Archives for August, 2007

We were in Hambantota. It was a clear morning and I was sulking. I had taken longer than I should have to find the camera and my father, nervous about the visit he was about to make to the hospital, was lecturing me longer than necessary about how I was supposed to be looking after it.

Revenge came swift and sweet. That afternoon at the beach, my father borrowed the camera to take pictures of the rubble on the shore. When he returned with it twenty minutes later the dial was immovably stuck.
His face remained scrupulously blank and distant when I asked what had happened. He said nothing when I remarked, snarkily, “It’s a good thing we got that warranty.”

And now my camera is over two years old. Continue reading this entry »

I was fourteen-years-old and everywhere I went I was beset with existential crises.

The most persistent was the private drama I’d go through every time I had to fill in a form that asked me what my first language was. I was new to the country and to the school, so there were many such forms. And, I swear, every time the question came up, worded exactly like that – “first language,” I would pause and try to come up with an answer.

Because I was confused. Were they really interested in knowing what my first language was? Continue reading this entry »

I live on the seventeenth floor of a building that claims to have eighteen floors but really doesn’t. There’s no number thirteen in the elevator and there’s just the one floor above mine.

The windows and the balconies of this building are arranged neatly in something like a checkerboard pattern. Expanses of glass lie flat against the whitewashed walls, concrete balconies flanking them on either side and above and below. Your average high-rise: grey and flatly common-sensical, an exercise in three-dimensional 2-Dness.

My apartment is right next to the elevators. Sometimes I can hear them through the walls: a high-pitched protesting followed by an indignant rumbling. Days will go by when I don’t hear them, and then one night the sound will suddenly make itself heard through an earphone and my taptapping on the keyboard and my skin will crawl a little.

This house I live in lacks, among other things, curtains. Continue reading this entry »