In a Hamlet Built on Forbidden Love, a Cyclone Buried It All

The hillside hamlet was built around a matriarch’s stubborn, scandalous love.

Its four homes — with foundations of stone, walls of concrete and strict boundaries of discipline set by the matriarch, H.M. Koinmanike — survived tropical downpours and the ever-present stigma that followed her decision to marry a man of a different ethnicity.

In the shadow of a gnarled, old mango tree between the houses stood a small family temple, an altar where every year during the Hindu festival of Deepavali they sacrificed an animal as an offering to the gods — a goat in a prosperous year, a chicken most years. It was here, in Sri Lanka’s central highlands, that her children lived, loved, and endured a difficult life of poverty. Her children’s children, with better education and white-collar jobs, were beginning to turn the page to a brighter future.

Then Cyclone Ditwah struck.

The most devastating storm to lash the island nation in decades killed around 800 people late last month. It swallowed villages, wiping out entire communities in the hardest hit central hill region of Kandy.

As the storm closed in on the evening of Nov. 27, Sivakumar Gopal called his sister — Dayavati Gopal, the matriarch’s eldest living daughter — from the restaurant where he worked as a cook in the capital, Colombo, to check if they were OK.

“My sister was making tea when we called, and brother-in-law was in the hall, in the front,” he said. “After that, we didn’t hear from them.”

The hamlet was buried under mud. The only thing that remained intact in what was otherwise a giant mound of mud was the old mango tree, and just one room of a house.

Survivors like Sivakumar, who had escaped the destruction because they were out on a chore or working far away, rushed back. They had to find their way through broken roads and disrupted transport to come and dig for their loved ones.

Ms. Gopal’s husband, Mutaiah Nagarajah, was found early. His body was discovered after rescuers homed in on three holes dug by Nicky, the only one of the family’s two dogs that survived.

But to find the rest of the family, it would be a long and crushing process.

Day after day, members of the family arrived at the site, joined by about a dozen infantrymen from the army.

Two machinists operated an excavator to dig into the brown sludge, but the families here were poor, so the effort had to be paid for by donations from around the country. The excavator’s clawed buckets cut through everything in its way as the family watched, looking for signs of their once-life, once-home. The workers stopped only for meals, or when rain brought fears of more landslides.

“The houses were totally gone, I couldn’t see anything,” said Sivakumar. Quietly, he took command of the search for his sister and her family.

A new start

Traditionally, life in the hills revolved around colonial-era tea plantations. You were either a landowner, an aristocrat. Or you were a laborer, largely Tamils brought as bonded workers from India’s south.

That Ms. Koinmanike, the matriarch, had tried to cross these lines was the scandal.

Belonging to a Buddhist Sinhalese aristocratic family, in the 1960s she had fallen in love with Mutapan Gopal, a Hindu Tamil of Indian descent. Both their families disapproved, hers to the point of practically disowning her, so she left her home to start a humble new life.

“Until her last day, she told us that if her family ever gives us land or inheritance, we should not take any of it,” her youngest daughter, Vasantha, said.

There wasn’t much of a wedding, just a marriage certificate — he signed, she put her thumbprint — that remained in the family long after they died. It is now buried deep in the mud, along with the land deeds.

Ms. Koinmanike worked as a cook on one plantation, and Mr. Gopal as a laborer on another. A nun from a nearby church helped them acquire their first cow. Over the years, the couple expanded the herd to seven.

“I used to sit on my mom’s lap and ask her why she left her big house and came here,” her youngest son, Rajakumar, said. “She’d joke that it was her ‘karma.’”

When Sivakumar was 9 and was out grazing the cows, his oldest sister, 18, drank poison and took her own life. She had been in love with a man whose family had rejected her because of the difference in their castes.

She was buried in a roadside cemetery. On her way to work daily, Ms. Koinmanike would stop to clean the grave. One afternoon two years later, when Sivakumar was 11, his mother asked him to help plant another mango tree by the grave.

“My mother changed after that, she went quiet,” Sivakumar said, referring to the suicide. “Her energy was gone.”

Ms. Koinmanike died in 2016, followed by her husband three years later. Both were buried by the same new mango tree.

Now, Sivakumar was facing more loss. After the body of Mr. Nagarajah, his brother-in-law, was found, the diggers were clawing at the mud for Ms. Gopal and two of her children.

Krishanti Nagarajah, the couple’s younger daughter, 19, had put in a deposit for a teacher’s training course, and their son Roshan, 6, was in first grade. Roshan had been particularly close to one of the two family dogs — Tarzan — who was always at his side but was also now missing under the mud.

