A year after the wave destroyed her home and business, Mai was still unable to have a bath. Even the shower in the London flat to which she had escaped with her husband Mike had been a daily challenge. The idea of taking their son, Adi, to a swimming pool was unthinkable. Raindrops would bring on little panic attacks, like emotional squalls, which Mai contained in the neat way she did everything.
One thing she didn't mind about being in England was the isolation. Speaking to friends and family back in Phuket was very difficult, even though family - and hosting family events in her restaurant - had been the joy of her life. After the tsunami, her attention had become exclusively, and excessively, focused on Adi. When she first saw a therapist, at her husband's insistence, Mai had acknowledged that it wasn't good for a child to be fussed over like that.
Adi, aged eight, had bounced back easily. Mai, on the other hand, was terrified of going home and seeing the beach again, though she thought about it ceaselessly. "It's not healthy, this fear," she told the therapist, "because the sea is in my soul."
What Mai remembered about the wave was the blackness of the water and the dankness of its smell - an odour she hadn't been able to get out of her nostrils since. This wasn't the sea she had known. Dragged inland by an incomprehensible power, she had managed to hold on to Adi until she was swept against a tree and, for a dark, swooning moment, felt her boy underwater and her grip weaken. Her sister, Lek, had been clutching her own two children, both of whom she lost. They were among 13 members of Mai's family who died that morning.
Iris, a trauma therapist, had tried to coax her into regular meetings. Mai was still being assaulted by nightmares and a daily intrusion of smells, sensations and inexplicable panics. But she was reluctant to give herself over to a stranger. Though she had studied literature at an American university and was familiar with the ideas of western therapy, Mai would courteously sidestep invitations to emotional disclosure.
When Iris confronted her with this reluctance, Mai explained that her sister was better at talking. Lek was the one with true grief. She had met a Christian counsellor in Phuket, and had converted. Buddhism was about past lives that can't be changed, Lek had told Mai, but Christianity allowed you to talk to God.
Although she was married to an Englishman, Mai said she was still "very Thai". She didn't want to talk about private matters; she wanted to be a good mother, and find the strength to go back home and restart her business. But, slowly, Iris persuaded her that they could do a kind of therapy that didn't involve analysis as such, and that was, maybe, more like some Buddhist ideas - about accepting what had happened and teaching the mind to absorb its troubles.
Iris explained that, in cognitive therapy, this was called memory "processing", and the particular method she used had a rather scientific-sounding name - EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. But it was actually quite simple. It wasn't about revisiting childhood fears; it didn't even do what was expected in some trauma treatment, which was to relive an event through "imaginal exposure". With EMDR, you had only to think about your particular symptoms, and the events or beliefs that went with them. This was called "dual awareness" - thinking about the past and present at the same time. And there was an easy trick involved. Iris would tap Mai's knees while she let her reactions sink in, or move a finger back and forward across her eyes.
Mai found this interesting. When they spoke about the smell of the wave, she would describe a feeling of panic; but as she watched Iris's finger, the feeling seemed to move farther away, like a thought going to the horizon. When she described the sensation of Adi slipping out of her grip, she found herself able to say: "Yet he is still here," and to feel that this really was true. Iris described it as "bilateral integration": feelings and words fitting together. After four EMDR sessions, Mai revealed that she had managed to have a bath. And that was the last Iris saw of her.
Until she got a visit in January this year. Mai had been back home, and had gone into the sea. It was funny, she said, because now she did want to tell Iris something private. It was a memory from when she was young; before she married, had a child and felt the grief. There were two lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens that Mai had read at university: "Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self/Black water breaking into reality".
· Names and details have been changed.
