A few years ago, I was seated with two male friends, K and B, casually chatting on the deck of a resort in the south of Sri Lanka, facing the vast Indian Ocean. One of my friends, who was smoking, exhaled a puff of smoke into the air and casually said, "Do you know what happened to B... our friend?" He pointed to the other friend. "He lost his wife and two children in the tsunami of 2004, right here in Hambantota. He lost everyone, but he survived."

I immediately looked at my other friend, who gave a slight nod and said, "Yes." Although I was deeply shaken by what I had just heard, I simply said, "That's very sad." Without missing a beat, we shifted the conversation back to casual topics.

What struck me was how lightly my friend had mentioned such a personal tragedy, almost with a slight smile on his lips, as though it were just another passing detail. It seemed almost indifferent to B’s emotions. Yet, B had long since moved on. He had remarried, had two young children, and, after 15 years, had found a new life beyond the trauma of the tsunami.

Then, recently, while going through the discarded library books at the Alliance Française in Colombo, I came across a novel with an attractive cover—crashing blue waves and the title Other Lives But Mine. It turned out to be the French novel D'autres vies que la mienne by Emmanuel Carrère. I was truly surprised to find that the first five chapters of the book are about the author’s vacation in Sri Lanka and his survival of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The book also describes his witnessing the death of a baby girl named Juliette. As the Francophone world has little knowledge about Sri Lanka, the story of the 2004 tsunami was not widely featured in many synopsis or literary articles regarding this book. (*Back cover of the book In Sri Lanka , a tsunami sweeps a child out to sea.... )

In one passage, Carrère recalls a conversation:

"When I ask him what has happened, he replies in English:

‘The sea, the water, big water. Is it true that people have died?’

‘Yes, many people dead, very dangerous.’

‘You stay in hotel? Which hotel?’

‘Eva Lanka?’

‘Good, good, go back there, it is safe.’"

The Sri Lankan would answer in fragments, never in complete sentences with correct grammar. The essentials had been uttered; they didn't know the past tense, they didn't use elaborate adjectives—just plain news.

Today, it is December 26th, twenty years after the great tragedy that took 35,000 lives in Sri Lanka. I vaguely remember the news of the waves crashing inland on TV. We thought it was a joke on a Sunday morning. Then we gasped when hearing that two people were dead, until we received the breaking news for weeks to come with the accumulating death toll.

Separation, death, and tragedy are all part of our lives. The tsunami taught us a profound lesson: though we may try to fight against the waves, we do fall and drown at times. But the key is to keep swimming.

Do we still remember the tsunami? I remember it only on the morning of December 26th, just before 9 AM, when the train was struck by the waves. The rest of the year, it never comes to mind, unless questioned by a curious tourist with a sympathetic tone: “You had a tsunami, right?” I keep nodding and say, “Yes,” like my friend B.

Do you have anything to say about the Indian Ocean Tsunami ?