Malinda Seneviratne

At around 11.30 pm, Sri Lanka time, on Monday the 19th of June, a submersible vessel, the Titan, at the other end of the world, set off with five persons on board and a 96-hour oxygen supply to explore the wreck of the ill-fated British passenger liner, the Titanic, which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. The wreck lay at the bottom of the sea around 640 km away from Newfoundland.

An hour and forty five minutes later the vessel lost contact with its operator, OceanGate Expeditions. Four days later a robotic diving vehicle found major fragments of the sub on the seafloor about 480m from the Titanic shipwreck. At present it is believed that the Titan had imploded, instantly killing all five passengers.

The resources deployed in search/rescue operations were phenomenal. It dominated the news channels for four full days. I happened to check BBC around midnight that Sunday and continued to check on the progress of the rescue efforts. There were frequent updates. We were offered details of the passengers, their names, vocations etc. We knew which countries, which agencies, which vessels and what kind of technology were involved. And we were given a countdown, almost, of how many hours worth of oxygen remained, in the event that the Titan was lying somewhere and unable to communicate for whatever reason.

As the deadline for oxygen running out neared, I found myself imagining what it must be like in the Titan, assuming the sub was still intact. How would those people deal with the knowledge that each would be competing with the other four for life breath, literally, I asked myself. Among them was a father and his son. All kinds of scenarios ran through my mind. At one point I found myself thinking, ‘it would be best if the Titan had imploded,’ a possibility according to more than one scientist. Instant death would have been preferable to slow, tortuous and inevitable asphyxiation, I reckoned.

Others may have also wondered along the same lines and come to their own conclusions about preferable ways of dying. At least there’s closure now. Most of all for the families and loved ones.

For four days, I had found myself checking the BBC updates. It was there, right on top. For four days. I hadn’t checked the BBC website for about a week before the Titan went missing, but I had totally missed another tragedy.

Less than a week before the Titan tragedy, a fishing boat had sunk about 80 kilometres off the southern Greek town of Pylos. Seventy eight (78) have been confirmed dead. A total of 104 survivors, mostly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, have been brought ashore. It is believed that there were up to 100 children in the ship’s hold and that as many as 500 are missing.

It is claimed that the Greek authorities hadn’t reacted fast enough. Greece have rejected these accusations. One this is undisputed. The media coverage was nothing like what it was with regard to the Titan’s disappearance. Indeed, I got to know about it only because there was some play in social media, comparing the two tragedies.

There are obvious differences of course. Those who died in the Titan were enormously wealthy and probably very influential. They were, in other words, known. They had names. Those who died off the Greek coast were refugees. While there have been people visiting the wreck of the Titanic after it was discovered in September 1985, this was probably the first high profile (and highly expensive) tour with passengers having to pocket out hundreds of thousands of pounds for the trip. In contrast, thousands of refugees have died at sea.

In 2022, over 3,000 had died trying to cross the Mediterranean. In the early part of 2023, over 400 had perished at sea. Refugees. No names.

There are more sobering numbers. There are 35.3 million refugees under the UNHCR’s mandate and 5.0 million Palestine refugees under the UNRWA. There are 62.5 million internally displaced persons and 5.4 million asylum seekers. That’s more than a 100m displaced people. In a sense, 5 is media-manageable, so to speak; 108.4 mullion is obviously not.

I remember Rauff Hakeem, commenting on the LTTE’s political chief, S P Thamilchelvan, being killed, quoting John Donne: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

Are we ‘diminished’ equally by each death, though? We don’t know the names of the 3,000 odd (yes, ‘odd,’ means, ‘unspecified’ or ‘unable to specify’) refugees who died crossing the Mediterranean last year, do we? Their loved ones alone know. But we know who died in the Titan. We can google the question and the answer will pop up immediately: Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Reminded me of King Lear from the Shakespearean tragedy. Lear’s story is sad but no less tragic than countless others who suffered similar fates. Lear is collectively mourned. The others? Well, by their loved ones, at best. 

Not all deaths can diminish us equally because those who died weren’t equal in the first place.

Someday, someone might make a movie based on the Titan story. There are probably movies made of refugees dying at sea but we would need hundreds of thousands of scripts to do justice to the stories of each and every victim. They will not be fleshed out.

The world is not flat. Lives are not equal. And death is variously valued. It’s as simple as that. It is as atrocious as that. 

malindadocs@gmail.com