PETTIYADICHCHENI, Sri Lanka — Every morning and evening, Velmurugu Kangasuriyam gathers his 2-year- old daughter and his wife and confronts the wreckage of his former life.
His wife, Thaya, lights an oil lamp on the mantle of a dark, bare concrete room. Kangasuriyam presses his hands together and closes his eyes. Little Theresa follows in imitation. For a long minute, his new family stands in silent prayer.
Thaya places orange flowers in front of pictures of Hindu gods. She lays several more before a picture of Kangasuriyam’s parents.
The last flowers sit in front of a photo of a woman in a red bridal sari: Devi, who was Kangasuriyam’s wife for just 10 months before she died with his parents, three of his sisters and a brother, four years ago Friday.
The tsunami that crashed over south Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, and killed 230,000 people washed away nearly everything Kangasuriyam held dear. Sixteen close relatives were killed. His village was razed, his house demolished, his business destroyed.
Four years later, with international aid and prodding from relatives, the 30-year-old has rebuilt his life. He has a new family. He has a bigger house in a village away from the ocean.
He opened a bicycle repair shop to replace the one where he worked alongside his father from boyhood.
A quiet man, Kangasuriyam says he is finally getting his life back in order. “I want to be happy with what I have, and get over it,” he said.
About 35,000 Sri Lankans died in the tsunami. More than half a million were left homeless. Aid groups have built more than 100,000 homes, though several thousand families still remain homeless, according to the United Nations.
For Kangasuriyam, the reminders are hard to escape.
Every Friday, as he returns from prayers at the Hindu temple, Kangasuriyam stops at the remnants of his old village, Passikudah, a few hundred yards from the beach in the Batticaloa district on Sri Lanka’s east coast.
The house he lived in is little more than two red steps leading to a cracked foundation.
His parents’ home next door is a slab of concrete covered in black mud, rotting coconut husks and a tangled bush and vines. He tries to keep the foundation clean, he said, but the jungle keeps reclaiming it.
His four sisters and three brothers lived nearby as well.
They were a close-knit family, Kangasuriyam said. After school, his nieces and nephews would play together outside. After dinner, everyone would converge on his parents’ home to drink tea and gossip.
Growing up, he and his brothers all worked in their father’s bicycle repair shop, learning how to rebuild a bike that had been dismantled down to its ball bearings. Eventually one brother left to become a postmaster, another a Hindu priest.
The third started his own bike shop, leaving Kangasuriyam, the youngest son, to drop out of school and help his father in his shop.
As his parents grew frail with age, it fell to Kangasuriyam to care for them. He couldn’t do it alone, he said, so he asked his parents to arrange a marriage. He met Devi, from a village 5 miles away, on their wedding day.
She was a good cook, always smiling and happy. She was kind and took such good care of his parents that when the newlyweds got into an argument, his mother took her side, he said.
She was four months pregnant, he said. “Every time I remember that, it’s very painful,” he said.
His memories of the tsunami are confused, but his brother, Sarawanamuttu, says the brothers were working in his bicycle shop when villagers ran by screaming that the sea was coming. Sarawanamuttu says he grabbed his daughter and ran for safety, while Kangasuriyam ran back toward the village to get his family.
His other surviving brother, Ganeshamurthi, the priest, says he was in the temple when the screaming started and saw Kangasuriyam running to the village. He grabbed him, but Kangasuriyam broke free and tried to get home.
Kangasuriyam says he ended up unconscious, hanging from a tree 30 feet off the ground, and was taken to the hospital. It took days for the scale of his tragedy to emerge.
The long hours of work on the house and in the shop helped Kangasuriyam cope with his loss, Sarawanamuttu said. “Those things got him involved in life again,” he said.
He spent so much time at work that his brothers and sister decided he needed a new wife to care for him. They found Thaya, a woman from their village who had always had a crush on Kangasuriyam, seven years her junior.
In May 2005, just five months after the tsunami, they were married. Theresa was born the following April.
Since the ocean turned on Kangasuriyam, he has not gone back. Even the crash of waves rattles him.
“I’m still scared of the sea,” he said. “People have called me many times to go, and I say, ‘No. I’ll never go back.’ “
