Blast from the past
“It was crowded,” says Lidwina, who with Bede boarded the one-but-last compartment. There were murmurs when the train stopped at Dehiwela, for the same thing had happened in the morning at Wellawatte and the commuters assumed it was something to do with the signals.
She and Bede were close to the compartment’s landside door and Bede standing tall above the tightly-packed crowd was reading the newspaper that she had given him.
A blast followed by dead silence…….then many voices. Lidwina could not move her hands and legs. There were splinters in her eyes, her ears were humming and through a haze she saw a pink head falling on her. “I tried to shout but no voice came,” she says, as she wept to be saved.
Help did come later, with people lifting her onto a gunny and sending her in a vehicle to the Kalubowila Hospital. It was here that she realized that her whole body was burnt and black and the bomb had ripped the clothes off her and a nurse covered her up. She was once again put on a stretcher and sent in a small van to the National Hospital.
Some memories are distinct, a reporter talking to her to whom she gave her aunt’s number, but the message was never conveyed. It was the next day that Bede’s best friend’s mother tracked her down and made arrangements to transfer her to a private hospital, which she believes saved her life.
To all her entreaties for news about Bede from relatives there was only silence. What they did not tell her at that time was that Bede had been the first to be taken to the mortuary having got the full blast of the explosion due to his height and that they had already buried him. His only evident injuries had been a small scratch on his face and a broken hand.
It has been a long road to recovery for Lidwina with 32 stitches on her head, hearing loss in her right ear and her left ear having to be reconstructed through painful operations. Up to now she walks around with shrapnel in her body, due to which she would never be able to have Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as a medical test or walk through security machines without them beeping. The scars have not only been physical but also psychological, for until recently she has shied away from trains.
This ordeal, however, has not deterred her from her husband’s goal of educating their son. Through trauma and travail, Lidwina (who lost her mother just before her wedding, suffered the agony of two miscarriages, then faced the death of her husband while suffering serious injuries herself and finally saw the home she and Bede had begun building with a bank loan before his death being caught up in the swirling waves of the tsunami) has been able to achieve this, while the Commercial Bank has established the Bede Sebastian Centre for Education and Research in memory of her husband who was the President of the All Ceylon Bank Employees’ Union at the time the cruel hand of fate snatched him away.
There is a sense of stoic resignation as she says, “Life has to go on.” (For a story by Bede and Lidwina’s son, please see sundaytimes.lk)
Another couple on that doomed train was newly-weds Indika and Lasantha Wickramasinghe. Married a month and 20 days, unlike many others, they were not regular train travellers. Living in Panadura, they would go to work by motorcycle but traffic congestion was a deterrent.
Lasantha would board the one-before-thelast compartment of the train at Fort, as she was working at the Commercial Bank Head Office and Indika would join her in Wellawatte after finishing his duties at the Commercial Bank there.
Vividly he recalls how an earlier train got cancelled and when the power-set arrived it was jam-packed with people. At Dehiwela there was an unusual delay and talk of a bomb and as he desperately walked down the length of the compartments peering into the crowds, he saw her peeping from a window. The train began moving then and he hung onto the compartment.
“That’s all I remember,” says Indika who in the instant of the blast lost consciousness. Now living in Wadduwa, the memories seem painful even 20 years later – he could not open his eyes, his face was burning, his hair was burnt, he had no clothes on except his shirt collar, belt and underwear. When he woke up at the National Hospital in Colombo he was tied up, for he had been struggling violently. Three of the fingers of his left hand had fallen victim to the bomb and had to be amputated.
He found his wife only three days later severely disfigured. She was blind in one eye, her lower jaw had been blown off, the rehabilitation of which is still being done two decades later. “My wife suffered 99% disfigurement and underwent 26 operations between 1996 and 1999,” he says.
Little wisps of memories come to the fore of several soldiers seriously injured in a blast in Mullaitivu helping other patients in the National Hospital ward and of an old Tamil man on the next bed who spoke not a word of Sinhala or English who would gently rearrange Indika’s sheet whenever it went awry.
Later, when he needed fingerreconstruction in India he would be warmly welcomed and looked after in Madurai by a Tamil family who had fled Sri Lanka after the 1983 riots, ironically in July too.
For Indika and his family, the blast brought about an entirely different dimension. “We don’t make many plans for the future, we live for the day,” he says with emotion.
It is a similar tale that we hear from Sriyan Fernando who was then working at the Commercial Bank Head Office. Excited about an outstation trip with the family the next day, he got off early from work and boarded the packed power-set.
“When the bomb went off there was pandemonium and I was among the dead,” he says. “It was marila negitta wage (I had risen from the dead). It was a miracle.”
The only possessions he was left with was the rosary he had always carried in his pocket since childhood and his underwear. First taken to Kalubowila Hospital and then to National Hospital, even his wife had not been able to recognize this blackened and bloated man, with a huge bandage on his head, until he waved weakly at her. A deep gash in his head needed 27 stitches and he too could not sight a train for six months.
He relives a chance meeting with some Tiger women soldiers much later during a family trip to Madhu Church. As he pointed out the injuries he had suffered from the train blast, one woman had opened her blouse and shown him major scars left behind by a grenade blast on her chest which had also taken away her femininity.
Exactly two decades after that train explosion, there is hope arising from the wreckage and the debris – with each and every one elaborating on the need for reconciliation and restoration of justice among all races who call Sri Lanka home.
As much as the memories of these victims will make us remember that train of terror, like the phoenix, strong hope for a united Sri Lanka rises from such terrible tragedies……..hope of innocent people that cannot be quelled by extremists on any side.