May 26, 2013
Source: Marco Walker
As it turned out, three days later, on Boxing Day, a tsunami smashed into Phuket and Krabi too, annihilating almost everything in its path. I can picture it vividly. I was on the phone to my manager Gill Luxemburg, discussing an Indian film I”d written that had been in pre-production in Chennai that summer”before it was pulled. (The Indian director resigned due to creative differences with the American producer; nothing to do with me). We were shooting the breeze when I noticed the seabed had abruptly been drained of all its water.
I had a front-row seat for this extraordinary event. I was staying in a raised bungalow right on the beach. As the sea withdrew, wet sand beneath was exposed for the first time in millennia. Crabs, starfish, and similar scuttlebutts wriggled naked, bereft of cover. Crustaceans ran madly sideways. Thinking it was an extreme tide, I carried on my conversation. Yet by now the makaks were screeching, monkeys were wailing. The jungle was in revolt. Otherworldly, like a midday eclipse. It felt…wrong. Like the planet had un-sync”d.
In retrospect, it felt portentous. Though standing on my balcony I felt none of these things…until a minute later when the tide returned.
A twelve-foot wall of water roared onto shore, hurling up over the beach, breaking and blanketing the restaurant, the gardens, the ornamental pools (liberating the carp)…rushing under my raised bungalow floor. A moment later, I was standing near knee-deep in seawater. Somehow the phone line was still clear. The wave had knocked down a third of the hotel but I had no idea it was the real deal. I”d been thinking about the hotel-style crispy bacon. You know the kind: It’s crackly. I was looking forward to breakfast until the restaurant was entirely submerged.
We were luckier than Phuket, which saw the greatest number of deaths. The island of Ko Yao two miles offshore served to block half the wave. A hotel staff member poked his head in the room and instructed me to hurry to the entrance. Guests and staff were being evacuated to the hill. I was the last person left. I told Gill I might have to call him back.
It was weirder for these divers, who”d gone under with their oxygen tanks to admire the coral reef at 8:15AM. Returning to the surface half an hour later, they found their boat had disappeared off the face of the sea. Imagine their confusion.
Fortune’s fickle. They were saved because they were underwater at 8:32, when the mega-swell surged over their heads, taking their dive boat with it.
How did I die? The girl on the plane had called me on Christmas Eve and I wasn”t in my room. She left a message asking me to call back. I would call back before or after New Year’s as I was planning on some heavy relaxation. She called again Christmas Day. Again I failed to return the call. She called one last time after the tsunami had hit. Boxing Day evening. The receptionist told her I wasn”t in my room. We were sheltering in a school on top of a hill. I assumed a tsunami meant our plan to get together was off. Right?
Wrong!
She interpreted the fact I wasn”t available to mean that I”d perished in the tsunami. She was kind enough to report my death to the British embassy in Bangkok. Three days later, a Thai friend of mine who knew where I was staying read in the newspaper that I”d been killed by the tsunami. My name jumped out of a growing list as he scanned the front pages. He called the hotel stunned and was put through to me. I assured him I was just fine. I told him not to believe everything he read in the newspapers.
Was she trying to tell me something? Maybe she was irritated I hadn”t yet called back. Whatever; she”d volunteered confirmation of my death to the authorities. And that’s how my temporary “passing” came to be.
Juan Rulfo once wrote:
No one knows better than I do how far heaven is, but I also know all the shortcuts. The secret is to die, when you want to, and not when He proposes.
Amen to that, baby!
“Bombay
