I first heard this story from a man in Colombo. It happened near Tissa on the south coast, he said. When I was visiting the south coast, I heard the story again. No, it had happened on the east coast, somewhere near Batticoloa, and it wasn’t a coconut shell, it was a pot. It was six weeks after the tsunami. I was on the east coast of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres south of Batticoloa. We had spent the night in the town, but it had taken us three hours to negotiate the washed-out bridges, causeways and pitted roads, and now it was nearly noon. It was hot, and the pastor and the priest were sitting on chairs in front of a group of forty local people – men, women and children – in the shade of some coconut trees. I was surprised about the coconut trees. Though whole buildings were swept away by the tsunami all along the coast, the coconut trees were still standing.

I was also surprised at how much had already been done: local people shovelling away countless tonnes of sand; Canadian army volunteers clearing roads and stringing up power lines; British Royal Engineers building Bailey bridges. Charity workers were everywhere, the big ones in their four-wheel drives – Oxfam, UNICEF, Médecins sans Frontières. The pastor was dressed in a black suit with a white dog collar. The priest, a Tamil man, was dressed in a white cassock and black sash (I note that sashes fasten with velcro now). The priest lives on the coast, the pastor lives inland. On 26 December 2004, the day of the tsunami, the pastor had heard god tell him to go east and help the people. It took him and his helpers ten hours to drive there. He met the priest and, in the days that followed, they pulled bodies from the wreckage and buried them. They found twenty-six families needing special help, the poorest of poor.

Though most people of the Sinhala majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhists, Hinduism is the main religion among the minority Tamils, with the entrenched caste system that goes with it. These Tamil people had been a small community of fisherman. They owned no land; their houses were no more than shacks on the beach. When the wave came, everything went. Of the 143 people in these families, forty-six were killed.

Underneath the coconut trees, a teenage girl sat alone, her whole family gone. A young man sat with his one-year-old daughter in his lap, his wife and son having been swept away before his eyes. The first thing the pastor had to sort out was whether they had got the right group. He spoke first. He is not a Tamil speaker, so he spoke in Sinhala and the priest translated.

‘I notice some new faces here,’ he said. He and the priest conferred, and it was explained to the group that they were sorry but at the moment they could only help those families they had already talked to. A dozen people drifted away – I don’t know where they went. It was explained to the rest that they would have to be patient. The priest and the pastor knew that life in the camps was not easy. Just as they had been low in the pecking order of the community, so they were finding that when it came to the provision of relief they could expect little better. Their tents – canvas ones, not the smart rip-stop nylon tents that others seemed to have – were not exactly waterproof. The part of the camp they had been assigned to – in the low-lying area at the back – was not as close as it might have been to the water tanks (a gift from the European Community, filled every day by UN-badged tankers). When it was their turn to fill their buckets the tanks were sometimes empty. The government rice ration was adequate, but the quality of rice was not the best: musty, broken, gritty.

The priest and the pastor heard all this, but assured them that they would soon be able to help them with land, housing, boats and nets. The parson had agreement from the minister that public land would be released within the month. He had been negotiating with a German charity, and they would definitely build new houses just as soon as the land was ready. And he had brought with him four new bicycles. He was sorry he didn’t have the nets yet.

On the way down, the pastor had told me about the nets. The fishermen needed them to fish the lagoon behind the beach. The nets cost about US$20 each. He found out that a Canadian charity had bought a thousand nets – could he have fifteen?

‘Sure,’ said the Canadians, ‘we’ll send some down. We have done all things through the right channels, of course, but you can pick them up at the local government depot.’

The pastor turned up to get the nets.

‘Yes, we’ve got them here – which charity did you say you’re with?’

‘I’m not, I’m a pastor.’

‘Oh. I’m afraid we can only deal with registered charities.’

The pastor phoned the Canadians again.

‘No problem. We’ll give you a job – say US$5,000 a month, car, driver, all that stuff? – for six months. Will that be long enough for you to get your nets?’

‘I’m sorry, I have my parish work and my school. I can’t work for you. I just want the nets. Is there any other way?’

‘Hmmm. We’ll get back to you.’

There have been a few problems lately, with people claiming to be working for charities that don’t exist. The pastor knows that the government is not allowing any more to be registered. He also knows that back in his hometown there is a defunct orphanage that is still registered, and he knows the man who is still nominally in charge of this charity. The pastor phoned him up and explained the situation.

‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘I’m sure we can do a deal.’

‘A deal?’

‘I help you, you help me. I’ve heard there’s a lot of aid money sloshing around.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I just want the nets.’

Among the birds of Sri Lanka, the sea eagle is the largest and strongest. But the sweetest singer is a small black and white bird with a long tail. In Tamil it is called a dayal, in Sinhala a polkichcha (in clumsy English, it is a magpie robin). As the twenty-six families got to their feet and wandered back to their camp beside the lagoon to wait for their nets and their houses, the small black and white bird with a long tail began to sing from a broken wall.