 1,700 died! One THOUSAND and seven HUNDRED! The world knew: It has an encyclopedia entry to it as the world’s worst railway disaster. After all, Telwatta is less than a hundred miles from where I almost died. This tactic of mum and dad to shield me from bad news isn’t working. It’s the opposite: I don’t feel protected. Something new flashes every day and I plunge into the wreckage from different angles to make sense. The worst thing about a disaster is you don’t have an inkling of what happened to you, let alone the other million.
***
Unusual squawks broke my sleep. They sounded out of place, so I went outside to look. There were four seagulls over the neighborhood, swooping up and down and sideways like unbalanced kites. It was the first time I saw or heard them away from the beach, so I made a ruckus all right by waking my parents out of their Sunday sleep to investigate the cause. Turned out there was nothing to panic a few phone calls later. But all morning, the seagulls monitored the situation for us and issued unanimous warning after warning before they departed: One shrieked, “Go…w away” as if paddywhacking a takaran sheet and the rest joined in chorus, “Go…w away, go…w away, away, away!” Later when my father got a call back, I overheard our house is not even one straight mile away from the beach. The grownups of our lane were on high alert, though nobody showed any sign of it. I think our only chance is to flee like that jumpy rabbit, who thought the sky was falling when he heard the thud of a coconut. Nobody can say he’s stupid anymore.
***
I have scissored out “impossible” from my dictionary. Leaving it there lulls me into a false complacency, the kind crabs are said to revel in the saucepan before the water begins to boil. The takeaway is that crabs, with their notorious speed, should try to escape at every stage before being cornered, because one danger leads to worse danger. But the humans on our street are too wise to take action; they attack the message of one fable with another fable as if the echo can be silenced by angry shouting. If they were the caught crabs, they’d die from the chemicals in tap water before the heat mellowed their crusts crispy for our teeth! Even when your house is a hundred miles away from the sea, the earth sinking and the sky falling are no longer out of the question, are they?
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Samodh Porawagamage writes about the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty and underdevelopment, and colonial and imperial atrocities. His debut collection of poetry, “becoming sam,” selected by Jaswinder Bolina, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2024.