Paradise Drowning

Short Story

Ceylon.  Sri Lanka. 

  The names themselves conjure up images of mystical mountain temples, vast rainforests, herds of wild elephants roaming free through the thick wet jungles. 

  What the names don’t summon is the teeming modern city of Colombo, home to two million people.  Or the outer villages where people still use water buffalo to work the muddy paddy fields, and where poverty is as rife as mosquitoes. 

  To me, the names mean something different.  When I think of Sri Lanka, I think of death.  When I speak of the island that is just a teardrop in the Indian Ocean, I speak of loss and heartache, courage and friendship.

  And I think of the waves of the sea that crash against the sun drenched beaches.  The cold shadows cast by the swaying palms that chill like a ghost passing through me.  There are a lot of ghosts in Sri Lanka these days.  Their spirits haunt the beaches and the coastline, like memories that won’t ever leave.

  I swore, after Lyn, that I would never return here.  That I would let the memories fade like old scars. 

  But here I am again.  Still searching for something that I know I’ll never find.

  My good friend Raja stands beside me, looking out at the grey ocean as the sun begins to set.

  “You need to move on, Aaron” he said in his perfect, though heavily accented English.  “She’s not coming back.  None of them are.”

  I could feel myself fighting back stinging tears that burned the back of my eyes. 

  “Do you ever ask yourself why, Raja?”

  “Every day, my friend.  Every day I have to come back here and confront my fears.  Every day I hear those screams, mingling with my own.  Maybe you should have come back sooner”, he said, with a hint of reproach.

  I ignored the dig.  I know I hadn’t seen him for nearly three years, despite my promises. 

  “You do this every day, Raja?” I asked although he had already answered, wondering how he could face it.

  “Yes my friend.”

  “Does it get any easier?”

  Raja answered with silence, looking out at the swelling waves as the low-lying sun shot the grey sea with sparks of colour.  He said nothing as the minutes rolled by.  Finally, when the sun slipped into the sea and the shadows had begun to gather around us, he looked up at me.  I could see tears glittering in his eyes.

  “No, Aaron it never does.”  He pointed his hand out towards the sea.  “But there are no answers.  Whether you pray to your Christian God, or Buddha, or Allah.  Even if you pray to the thousand gods of the Hindu’s there will be no answers.  The gods are silent.  Perhaps the screams of so many struck them dumb.”

  “Then how do we come to terms with it?  If even God cannot give us a reason?”

  “You must find your own, my friend.  You must face these ghosts you fear so much.”

  I turned away from him, looking back at the grounds of the rebuilt hotel where it had happened.  Where I had lost everything, like so many others.

  “I thought that’s what I was doing,” I said.

  “No.  You are remembering. It’s not the same.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  My friend shrugged.  He took a sly draw of a joint that burned between his fingers, first checking to make sure no one saw him.  Drug laws in this part of the world were heavy, and even possession could cost him his head.  He puffed away, and then tossed the embers into the next oncoming wave.