THE hillside hamlet was built around a matriarch’s stubborn, scandalous love.
Its four homes – stone foundations, concrete walls and lives governed by the strict discipline of HM Koinmanike – had withstood tropical downpours and decades of social stigma after her decision to marry a man of another ethnicity.
Between the houses stood a gnarled old mango tree and a small family temple.
Each year, during the Hindu festival of Deepavali, the family sacrificed an animal there – a goat in a prosperous year, a chicken most years – as an offering to the gods.
Here, in Sri Lanka’s central highlands, her children lived, loved and endured a hard life of poverty. Their children, better educated and steadily moving into white- collar work, were beginning to edge towards something brighter.
Then Cyclone Ditwah struck.
The most devastating storm to hit the island in decades killed around 800 people last November, swallowing villages and wiping out entire communities across the central hills around Kandy.
As the storm closed in on the evening of Nov 27, Sivakumar Gopal called his sister, Dayavati Gopal – Koinmanike’s eldest living daughter – from the restaurant in Colombo where he worked as a cook.
“My sister was making tea when we called,” he said. “My brother-in-law was in the hall, in the front. After that, we didn’t hear from them.”
By morning, the hamlet was buried beneath metres of mud. Of what had once been four houses, only the old mango tree remained standing. One room of one home clung stubbornly to the slope.
Those who survived because they had been working or running errands away from the hamlet rushed back, navigating broken roads and disrupted transport to search for their families.
Dayavati’s husband, Mutaiah Nagarajah, was found early.
Rescuers homed in on three small holes dug into the mud by Nicky, the only one of the family’s two dogs to survive. Beneath them lay his body.
Finding the rest would take days.
Relatives arrived one by one, joined by a dozen infantrymen sent by the army.
Two machinists operated an excavator, its clawed bucket tearing into the brown sludge.
The families here were poor.
The excavator and its crew had to be paid for through donations that trickled in from around the country.
Each morning, no one knew if the digging could continue another day.
The machine chewed through broken beams, tiles and household debris as the family watched for any sign of their former lives. It stopped only for meals or when rain triggered fears of fresh landslides.
“The houses were totally gone. I couldn’t see anything,” Sivakumar said.
Quietly, he took charge of the search for his sister and her children.
Traditionally, life in the hill country revolved around colonial-era tea estates. You were either a landowner – an aristocrat – or a labourer, most of them Tamils brought from southern India as bonded workers.
That Koinmanike had crossed this divide was the scandal.
Born into a Buddhist Sinhalese aristocratic family, she fell in love in the 1960s with Mutapan Gopal, a Hindu Tamil of Indian descent.
Both families opposed the marriage, hers to the point of near disownment.
She left home and started again.
“Until her last day, she told us that if her family ever offered us land or inheritance, we should not take it,” said her youngest daughter, Vasantha.
There was no wedding celebration. Just a marriage certificate – he signed it, she pressed her thumbprint – kept by the family until it was lost under the mud, along with the land deeds.
Koinmanike worked as a plantation cook, while Mutapan laboured in the fields.
A nun from a nearby church helped them buy their first cow.
Over time, the herd grew to seven.
“I used to sit on my mother’s lap and ask her why she left her big house and came here,” said her youngest son, Rajakumar. “She’d joke that it was her karma.”
When Sivakumar was nine, tragedy struck. His eldest sister, 18, drank poison and killed herself after the family of the man she loved rejected her because of caste.
She was buried in a roadside cemetery.
On her way to work each day, Koinmanike stopped to clean the grave.
Two years later, she asked Sivakumar to help plant a mango tree beside it.
“After that, my mother went quiet,” he said. “Her energy was gone.”
Koinmanike died in 2016. Her husband followed three years later. Both were buried near the mango tree.
Now Sivakumar was facing another round of loss.
After Mutaiah’s body was recovered, the diggers pressed on, searching for Dayavati and two of her children.
Their daughter Krishanti, 19, had put down a deposit for teacher training. Their son Roshan, six, had just started first grade. He was inseparable from the family dog Tarzan, now also missing beneath the mud.
The family had only recently laid new floor tiles and hung fresh curtains.
With two earners, they had bought their first washing machine on instalments.
The eldest daughter, Saranya Nagarajah, 22, had just begun work as a nurse in Colombo.
On the fifth day of digging, the excavator edged closer to where their house had once stood. Sivakumar climbed up to sit beside the driver, scanning each bucketful as it emerged – a kitchen rack, shards of pink tile.
By late morning, there were signs of a body. The machine stopped and soldiers unpacked masks and gloves.
“Is it her front or her back?” Sivakumar asked.
Vasantha, watching from a rock above the pit, wept quietly. Saranya turned away.
Pieces of roof were rushed over to make a stretcher.
Kitchen items emerged first – pots, a metal tub, a two-burner gas stove.
When the body was rolled onto a sheet, Sivakumar saw the face.
It was not his sister, but a man from a neighbouring home swept here by the slide. He was laid in the shade, covered with a purple sari.
The air drained from the crowd.
Then the digging resumed, inching towards the mango tree.
Just after 2pm, they found Roshan.
The bucket lifted him gently. He lay face down, as if pressed into a pillow, his small back bare and clean.
His uncle, Muttiah Ravi, made call after call.
“Roshan has been found,” he said, his voice breaking.
The coroner arrived, ledger in hand.
As he questioned Saranya to register her brother’s death, she offered him a chair.
Moments later, shouts rang out.
Another body. Then another.
Dayavati and her daughter Krishanti lay close together, as if they had tried, through the choking mud, to reach each other.
Sivakumar stepped back. His shoulders folded in and he sobbed.
Tarzan, the dog, would remain buried.
Saranya stood silently before the bodies, her gaze fixed on the largest.
Then she screamed – “Amma! Amma! Amma!” – again and again, her voice echoing across the hills.
Vasantha collapsed beside her.
By evening, two dozen men had gathered to carry the bodies down the slope to the cemetery as the sun softened over the hills.
A large grave waited behind the mango tree that had marked the family’s first loss decades earlier.
Dayavati was lowered first. When it came time for Krishanti, the men asked if she should be placed beside her mother.
“No,” Sivakumar said firmly. “The other side.”
He carried Roshan himself, cradling him like a sleeping bundle and handed him down to be placed between his mother and sister.
Sivakumar and Rajakumar lit incense and circled the grave, blessing the mound of earth that now held their family.
Then they turned away, walking back towards the hillside where the hamlet had once stood – a place erased and a future once again uncertain. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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