After his appointment, my father goes grocery shopping. He buys every conceivable fruit in the store and when he gets home I take them out of their bags and put them all away. Oranges and tangerines and grapefruits jostle for space in the fridge drawer with apples, empires and granny smiths and red delicious. There are pears and guavas. A papaya, its slick green skin shrouded in clinging plastic, somehow finds space too. And bananas, of course. They’re a staple in my father’s shopping. I place them in the wire holder on top of the microwave. He used to bring home plantains, but only he and my mother would eat them, so he fell out of the habit. There’s even a whole pineapple, which my sister carefully slices, her dark head bent intently over the spikes. The scent stings and for a moment I am transported to a damp kitchen in Colombo, to those crowded mornings, the way those days slid under my skin, seem lodged here beyond familiarity.
Strange that this many years later the memories still resurface like this, in all the wrong ways, for all the wrong reasons.

And then it’s all done, there are no more fruits to be put away. The plums and the peaches and the apricots, the orange juice and the ginger ale, the hefty green watermelon, everything neatly stored in their correct placeholders. This excess of colour, these strange ways of speaking.