Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This also happened to be an auspicious day to travel (once the head was "anointed by the juice of the nuga leaves at 7:39 A.M. while standing on karanda leaves"), and the ticket line was so long I simply pushed myself onto the train and got a seat. No one asked for my ticket. The train had not changed in all that time. It pulled out and rolled through the Colombo outskirts and down the coast to where the tsunami had hit.

I remembered this as one of the most beautiful journeys I'd taken on the Railway Bazaar—one of the loveliest railway lines in the world, at sea level, right next to the beach, traveling along the glittering shore, the blue sea and the palm groves, all the windows open, the ocean breeze blowing through the coach. It could have been the same sunny day I spent on this train in October 1973: the same people, monks, nuns, families, children, old women in shawls, men in neckties, men in sarongs. "The recommended color of dress is blue," the Avurudu astrologers had announced.

On a morning like this, on December 26, 2004, on this coast, the tide had ebbed dramatically. The tide went out to the horizon, Sri Lankans told me. All we saw was mud and sand and distant rocks—no water at all.

The weird sight of the water sucked off the ocean floor, the exposed sand gleaming in the bright sun, had attracted the villagers who lived by the shore. They had, many of them, run onto the sand and into this new land. Big fishing boats sat helpless in the middle of the strange waterless place.

And then the tidal wave appeared as a high wall of foam rushing towards them, and soon it was on them, on everyone, crashing onto the land, crushing houses, sweeping huts away, drowning cattle and people, hitting a train just like this one and knocking it sideways off the rails, drowning 1,500 of the passengers, almost everyone in the coaches.

The tracks had been hammered apart, even brick and cement houses tumbled and destroyed, foot-thick walls smashed to pieces. Yet, a kind of miracle, most trees—the palms, the bunches of pandanus with great stalking roots, the sweeps of mangroves—were left undisturbed by the same wave that swept away fortress-like walls and paved roads. Because of these tenacious trees the coast retained a look of serenity, not the knocked-flat aftermath I associated with a hurricane.

Many houses had been rebuilt—bright bricks, fresh cement, newly woven thatch, and bamboo. There were new bridges and paved roads, and all along the rail line evidence of a massive rebuilding effort. The line itself had been repaired two months after the tsunami, but now, sixteen months later, I could see that many people still lived in emergency shelters, and here and there were signs with arrows saying Tsunami Camp. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their homes.

The most poignant sight, very common, were the many grave markers along the shoreline, as though the people had drowned on that very spot—and perhaps they had—the gravestones in the shape of Buddhist stupas, big and small, clusters of them on the beach, under the palms, dozens in some places. I began to associate the big stupas with adults, the smaller ones with children, and even infant-sized stupas, as though these poor people had been turned to stone by the horror of the sudden slap of the wave, and remained there, petrified on the beach.

My coach was crowded, people sitting and standing, swaying as the train rounded the curvy shore, but freshened by the sea breeze.

"So glad to see you," said the man next to me. "Tourists are afraid to come here because of the troubles—the Tamil business, the tsunami, and what and what."

"I was here a long time ago," I said.

"It was different then," he said.

"I think it was the same."

"I mean, it was better."

"Maybe."

We were all headed to Galle this beautiful day, but all along the line was the evidence of tsunami damage. Where villages and houses had been rebuilt, roads repaved, bridges fixed, there were gravestones and stupas and plaques, with freshly chiseled inscriptions, commemorating the many thousands who had died.