Sri Lankan

Sri Lanka's government said today that 12 minority Tamils had been arrested overnight in connection with the slaying of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar. Raids in and around the capital, Colombo, netted 11 men and one woman, said Brig. Daya Ratnayake, spokesman for the Defense Ministry. "They are being interrogated, but at this moment of time we don't want to say anything," Ratnayake said. Officials blamed Tamil Tiger rebels for the slaying, but the group said it was not responsible.

"Bodies in Motion," Mary Anne Mohanraj's debut book, is less a collection of stories than a series of snapshots, a highly colored album of two Sri Lankan families in America. Read separately, the stories are a scattering of random images, raising more questions than they answer. Taken together, glossing and expanding on each other, they create a vivid portrait of families in flux, wandering back and forth over borders both geographic and cultural.

From a distance, it almost looks like a postcard -- tropical sun, blue sea, sandy beaches, families idling in the shade of palm trees. But a closer look reveals the reality. The people are tsunami survivors, still homeless nearly four months after the waves hit. They are sitting in the shade because their tents are too hot, and the Sri Lankan government has yet to rebuild their homes.

The old man frowns and says he has had enough of the sea. For 55 years, Samson Silva thought he had worked out a partnership with the turquoise ocean waters that each morning responded to his visits by yielding a bounty of tuna, mullet and grouper. The fish fed his family and provided him with a comfortable livelihood. That changed on the morning of Dec. 26, when the sea turned its back on him, unleashing a series of killer waves.

In the aftermath of the tsunami, the restless boys in the crowded classroom play cruel tricks on other refugees: "The water is coming! The water is coming!" they shout, then laugh as women run in fear. For 82 homeless bankers, teachers, fishermen and shop owners in this makeshift camp, there is no escaping the flies that crawl across their sweaty faces in the 85-degree heat. At night, mosquitoes come in airborne squadrons, prompting parents to use their bodies to protect their children.

In one of the largest relief efforts in history, a new issue is cropping up: mismatched aid. Relief groups have opened boxes meant for tsunami survivors to discover coats sent by donors who were apparently unaware that the island nation is in the tropics, as well as polyester shirts and pants, which don't absorb sweat, and fleece baby clothes. "They'd melt to death," said Pam Porodo, co-founder of Impakt Aid, a recently formed independent group working out of Colombo.

For years, this bohemian beach town on scenic Arugam Bay was a colorful stamping ground for surfing fanatics, backpackers and pot-smoking Rastafarians in dreadlocks and Bob Marley T-shirts. They drank at bars alongside local fishermen and rice farmers. About 60 thatch-roofed resorts and eateries such as the Aloha, Hang Loose Hotel and Cool Spot restaurant -- run mostly by Sri Lankans -- lined a busy thoroughfare where motorcycles buzzed past ox carts appearing like holdovers from another time.

Keerthi Munasinghe, a robust lover of seafood, said he scarcely could have imagined a day when he would sit down to cocktails of powerful coconut arrack without nibbling a side dish of spicy deviled fish. "Always, I would eat fish with my drink," he said. But ever since a series of tsunami waves roared onto the coast of this island nation, killing more than 30,000 people and dragging many bodies out to sea, the 42-year-old said he'd eliminated seafood from his diet.

It's an unlikely tourist attraction. Thousands of people a day are making the pilgrimage from all over Sri Lanka to stare at eight passenger cars and a locomotive that have captured the imagination of people here and around the world. "I came down from Colombo to have a look," said Chandralatha Weliwatta, a 50-year-old homemaker who made a 10-hour round-trip drive from the capital. "It's much more powerful when you see it yourself." If there's an enduring symbol of the Dec.

Even before the tsunami, Dewata wasn't much to look at. It isn't blessed with a great beach, and most tourists don't stop for much more than gas or a Coke on their way to better sun spots farther south. Locals are sometimes at a loss to say what's special about their town. Maybe the cement factory, they venture, or the visit by a Russian cosmonaut in the 1950s. Eventually, though, it dawns on them.