I get the usual question, “Is your family ok?”
And I give what is becoming my standard response.

No one in my family was killed, and this is surprising because my father’s side lives in Pottuvil, which is right next to Galle, which was one of the most publicised spots in the country after the tsunami. In fact, one of my cousins, 6-year-old Shifa, lived in Galle.
School had just finished when the waves hit, and Shifa and her classmates had just begun heading home. I have her on video. The quality is crap and it’s dark, but it’s clear that her face is perfectly straight as she narrates her story. The class teacher, on seeing the oncoming waves, collected the kids and put them all up in a tree, and only then climbed for safety himself.
Of the the 30 kids in her class, only 6 survived.

She now lives in Pottuvil, with the rest of our extended family. Her parents worry that sending her back to her old school, which has reopened, would be traumatising.

I remember that night, after she told us her story for our “records,” she had nightmares and woke up crying.

So this is the story I tell people when they ask how my family is. And a few days ago I got the strangest response.
The woman I’d been speaking to looked at me with a look in her eyes that made me uncomfortable; it was almost a hungry look, something slightly savage.
“Did she grow?” she asked.
Confused, I stammered, “She was six at the time -”
“No, I mean, did she grow … mentally?”
“Oh.” I paused, Shifa’s face in my mind’s eye. She was one of the few people I’d been comfortable speaking Tamil with my whole month in Sri Lanka. I only ever saw her at night, when she was home from school, and so her memory is inextricably linked with that black, sequinned sky.
“I don’t know.” Something about the question made me withdraw, made me regard this woman with something like distrust. “I’d never met her before, I hadn’t known she existed, so I don’t really know whether she grew or not.”

And I couldn’t place what it was about that seemingly innocuous question that troubled me. The understanding of it comes and goes in blurred flashes. The sense that this was a romantic question, a breath-takingly naive question, the sort that we ask when we have no idea whatsoever what we’re really talking about. As though something holy had been betrayed, trampled on, photographed by blind tourists.

Growth?
Like it’s something you casually mention in small talk. How one’s soul grows, whether in leaps or bounds, after spending a day (that’s how long the child was missing) in a tree, watching people die. How children’s memories are imprinted with bodies being washed away, and the realisation that parents are as mortal and unreliable as everyone else.
As though these were things I could succintly put into bite-size sentences to make it easy for her to understand, easy to swallow, to digest.
As though really, it was for her own growth. Her own search for meaning, and she wanted to find it in someone else’s tragedy.

I think that her question unnerved me, because it reminded me of the problems I’d had with our alms-giving in Sri Lanka. We all think that there is power in helping others, that some sort of beauty must surround us because we help others. It becomes about us, not about the action, not about the victim. It’s not as obvious as, say, a celebrity donating a few thousand to some “exotic” charity while reporters and photographers crowd around. It’s much more personal than that, and much more systemic, too.
We’re out to save the world, as though the world were an entity that cannot live without our help. We’re out to save the world, because we think that unless we have seen death first hand, we cannot grow. We do it for purely selfish reasons; we want to grow.

I don’t know what it is; still it eludes me. Why I felt so uncomfortable when I taped the things we did, why I draw back when people assume an understanding they can’t handle. Why this understanding eldues me.
Surely I don’t have to go half-way across the world to understand myself.
And surely, you don’t need to devour someone else’s most private moments to come to terms with your own emptiness.