The day drags. I manage to do some of the things I had to do today, but doing them gives me no sense of satisfaction, leaving me with no desire to do the more pressing things I haven’t yet done. Like writing, or processing pictures. Or reading the things that it scares me to read.

I spend the morning and then the afternoon flitting between my novel and my laptop, computer screen and blotted typefaces alternating until my head hurts and a thick-clotted frustration begins to settle itself, heavy-haunched and maudlin, behind my eyes.

I’ve been in the country, been in Toronto for three weeks now. Sri Lanka is at once at the forefront of everything I talk and think about, and also somewhere so far back in the recesses of my memory that I cannot believe that I was there less than a month ago, that I was there for longer than I’ve been back in Toronto. It is at once the central point of interest around which I am constructing lifeplans and also some place, some history that I am not quite sure exists. There is so much to say — so much to say, in fact, that I’m overwhelmed. I cannot put words to paper, cannot write about Sri Lanka. There is too much preamble, too much of Toronto to wade through first.

So anyway, I’ve been in Toronto for three weeks and have yet to walk through this city, really walk through this city: on my own, with no destination, where the point is the streets you find that you’ll never find again and the people you meet who you’ll never speak to again. When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking of Toronto, sick with longing for and dread of this place, it was of those solitary walks I’d think with relief, the way you can spend days entirely anonymous in public places, how people talk to you when you know you’ll never see each other again.


The day’s dragging on me, and when I realise that I’ve spent the last ten minutes pacing the breadth of our tiny living room, I pull on a jacket and go outside. After some deliberation I leave my camera behind. It starts to rain the moment I step out of the lobby, a light drizzle that gives way to a enthusiastic downpour once I’m deep enough in the valley that I’d get as wet if I kept on going as I would if I turned around. Like the last time I got this drenched, about half a year ago, I am soaked down to my underwear, and just like the last time I got this wet, when the rain clears and I make my way to the mall, I am the only one, with my waterlogged trousers and dripping hair, at all wet. Everyone else is surreally, spotlessly dry and I can’t see the expressions on their faces from behind my clammy glasses. I pick up some ice cream and head back home, trailing oceans as I go.

Outside, people are holding their cellphones to the sky. In the time it took the cashier to ring through three customers, the storm wore itself out. The sun’s going to set in about twenty minutes, but as though compensating for the fact that it had felt for a while like night had already fallen, the waning afternoon is suddenly as bright as noon, and there is a rainbow cutting an immaculate arc over the building in which I live. It’s been years since I’ve seen a rainbow this flawless, never since I’ve seen my neighborhood this graciously photogenic. Had I bought my camera with me, no doubt somewhere in the universe my karmic calculations would have been readjusted so that I wouldn’t have been there at that moment to see what my homeplace looks like when it’s not being just another rundown brown ghetto in the city, when it’s being some place whose value you don’t need to belabour to explain. I cross the street and there’s a man in jeans and a dress-shirt clamboring over his ground-floor balcony. He looks a little stunned, this side of his apartment, and then he’s striding towards the parking lot.

Of all the places I could have come back to and all the places I’ll have to leave again, even though right now I’d happily rewind back to four weeks ago in Sri Lanka or fast-forward ahead three months to Vancouver, I’m glad it’s Toronto to which I returned, glad it’s Toronto to which I’m saying goodbye. Toronto is the place I am when I am nowhere else; and maybe that sounds dismissive, and maybe it is dismissive, but this is the closest thing I can muster to a sustainable sense of home.