Wave

Wave is a 2013 memoir by Sri Lankan author and academic economist Sonali Deraniyagala, who lost her husband, her parents, and two children in the Asian tsunami of 2004. The memoir begins with the moment the tsunami struck the beach resort where Deraniyagala and her family were staying: the remainder of the book narrates the author’s grieving process. Praised by reviewers for its unflinching portrayal of extreme grief, Wave was named a Best Book of 2013 by The New York Times and Kirkus Reviews.

The book opens at a seaside resort in Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park. Deraniyagala is on holiday with her husband, Steve, their eight-year-old, Vikram, and five-year-old, Malli, and Deraniyagala’s parents. Deraniyagala notices that “the ocean looked a little closer than usual.”

Within minutes, Deraniyagala, Steve, and their children are in a jeep, racing away from the ocean. It occurs to Deraniyagala that they should go back for her parents, before she realizes that it is too late to save them.



The jeep cannot outrun the wave. Deraniyagala witnesses a moment of utter horror on Steve’s face before the Jeep flips. Carried away by churning water, Deraniyagala clings to a branch, which prevents her from being swept out to sea.

Deraniyagala knows intuitively that her family is dead, but for the time being, they are simply gone: there is “no moment of separation, not one that I was aware of anyway. It was not like I tried to cling to my children as they were torn from my arms, it was not like they were yanked from me, not like I saw them dead. They simply vanished from my life forever.”

In the hospital, she battles shock and a severe infection, caused by swallowing dirty water. Finally, a friend takes her to her aunt’s home in the city of Colombo. There, she struggles to assimilate the magnitude of her loss: “They are my world. How do I make them dead? My mind toppled.”



When she first arrives at her aunt’s house, she refuses alcohol, offered to help her sleep. Soon she is drinking half a bottle of vodka every day. When her relatives start rationing her sleeping pills, she buys black-market pills from a neighborhood pharmacy. She begins to entertain suicidal thoughts. Her relatives hide all the knives in the house. She lights cigarettes and puts them out on her skin. She is torn between the pain of constantly brooding on her loss and the worse pain of remembering her loss again should she allow herself to forget it even for an instant. “How is this me? I was safe always. Now I don’t have them, I only have terror, I am alone.”

A Dutch family buys her parents’ former home in Colombo. Deraniyagala begins to harass them, first calling them in the night and then visiting the house to yell at them through their gates.

After six months, Deraniyagala is able to summon the courage to visit the resort again. She goes with Steve’s father. Amazingly, they find traces of Deraniyagala’s lost loved ones scattered around the ravaged landscape: the back cover of Steve’s dissertation; a piece of Vikram’s shirt; one of Malli’s outfits.



It takes Deraniyagala two years to return to London and four to return for the first time to her house. Everything is as they left it. Her sons’ shoes wait by the door; in a pot in the kitchen, an onion peel from the last curry Steve made the family. From these relics, Deraniyagala reconstructs her family, showing us Vikram’s fanatical love of cricket; Malli’s playfulness; Steve’s intelligence and sensitivity.

As she continues to grieve, Deraniyagala also struggles to grasp her identity. When people ask her if she’s married or has kids, she doesn’t know what to say: “I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone someone else.” Yet, when she doesn’t tell her story, she feels that she is lying. Other aspects of grief surface by turns. For a time she is racked by guilt at the discovery that her grief has a “pecking order”: first her children, then her husband, lastly her parents—whom she did not even think to warn when she first spotted the wave.

When she finds herself unable to heal further in London, Deraniyagala takes an opportunity to move to New York. At first, leaving the place where she had lived with her family worsens her grief, but in time, she finds the distance healing. Eventually, she finds that she can remember her family more clearly with this safe distance interposed between herself and her memories.



An economist by training, Deraniyagala begins research on economic development, focuses on post-disaster recovery, feeling her way into a new life and a new identity, while keeping her old life with her. The memoir ends seven years after the tsunami, as Deraniyagala hears her boys laughing in their garden in London, at the age they would have reached had they survived.