It was all in a second ... or more ... or less. Then, blackness. Silence, save the ringing in her ears. A shower of rubble and water from the ceiling, and, still, a sense of coursing electricity. This was how it feels to die, she thought, until a voice dismissed her mind's lie: “Oh, she’s alive,” it exclaimed. “Come take her.” The bombed-out Kingsbury Hotel. Credit:AP Unlike 250 others who died in the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka - including another mother and daughter from Australia - Melbourne airport check-in worker Chathudila Weerasinghe and her mother Vipuli got another chance.

The 29-year-old was with her mother in Sri Lanka to visit Chathudila’s 92-year-old grandmother. The pair from Doreen in Melbourne’s north-east also treated themselves to sightseeing and shopping, industries booming since the 2009 end to the nation’s brutal decades-long civil war. Chathudila Weerasinghe was holidaying in Sri Lanka with her mother. This photo was taken in 2017, two years before their fateful trip. Sri Lanka was so successful in its makeover after the war that Lonely Planet crowned it the hottest tourist destination of 2019. But that was before. By April 19, with their trip coming to an end, Chathudila and Vipuli treated themselves to the five-star experience of the Kingsbury Hotel in Colombo, where the man with the bags, named by Sri Lankan police as Mohammed Azam Mohammed Mubarak, checked in the following night.

Security footage shows Mubarak with two packs. The larger of the two had caught Vipuli’s eye in the dining hall Easter Sunday morning. “I saw that man coming through," she says. "It was a little unusual. It was bigger than a normal backpack. “I could see something like a metal frame and I thought ‘what is this man doing here?’" She returned to her omelette and gave the man with the pack no further thought until days later when she began piecing together events. Chathudila had finished her breakfast and was at one end of the 10-metre-long buffet, reaching for a plate for seconds.

At the other end, according to an account given to Vipuli by another survivor, Mubarak poured his juice. It was 8.45am. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video In her private darkness, Chathudila was spared the chaos, the blood, the bags of body parts carried away by rescuers. Vipuli, who escaped with minor bruising, saw these things.

She saw, heard and thought things so disturbing she still wakes up screaming at noises in the night. She saw the bravery of people rushing in to help, and the not-so-brave taking videos on their phones. But it was what - who - she couldn’t see that troubled her most. “I was screaming Chatu, Chatu, Chatu for about 10 minutes,” she recalls. “When I came to the lobby area, one of the managers said ‘They’ve taken your daughter to the hospital’, so I rang my husband.” Sri Lankan soldiers ride past the bombed Kingsbury Hotel. Credit:AP

It was early Sunday afternoon in Melbourne and Ranjith, a mathematics lecturer at Monash University, was tidying up, getting their double-storey home in a suitable state for his wife and daughter to return in two days’ time. Vipuli remembers him screaming down the phone. Within 36 hours, he was by Chathudila’s hospital bedside with Vipuli, surrounded by other victims; the sole TV in the ward stuck on an endless news loop of terror; nurses barking like some “fish market”. And the heat. The annoying plastic pillowcase and the heat. Ranjith made calls to his Sri Lankan contacts to get her into a better hospital. He fought with the insurance companies and with Australian consular support, which he says wasn't terribly supportive. After more than a week of treatment and “so many scary moments” he got his family to Australia, where another month at The Alfred hospital awaited his daughter.

He would wake at 4.30 each morning to drive to the hospital to give her breakfast. Vipuli would catch the train at 10.30 to bring her lunch. Chathudila was lucky like that. Sri Lanka Bombing victim Chathudila Weerasinghe at home in Dooreen with dad Ranjith and mum Vipuli. Credit:Jason South Details are sketchy about how many died in the Kingsbury hotel. Reports tend to focus on dead foreigners, of which there were at least six: a Spanish couple and four Chinese researchers. Sri Lankan authorities themselves revised down the overall toll by 100 in the days after the attacks.

Vipuli wonders about the workers at the buffet; they were closer to the terrorist than anyone. As Mubarak blew himself up, so too did co-conspirators at the Shangri La Hotel, St Anthony’s Shrine and a Catholic church. All up there were eight attacks across Sri Lanka, most in Colombo, the deadly work of militants inspired, and possibly directed, by Islamic State. Sri Lanka bombing victim Chathudila Weerasinghe back in Melbourne. Credit:Jason South Three months on, Chathudila moves awkwardly and slowly through her parents’ Doreen home with the aid of a walking frame. She uses a wheelchair on rare outings to the movies or shopping.

She has wires holding her hand together, a rod through her right leg and more than a hundred stitches have patched up the holes from the killer’s shrapnel and exploding glass, plates and cutlery. Loading A small scar above her right cheek marks the entry hole of a marble-sized ball bearing that missed her brain and optic nerves to lodge behind her left eye. It was removed in Sri Lanka and presumably thrown away, but doctors have explained the ball bearing stuck millimetres beneath her heart and the others in her legs and back entered with such heat not even infection-causing bacteria could survive. They’ll probably stay there forever. There have been too many operations to count, and too many left to bear thinking about. It is too early to talk about “full” physical recovery, or when she might get back to work at the airport.

“I’ll probably have to wait until I can drive," she says. “And my hand, with typing and all that. I’ll have to see once the wires are out and if I can move my leg and start walking. I’d like to start walking without the frame, that would be nice.” She has appointments most days with doctors or physiotherapists and spends the others watching old Sri Lankan dramas and reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She misses riding her bike and walking her dog, Bluebell. Chathudila, known as Chatu to her family and friends, in Paris a year before the bombings in Sri Lanka. Despite her injuries, her captivity, her wrecked body, Chathudila laughs easily. She laughs at how the disabled public toilets seem to have their support rails on the right-hand side, not ideal when that hand is full of wires.

She laughs at how Bluebell and her cat Sheeba were scared when she first wheeled through the doors a mess of bandages and machinery. She laughs at how her mother and father have to keep running up and down the stairs to get her things from her old room. As she shuffles and fidgets on the couch, clearly in pain, she says she is “just a bit itchy”. Outside, having her photo taken on a truly wintry Melbourne afternoon, she is “not too bad.” Ranjith chokes up once during The Age’s visit and it is when he is asked about his daughter’s resilience.