Linda Gayathree

Age 19
Country: Sri Lanka

“Once upon a time there was a very beautiful house covered with coconut trees and beautiful flower pots. There was a very beautiful sea beach in front of the house. This house… belong[ed] to a nice family. Every day they started their lives with beautiful sceneries. Cool sea winds kissed them when they opened their windows. Dancing coconut trees tried to show a beautiful scene for them. At sunset they used to take their tea break.” “This house was mine.”

The day the sea came alive with vengeance, the world was silent. A gloomy pall draped itself over the canopy of the Sri Lankan sky as birds and insects muffled their morning chatter, but attacked their activities with renewed zeal. The air felt heavy as nature’s most destructive forces steadily gathered strength off shore. Linda Gayathree awoke that day in the house she loved, with the parents she adored, next to the sea she worshipped, and instantly noted the change. “I thought the sea had forgotten to wake up because it was so still,” she remarks. She watched the scurrying animals and insects and pondered their sudden frenzy. “I tried to understand them,” she says, “but [they] just left me confused.” It was December 26th, 2004.

Linda grew up on the coast of Sri Lanka’s island nation in the southern province. Her small house was built right on the sand, and she spent an idyllic childhood playing along golden beaches that have been called some of the most beautiful in the world. Her mother was a housewife and her father supported her, Linda, and Linda’s younger sister, with his modest earnings as a fisherman. The family was so tightly knit that Linda rarely ventured outside her home without her mother. Even a simple shopping trip involved her mother’s caring supervision.

Not surprisingly, Linda is unusually affectionate—a girl whose desire to give love and be loved is immediately apparent. But she is also quick, driven, and articulate. Her passion for literature and her instinctive feel for words— even in a second language—transform her written prose into near-poetry. She approaches her studies with a grave seriousness that ensured her superior performance in Sri Lanka’s competitive education system.

The day the sea rose, Linda showered and dressed as usual for school, despite the scent of danger in the air. As a devout Buddhist, Linda would pray to Buddha and receive her mother’s blessings over breakfast every morning before leaving the house. But when Linda walked into the kitchen, she discovered her mother standing as still as the ocean she stared at, her eyes trained on the hushed landscape. She turned to her eldest daughter and ordered her to stay home that day, describing the atmosphere as “not good.” Linda, always the dedicated student, ignored her mother’s precautions. For the first time in her life, she went off to school with neither breakfast nor her mother’s blessing, the ritual smothered in the silence hanging between a mother and her disobedient daughter. The time was 9:35 AM.

Linda walked the short distance to the bus stop to discover it eerily empty. She was waiting for her friend Supuni—“because I never went [to] classes without Supuni”—when she heard shouting. A boy ran by, calling to her: “‘Sister, the sea is coming, please run!’” As the words tumbled from his mouth, frothing seawater came gushing in a torrent down the street. The “white color sea waves” coursed toward Linda, trying “to kiss my legs,” as shock and fear rooted her to the spot. “I forgot what I was doing there. I couldn’t do anything,” she says. Out of nowhere, Supuni appeared and grabbed Linda’s hand, pulling her into a run. It was utterly bewildering to see the sea in the streets. “I was unable to think what had happened,” Linda recalls. “I’m so confused but I ran.”

Wading through the swirling waves, Supuni and Linda found their way to a nearby boys’ school. They took shelter in the building as the storm raged outside. “We were safe for now,” Linda says, “but we didn’t know what had happened to our families.”

This was no ordinary storm. A tsunami, unleashed by the fifth largest earthquake in a century, had crashed into the coast of Sri Lanka. An undersea tremor that became a magnitude 9.0 earthquake on the floor of the Indian Ocean had triggered a series of devastating tsunamis across the coasts of southern Asia. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand were the hardest hit. One of the deadliest natural disasters in history, the December 26th tsunami was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people across eleven countries. Indonesia suffered the most casualties with a death toll of 242,347. Sri Lanka came in second with 30,974 dead and another 100,000 displaced.

The day crawled by without any contact between Linda and her family. As each further hour passed without any sign of her parents, Linda became more certain they had been killed. Her parents, after taking refuge in her grandparents’ home, were equally convinced of her death. “They searched me among all the dead bodies,” Linda says with traces of horror and sadness. Within less than twelve hours, 2,000 corpses had already been collected at the hospital. "Fortunately,” Linda says, “I leave with my life.”

By six in the evening, Linda felt brave enough to look outside. Venturing out onto the fifth-floor balcony of the boys’ school, she spied a man who resembled her uncle. Closer inspection revealed that he was indeed her relative—but “he looked like a mad man,” she notes. Shouting and crying, Linda ran to him. As she came bounding down the stairs, he fainted. “He never thought I live,” Linda says. He had spent the entire day sorting through rubble and staring into the bloated faces of the dead in search of his niece.

The storm had severed all phone connections, preventing Linda from reaching the rest of her family. Anxious to end their worries, she and her uncle quickly set out for home only to discover the roads blocked by bodies. It was impossible to walk. They had to resort to the long way back, picking their way home along jungle paths.

When they finally reached Linda’s grandparents’ home, “My poor mother’s face bloomed like a flower. She kissed me a lot,” Linda recalls. Her neighbors rejoiced as well; the close community had already begun to fast in mourning. “[My neighbors] love me a lot; I think I am a good girl, that’s why,” Linda says.

The family gathered together to exchange their stories, showering each other with hugs and kisses. When the tsunami first hit, Linda’s mother, a small woman, had closed the door against the waves, securing the house as best she could before running. Linda’s uncle found her fighting against the water and carried her to the grandparents’ house nearby. At that point, as Linda tells it, her father was far out to sea on his fishing boat. After learning about the tsunami from satellite images, he feared the worst. Overcome with grief, he swallowed a cocktail of the drugs he always carried with him after suffering a recent heart attack.

Linda’s eyes begin to water at this point in the story. “I think my father’s the gift of god,” she says. “I love him very much.” Her father survived the dose, fortunately, and made it back to shore to reunite with his family.

The months following the tsunami were challenging for the Gayathree family. Although they counted themselves among the lucky ones, the sea had still washed away their house and all their possessions. The family was forced to move into Linda’s grandparents’ house, living alongside her grandfather, grandmother, three uncles, aunt, father, mother, and younger sister. The house consisted of only two rooms. To make matters worse, the tsunami hit on the eve of Linda’s Advanced-Level (A-Level), the nation-wide qualification exam to graduate from high school. It was hard to find a place to study and even harder to get a good night’s sleep. With pride, Linda describes not only passing her A-Levels, but doing very well. She was offered a place at one of the best management universities in the country. The government eventually donated a new house to her family in a rural area, but Linda says, “It’s not like our home. It’s too small. Now we haven’t our beautiful sceneries, especially our sea.”

Her performance on the A-Levels, so soon after the tsunami, was nothing less than a triumph. With death at the door and her country in pieces, Linda managed to sustain academic excellence. Soon after, she was offered a place at AUW. “I never think I can do these things,” Linda says. “But I did it.”