By Neely Tucker Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 3, 2005; Page C01

PERALIYA, Sri Lanka -- The dreams of the nine-fingered man are filled with visions of the dead.

There are hundreds of bodies in these dreams, rag dolls that no longer dance and sing but only float along with the tide amid the palm trees and rubble, grotesque puppets with the strings cut loose.

He does not know which one is his wife. In the week since a two-story tsunami roared ashore here on the southern coastline of this island nation, taking a toll of close to 30,000 people, Jayasena Beruwalaga has filled the days by walking among the dead in hospitals, makeshift morgues or in what used to be the streets of his neighborhood. And still, he cannot identify any corpse as that of his wife, Tuduwage. She was 54. He is 56. They were married 30 years. "I'm afraid in the night," he says, standing outside the wreckage of his home, the sickly sweet smell of rotting carrion wafting through the heat. "I looked at hundreds of bodies. I tried so hard to find her. But after two or three days you could no longer tell which body was which. When I close my eyes to sleep, I see it all over again."

A passenger train swept off its tracks when the tsunami came ashore is part of the Sri Lankan landscape of debris. (Vincent Thian -- AP)

There are things in life that are fair and just, and then there are things that divide people into the living, the dead and the missing. People across South Asia are doing that by the hundreds of thousands this week, with the death toll now estimated at nearly 140,000. Thousands more are missing. Billions are being spent on disaster aid, including preventing disease outbreaks. Relief flights, including helicopter missions, are counted in the hundreds. And yet the sheer scale of psychic damage, the measure of human loss and heartbreak, spirals beyond all accounting.

Beruwalaga knows this. In a different way, so does his neighbor Samson da Silva, who mourns his own loss, as we shall see.

Military crews have pulled more than 30 bodies from the rubble here in the past two days, using a backhoe to bury them in a mass grave on the beach. There is still an area more than a mile wide and nearly that long that is impassable. No one knows how many bodies are out there.

"We took 560 bodies to the hospitals and buried another 300 in a mass grave," says B.P.B. Ayapala, the senior police superintendent of the area, overlooking the carnage and swatting away flies.

Sudath Lokude, a member of the city council in nearby Hikkaduwa, says the burial accounting was not quite that exact.

"We dug a big hole in the ground for 400 or 300, something like that," he says. "Then we dug another one, and I think one more. I don't know how many bodies families buried themselves."

The southern coast of Sri Lanka is somewhat like what South Florida is to the United States: a beachfront hideaway for tourists, where brown-skinned men with potbellies go shirtless and everyone with any sense wears sandals. Hikkaduwa is Fort Lauderdale to Galle's Miami -- a smaller community with tiny suburbs such as Peraliya lining a narrow beachfront roadway.

Peraliya is still a tourist stop, though the Europeans have all fled. Now this place is a rubbernecking nightmare of local gawkers who have come to see Where the Train Was Swept Away. It is a disaster within a disaster that carries a certain cachet. Hundreds of people walk along the railroad tracks and stare at the rescue workers in white masks. Fathers pedal their children on bicycles. Some try to find missing relatives. Most just stare. It is very quiet here, very humid and very hot. Kerchiefs are put to mouths and noses.

It happened this way:

A popular passenger train called the Queen of the Sea was ferrying more than a thousand passengers from the capital, Colombo, to Galle last Sunday morning. The first wave of the tsunami swamped the road and washed across the tracks, knee-high. The train stopped by the local high school. Local people ran to the train and clambered onto the roof to get out of the mess. Everyone thought the danger was all over.

Then the sea retracted and roared back with a monster wave that was 15 to 20 feet high when it was a quarter-mile inland, judging from high-water marks on the second stories of the few houses still standing. It twisted the steel tracks like twin licorice sticks, hurled cars in the air like Tonka toys, and knocked the train from the tracks with such force that the wheels were snapped from under the carriages. More than 1,500 passengers and local residents were killed instantly.

Beruwalaga, who ran a small television repair shop, was at the beach when the first wave struck. He was able to wade the half-mile home to his wife and their blue-tiled house. The second wave lifted him up and swept him into the back yard. He snagged a coconut tree as he was being swept past, some 30 feet in the air. The force of the water snapped the bones in his shoulder. A sharp piece of wood severed the middle finger of his left hand at the knuckle. He bled and screamed and held on.

Tuduwage was gone. He remembers her talking when the noise of the second wave approached. He does not know how he could lose his wife of three decades when they were standing so close. He does not think he or his two adult sons will ever find her remains. Perhaps she is far out at sea. Perhaps she is under the train 50 yards away.

"We have prayer services for her each day," he says. "There is nothing else we can do for her. She is gone. I have given up hope."

He is trying to move on, to clean up his house. He works shirtless, a small baseball cap perched over wisps of brown and gray hair. He wears only a bright blue cloth wrapped around his waist. His arm is in a homemade sling; the nub of his finger ends in a bloody bandage.

He considers the buckled roof of the house and the bent ceiling fans and the floors sullied with an inch of oily black water, along with grease, mud, underwear, shirts, pillows, soiled papers, playing cards and tin cans. He has been at it for four days. He is no longer sure why.

About a quarter-mile away, Samson da Silva is blinking back tears.

He is sitting on a slab of stone, which used to be the corner of someone's house. He is a handsome man of 44, a seller of music cassettes in town, and he seems to be compulsively, helplessly telling his story over and over. His audience at the moment is fronted by a small boy wearing a Tweety Bird T-shirt and a white surgical mask.

His sister is dead, da Silva is saying, but what torments him is the memory of his youngest child. She was 10 years old and her name was Dulanja. Dulanja, Dulanja, a name as pretty as the sea at twilight. She was last seen right here, where he is sitting, after the first wave. She was okay. The second wave came before he could reach her.

He found her body half a mile inland several days later. The family dug a hole and buried the love of his life near a Buddhist temple and now the tears are rolling down his face.

They are bound by their losses, these two men, da Silva and Beruwalaga. There is an odd symmetry in their lives now, one having lost his lifelong love, the other weeping for his young child.

"I cannot eat," da Silva whispers now. "I cannot sleep. I dare not. I think of her all the time. In the night, when others are asleep, I am not. I walk around here in the dark."

There is reality in those small hours of the night, which carries pain beyond bearing. Or there are dreams, in which the dead find the power to rise and walk again. Each is worse than the other.

But it is daylight now and will be for several hours yet. Samson da Silva sits in the bright light and shadows. Dulanja, Dulanja. He is waiting for the pain to ebb. He knows that in these hours the dead are only dead. And yet in this place they are everywhere, holding sway over the living.

Dulanja. Her name was Dulanja.