By Manjari Verma,10B  

Buried deep beneath the clouds, was the sun for the Sri Lankan capital: Colombo. The city was dreary; murkiness infected the entire place, by its scavenging touch. The summer break had just begun, but boredom already killed Louis. The weather was exactly the opposite of that; cool and moist wind brushed past people, the smell of the sea dissipated into the tiny corners of the country.

 Louis sat at his window and gazed at the shore; where the waves hit the sand violently.  The days and nights seemed equivalently dark; the citizens of Colombo had never seen such a thing.

Despite the bad weather, Louis and his family decided to spend a day by going for a long drive. Before the outing, there had been a huge argument between Louis and his Dad. Replaying the argument in his mind made him feel guilty: this was the biggest argument they ever had and his dad was extremely annoyed. During the drive, his dad hadn’t spoken a word; this not only surprised him, but his mom as well: his dad couldn’t survive without talking to him.

These thoughts were abruptly disturbed by the cacophony of the sea gulls; it was as if they were migrating due to the cold.

‘It is summer,’ Louis thought to himself; but the sea gulls weren’t the only animals showing peculiar behavior: the deer jumping haphazardly around, snakes slithering out on the road, rabbits protruding from their burrows. This idiosyncratic behavior was also conspicuous among the waves: the thud and gushing seemed like a way of expressing their aggression.

This abnormal behavior seemed completely normal to Louis’ parents. Just then, there was a traffic jam before them, all the people were evacuating their vehicles and running in the opposite direction. Louis’ Dad got off the car to go and enquire about the situation. Just then a fisherman approached their car and said something in Tamil; Louis didn’t understand what the man said, but his expressions and gestures expressed fear and shock. 

His Mom’s expression suddenly changed into a sense of fear and tension arose.

“Go to the top of the hotel, I will go find your Dad” screamed his mom.

Louis ran towards the tallest building he could see: the twenty storied hotel owned by a politician.

From the top of the building, Louis could see the sea swell up: gulping everything that came on its way. There seemed no sign of his parents; several people had made their way to the top of the building; everybody was traumatized by the event, most of them were continuously searching the ground for their loved ones.

Louis waited for hours together on the top of that building, until there were rescue teams helping them out of the terrace. Few of the people went into the waters looking for their family members, but no one was visible; only those that stayed on the roof.

Louis still stands at the remains of the most treacherous calamity that left him orphaned and away from home for the rest of his life. He has been waiting for his parents for the past twenty years, but they never returned from the sea. They too were engulfed by those ferocious waves.