(The following story by Michele Mandel appeared on the Toronto Sun website on December 29.)
PERALIYA, Sri Lanka — Ghosts still haunt these three crumpled coaches sitting by the railway tracks.
For Sri Lankans, rusting train cars 8317, 15059 and 15940 are their sad ground zero, the twisted metal compartments a macabre monument to the 1,700 souls who died here when the tsunami roared ashore.
Jayanthi Anthony can still hear their screams.
Bound for Matara from the capital city of Colombo, the train was called Samudradevi, which means Queen of the Sea — its eight carriages pulled by the “Manitoba,” Canadian-built General Motors engine No. 591.
Carrying holiday goers to the beaches and commuters to their homes, the ill-fated train was running on time that Dec. 26 morning, an unusual punctuality that would deliver so many to their deaths.
At 9:26 a.m. the Queen of the Sea came to a sudden halt just outside this seaside village, 95 km south of Colombo, and waited for a green signal that never came.
Anthony saw the train as her salvation.
The tsunami’s first unexpected swell of water had swept the 16-year-old from the home she shared with her parents and sisters, and now she was holding on to a palm tree for dear life. Passengers on the train heard her shouts for help, threw her a rope and managed to pull her in to safety.
She thought she was saved.
Meanwhile, the engineer was urging frightened villagers to climb in as well, that the train would be their island in this sudden storm. With their babies in tow, more than 500 clambered aboard. When the compartments were full, they scrambled on to the roof.
No one expected the giant wall of water that came next.
“It was so ferocious,” Anthony says through a translator. “I thought I was going to die. I was so terribly frightened that I couldn’t even think what to do.”
She is a tall, lanky girl with hunched shoulders and haunted eyes.
She stands by the tracks as a train bound for Colombo rattles by and reluctantly casts her thoughts back to that terrifying day.
What she remembers most are the terrible cries of panic and desperation as the tsunami’s second wave – a tower of water two-storeys high – suddenly stormed toward them.
“People were screaming, ‘Don’t close the windows, we want to get in. Please help us, please help us.’ They were making horrible sounds.”
Then came the silence. The sea swamped their coach, knocking it over like a flimsy toy and submerging her and her fellow passengers in its raging black waters.
Anthony doesn’t recall what happened next. Swept through a window, she was carried more than a kilometre before grasping on to a palm tree and holding on until the waters receded.
Anthony shyly lifts her blue skirt a few centimetres to show the scars that criss-cross her brown legs. “From the iron bars on the train.”
The cliff of water hit with such force that it ripped up the concrete studded rail ties, twisted them like a loop on a roller coaster and flung the locomotive and its eight coaches into a bog.
Of the estimated 1,700 on board, only 50 survived.
One of the villagers goes to fetch the photos she took of the horrific aftermath.
They are gut wrenching. Amid the holiday detritus of spilled baggage, tennis rackets, bathing suits and pocket books, a sea of bodies lie sprawled by the cars. Women in vibrantly coloured saris are bent askew in the mud, their faces wearing looks of such heartbreaking surprise.
Anthony’s entire family was swept away except for her married sister, who lost her 2-year-old in the waves that day. For months, remains were still being pulled from the swamps surrounding the village. Only the bodies of her mother and another sister were found.
STILL IN MOURNING
Her grief comes in waves. A year has passed and she mourns them still, especially her mother.
“When I feel sick, there’s nobody to take care of me,” Anthony says, turning her head away to wipe the tears. “I don’t know what the future will hold for me now.”
Her 23-year-old sister doesn’t have the energy to comfort her. Chandima Kanthi tries her best, but she knows she cannot replace the matriarch of their family.
“It would have been better if both of us had died, too, that day because I have too many burdens,” Kanthi sighs. “A mother is an irreplaceable loss. Her love, her affection. We can never get that back.”
In Matara, 60 kilometres down the tracks, 11-year-old Wathsala Nethmini feels the same about her father.
He had boarded the train that morning in Colombo. A harbour security guard in the capital, he was coming home for the holidays, she explains, kneading her hands, wishing the pain away.
Yet it will not ebb, not even one year on.
What was he like?
“He was 45 and fat and not very dark and not very light,” Wathsala replies, still issuing a missing person’s report that remains unanswered.
“And,” she adds, “he loved us very much.”
She and her older brother missed him terribly while he worked in the big city all week. He was finally coming home and she knew he would be bearing bags laden with apples and treats. He always did.
But her father didn’t come home that day.
A doctor who shared his third-class compartment later told them that he saw their father torn from the train when the water crashed through.
They never found his remains. All the Sri Lankan army managed to identify was his leather suitcase – a sodden newspaper, a toothbrush, some shoe polish and a package of cold medicine inside.
Her mother cries all the time now, Wathsala says.
Her own eyes are bottomless pools of tears.
In the emptiness that fills her heart, she clings to one treasured keepsake.
Something so small, so priceless.
From his brush at home, she found a stray strand of her father’s hair. Now she has it pressed in a book that never leaves her side.
For a father’s daughter, it is all the tsunami has left her.
PHYSICAL SCARS QUICKLY REPAIRED
Grief still echoes in Peraliya even though the physical scars of the tragedy were quickly repaired.
Just 57 days later, the track was fixed and trains were running again. A Danish aid agency put up tiny wooden shacks as temporary shelters.
The state-run railway lifted the battered carriages and agreed to leave three of them here as a memorial. Now the dead stand sentry to a village barely alive.
In the dusty heat, barefoot boys beg for money from the tourists who come to stare at the train cars.
“Please mister, please mister,” they say, their hands outstretched.
Some survivors have model ships to sell. Others barter their stories.
“Madam, madam,” offers one, “I lost my three children, my house, everything, madam. I will tell you. Please help.”
The women of Peraliya insist everyone has forgotten them. Across the tracks, there is a new medical centre, school and houses under construction. But their homes lay within 100 metres of the coast and the government has told them they will have to be relocated.
And so they wait. Only this haunted train is witness to their despair.
“The aid agencies helped us with soap, shampoo, napkins, toothbrushes and clotheslines,” complains Inoka Samanthi.
“What we need is a place to live in, a roof over our head. We need a home to recover, not knick-knacks.”
She offers a peek inside her tiny shack. A shelter, nothing more. She and her husband sleep on a slat of wooden boards and cook on a small fire outside.
“Most of the foreigners came and promised houses. We haven’t seen the houses. We don’t have anything. We need help.”
We pledge to take their pleas back with us to Canada.
But it is just another promise they don’t trust anymore, as ethereal as the spirits still riding their train of death.