Book review: Wave, a Memoir of Life After the Tsunami

On December 26, 2004, when the tsunami broke across the shores of the Indian Ocean, killing at least 275,000 people in a dozen countries, my three small children and I were paddling in the sea in Mumbai. We all noticed an unusually high, strong riptide that morning, but it was not until we returned to the hotel that we learnt how lucky we had been.

We had changed our Christmas plans at the last minute to attend a friend's navjot - a Parsee ceremony akin to a confirmation or bar mitzvah - and so narrowly missed spending Christmas in a beach resort south of Chennai. That morning, the resort was completely devastated by the tsunami. Almost everyone staying there was either severely injured or killed.

Like millions of others, we sat watching the television pictures of the tsunami engulfing beaches and islands across the region, appalled and thankful that we had chosen the west rather than the east coast of India for our holiday. But it is only now, reading Sonali Deraniyagala's memoir, Wave, that I can even begin to understand the full horror of what happened.

That morning, Deraniyagala and her husband, parents and two boys were, like us, on a family holiday - but in their case they were 960km to the south, at the Yala national park, on the southeast coast of Sri Lanka. The first thing Deraniyagala saw was the sea rising - a sight that looked odd, but not threatening. Only gradually did the full import of what was happening dawn on her - "Oh my God," she screamed, "the sea's coming in."

She grabbed her children and ran with her husband behind the hotel and into a waiting jeep. They were driving away when the wave hit.

Deraniyagala suffered an internal injury as the jeep turned over, and when she regained consciousness she was spinning around and around, bleeding, naked from the waist down, covered with mud, and with her mouth full of sand. She was quite alone. There was no sign of the rest of her family. For a while there was a strange calm: "I was floating on my back. A flock of storks was flying above me."