Their house had only recently got new tiles and new curtains, as the family’s earners grew to two. The eldest daughter, Saranya Nagarajah, 22, had begun work as a nurse in Colombo. About five months ago, the family had bought its first washing machine on installments.

The place had become so cozy that whenever Mr. Nagarajah, who worked as a bus conductor in Colombo, came home for his 10-day break every two months, he would struggle to leave.

Saranya, the only surviving child, now quietly watched the desperate search.

“Her father had dropped her at the bus station a day before and she had come to Colombo,” Saranya’s partner, Komala Pragash, 22, said. “Otherwise, she would have been gone too.”

Days of desperation

Each day, the digging would end without certainty that there was money for the excavator and its crew the next day. But a donation from some corner of the country kept the machine going.

On the fifth day of digging, they were getting closer. Sivakumar climbed shotgun on the excavator, so he could scrutinize the objects coming up: a kitchen rack, pieces of pink tile.

By 11 a.m., there were signs of a body. The machine stopped. The soldiers quickly brought out boxes of masks and surgical gloves.

“Is it her front, or back?” Sivakumar asked.

His sister, Vasantha, her eyes fixed on the pit from the top of the rock, started weeping quietly. Saranya turned away. Some of the infantrymen rushed large sheets of tin from a once-roof to use as a stretcher to pull the body out.

As the soldiers methodically cleared the mud around the body with shovels, Sivakumar stepped back. He told a neighbor to “go prepare the grave,” he called on Vasantha to “get the saris,” and he called on his brother, Rajakumar, to find the polyethylene body bags.

The body was framed by kitchen objects. First the soldiers extracted pots of all sizes, then a metal tub, followed by a two-burner gas stove.

As they rolled the body onto the metal sheet, Sivakumar saw its face. It wasn’t his sister but a man, a neighbor from a nearby home moved by the tide of mud. They laid him in the shade, covered in a purple sari.

There was silence, deflation.

Rajakumar described the neighbor as a good tile mason, a bigger drinker.

“If you bought him a bottle and told him to finish laying tiles in a day, he’d do it,” Rajakumar said.

Then the digging picked up again, inching toward the mango tree.

After the lunch break, a little after 2 p.m., they found the little boy — Roshan. The machine bucket lapped him up. He was faced down, as if pressed onto his pillow, his shiny back bare.

His paternal uncle, Muttiah Ravi, made phone call after call.

“Roshan, Roshan,” he repeated, choking on his sentence. “Roshan has been found.”

The area’s official coroner, a small man in a black tie and a black mask, arrived with a ledger. As he asked Saranya questions to register the death of her young brother, she offered him a chair to sit.

In the distance, just as the digging machine turned on again, shouts of “oh, oh!” were heard. Everyone rushed. The soldiers stepped closer to scrutinize.

There was another body — Ms. Gopal. And not far from her, her daughter, Krishanti. As if, in their final moments, somehow through the mud and slush that would block their oxygen, they had tried to crawl their way to each other.

Sivakumar, who had held it together through the days of searching, moved back to a distance as the bodies of his sister and niece were pulled up. His shoulders hunched. He sobbed quietly.

The trio of loss was complete. Tarzan, the dog, would remain under the mound.

Vasantha and Saranya came closer for a final look.

Saranya was quiet, her eyes heavy. She paused, looked at the three bodies in front of her, and her gaze focused on the largest. And then, in a voice that pierced through the hamlet, through the lush hill around it, she burst into scream after scream after scream: “AMMA! AMMA! AMMA!”

Vasantha fainted next to her.

Two dozen men slowly gathered, and one by one carried the bodies on stretchers, down the slope, and along the side of the narrow road toward the cemetery as the evening sun softened.

A large grave had been dug behind that mango tree that had marked the family’s first loss all those years ago, now tall and solid four decades later.

First they lowered Ms. Gopal, to the right of the grave. When they lowered her daughter Krishanti, the men asked if they should place her next to the mother, in the middle of the pit.

“No, no,” said Sivakumar, who had planned all of it out. “The other side.”

Sivakumar carried Roshan in his arms, as if a sleeping bundle, and lowered him to the men standing in the grave. They placed him between his mother and sister.

Sivakumar and Rajakumar lit incense sticks, moved them around to bless the mound of dirt that now held their loved ones.

Then, they walked out of the cemetery, their future uncertain as they slowly made their way back toward the hamlet that was no more.

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