Sweating heavily into his dark brown shirt and trousers, P.B. Lionel tears out a receipt from the order book for his Welcome Trade Centre clothing store and hands it over with almost tearful formality. The last rites.
In addition to a description of goods and costs, the crumpled piece of paper also bears the address of the store: 33, Mahajanapola, Galle, Sri Lanka. Just over the road from the central post office. Or three metres from the sea, which now laps gently at the shore.
But the information is far more detailed than need be. Inexplicably, Mr Lionel's 2.5-metre-wide, three-storey building stands alone amid rubble, piles of shattered glass and fragments of former lives: the odd toy, old socks, blackened cooking pots.
It is absurd that the Welcome Trade Centre should have survived, but typical of the selective cruelty of the Boxing Day tsunami. Still, Mr Lionel has lost everything. His building might be standing, but it will have to be demolished. There is no insurance. Twelve people have lost their jobs. It's over.
Galle, a town of 69,000 people with a history stretching back through Portuguese, Dutch and British rule, sits right at the end of the subcontinent and was hammered by the three waves that have set Sri Lanka back perhaps a decade.
In the town and surrounding districts, 4,300 people died. About 1,700 of them were on board a single commuter train - the Ocean Queen - which now stands on spare track just north of the city, like a shrine to the entire country's dead.