Srilanka, Dec. 7 -- n the pre-dawn haze of November 28, 2025, as Cyclone Ditwah's eye wall clawed its way ashore near Trincomalee, the people never thought it is going to change the country's destiny. The Mahaweli River, that ancient lifeline of the island's heartland, had swollen into a monstrous serpent, its waters churning with debris and fury on this day.

By midday, villages near Trincomalee were a memory swallowed by mudslides, one of countless hamlets erased in what President Anura Kumara Dissanayake would call "the most challenging natural disaster in our history."

Ditwah was not just a storm; it was a reckoning bitter storm that exposed the fractures in a nation still limping from the 2022 economic collapse. Over the next week, ...