Struggle for survival

Karunamuni, 52, is blind, which makes his survival all the more remarkable. A cousin saw him walking toward the massing sea, shouted at him to stop, then dragged him up two flights of stairs to safety.

Yet, beyond needing his friends’ guiding arms to navigate the rubble, Karunamuni’s challenge in the tsunami’s aftermath is no different from the challenges facing millions of others affected across Asia and Africa. Lives must be restarted, houses rebuilt, families reconstituted and losses weighed against others’ misfortune.

Karunamuni said he was 26 when he went blind, a driver for tourists who, heady with youth, ignored signs of worsening glaucoma until the world went dark.

Soon after, his brothers built him a small home near the sea. ‘‘Welcome Sri Lanka,’’it says on the outside, a link to his past work — shepherding visitors.

He knows every corner of his neighbourhood, at least as it existed before the water remade it.

Karunamuni says he reveres Helen Keller and likes to quote poetry: ‘‘O! Say what is that thing called light, which I must never enjoy/ What are the blessings of the sight, tell your poor blind boy,’’ which he attributed to John Milton, although it is by Colley Cibber.

Karunamuni sang, in a lovely voice, a song he wrote soon after losing his sight. It begins, ‘‘I can go with this stick everywhere, you do not say I cannot go here and there,’’ and ends, ‘‘I have a future, can become a teacher.’’ He did not. His brothers were poor, and his country, still developing, has few resources for the disabled.

So, Karunamuni has spent more than two decades just getting by. He has survived on his brothers’ charity and Rs 500 a month from renting out the extra room in his small house. He has lived on curry and rice.

His financial status, always fragile, is now precarious. Most of his possessions are gone. The extra room cannot be rented now; its interior was sucked out by the sea.

He is staying with Kaluperuma Chandrasiri Silva, 56, a cousin who lives nearby, and whose own home was inundated with five feet of water. Silva’s mattress is still wet. The papaya trees in his yard are already shrivelling and dying. The restaurant where he worked is gone, and with it his job.

The hotel where Karunamuni’s nephew, Mahesh Kumar, worked is closed. Seven adult members of the family are now subsisting on one schoolteacher’s income. Karunamuni, whose cloudy blue eyes sometimes look like the sea, is waiting for the government to assess the damage to his house and help him clean it.

Then, he will sleep there, as he has for 25 years, within earshot of the waves. He calls the sea ‘‘a very dangerous bugger,’’ but believes its innocence has returned.

Karunamuni grasps clearly both his diminished finances and his relative good fortune. ‘‘Other people lost everything, not only myself,’’ he said, and casually pointed to the damaged houses, as if he could see them. —NYT