This is what comes of moving and bare cupboards.
With under a week to go, the kitchen is devolving into a patchwork of missing foods. The ketchup’s all done, as are nearly all manner of vegetables — except broccoli. On the other hand, there is a whole block of butter and a huge ziploc bag of frozen dumplings. And we went through the last teabag last night. So today I finally made a pot of tea with the looseleaf tea I bought in Gampola a year ago this week.

I could tell you that the tea stings with the taste of home and history and truth and belonging and all those other things. But it tastes like none of those things. I added too much ginger, the magic is skewed.

A very dark-skinned Indian man walks in and orders a chicken plate for after salat. For a moment we stare at each other, and then I look away.
“For after salat?” says the proprietor. I’m not used to hearing it as salat, instead of salah. “Friend, I’ll make it for you after salat. It’s not so good otherwise.”
And the customer walks to the back of the store, to where the washrooom is.

The halal shawarma place down the street, besides the best falafels I’ve ever had, also sells kafiyyehs and Puck and Vimto and tiny glass bottles of Arabic shatta. All of them terribly overpriced, but regardless.

And tonight, with two weeks to go in this strange city, I learned they also have a musallah.

This afternoon at the grocery store, I thought about replenishing my depleted store of sandwich spreads. As of last week, I’m all out of peanut butter (and bananas), and as of this morning, jam. For variety, I considered getting Nutella this time. Diversity is healthy.

Several moments of painful deliberation were spent in that aisle. None of the jars come in sizes smaller than Too Big for Your Own Good. And since I’m moving back to Toronto in about a fortnight, the problem is that I probably won’t finish it all by then. Or, worse, that I will.

I tried to compensate with a 59c pack of Reese’s Pieces. I think they must have been old to have been that cheap. They were troublingly salty.

It’s a small place. There are four tables, with two rickety chairs each, set against the chipped and whitewashed walls. On the right wall, they’ve hung two blown-up newspaper articles featuring the place, one from The Star, another from Now. An off-white bust of Gandhi looks impassively past the enlarged headlines and inset quotations. There’s a telephone nailed to the left wall, its loosely coiled extension cord hanging flat against the greying plaster and underneath it, the cash register. They’ve set a tray out, holding a canister of water, another of coffee, and some mugs.

The phone rings. “Hello Gandhi,” says the owner. There’s almost comma in there somewhere in his greeting, but not quite.

We order our lunches and sit down. The food’s good, spicier than we expected. Surreptitiously, we dab at our noses with our napkins, feeling like failures for having not only taken but also warranted the advice of the white girl who, sniffing, had told us to be careful as she left.

“Next time,” says the owner, from behind the counter, amused, “order mild-to-medium. It’s too hot, huh. Even our chef is saying order mild.” The man in the kitchen waves at us; he looks vaguely Filipino, vaguely Spanish. “You’re finishing all my water,” he continues dryly. “Water’s expensive.”

I seize the opportunity, have in fact been waiting for this moment. “Thanni expensive ah?”
He nods. “Thanni expensive.”
I wait.
And then he looks at me again. “… Thanni expensive?”
I grin, satisfied.

The man wheeling in crates stops to join us. “How did you know we spoke tamil?”
“I heard you.”

One of them is from Tamil Nadu, the other from Jaffna. Since I can’t just be from the island, I am from the city I was born in and the towns my parents called home.
“Pottuvil. Near Batticaloa – and Gaul.” I have a sudden memory of the bridge to Gaul, the jeep, the sand dunes, the paddy fields.

We talk about the trouble. “The trouble,” which is the standard euphemism for the war. Other translations from the thamizh word include suffering and distress.

When I get home that night, my father is at the computer. I stand in the doorway, watching him. It’s a tamil website, advertisements all over the page and it hasn’t finished loading. My father is peering at the screen, one hand enveloping the mouse. There are two computers in the living room, but my father’s sitting at the monitor we’ve had for a decade now. The one behind him, surrounded by the paraphernalia of my brother’s sketches and notes, looms anorexic thin and cool, and I can’t understand why my father is sitting at the old one. That seems an important point to resolve, why my father chose this computer, with its painfully bad colour controls, over the one we’d bought last week.

“There was a bombing,” I say, leaning against the doorframe. “In Colombo. Forty people died.”

He nods. It’s the kind of website I avoid, with flashing headlines and animated images. “There’ll have a lot now these days. Today was the independence day. They always do things around this time.”

It feels, momentarily, like an important point to resolve.
But I can think of several reasons my father chose this computer over that.

What I can’t reconcile is the fact of my father’s reading thamizh websites with the silence of this conversation. The door is still open behind me, I still have my jacket on and my bag weighs heavy on my shoulder. In my father’s room, beside his bed is a stack of thamizh newspapers and magazines, bought at grocery stores where my father buys wadas in brown paper bags. A few of them are in English, printed in Sri Lanka and always a few days out of date. I’ll occasionally skim through those papers, trying to piece together a politics and a present history that escapes me. I cannot reconcile those inky sheets of newsprint, the fact of them sitting beside the phone in my parents’ bedroom, with the casualness with which my father agrees with me.