“I hate saying hello and I hate saying goodbye.”

I am standing at your closet. It’s a steel locker really, dented in several places, about a fourth of its front covered with stickers of wrestlers, their muscles bulging out of their skimpy costumes, their faces contorted into grimaces of victory, their arms either raised high in triumph or flexed across their chests in challenge. The stickers are old, faded and peeling, remnants of a shared childhood. I pick at one, its edges already serrated, the glue showing up in thin white ridges against the blue metal.

I can tell that I sound like I’m whining. I can tell that I sound spoiled and anti-social, wanting to avoid the crush of family and social responsibilities, wanting only to spend the light-drenched afternoons playing soccer barefoot on the roof or hanging over the balustrades of the red-floored balcony.

And it’s true, I am whining. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, to keep these fortnights lived and real. I will remember the sound of crows in the morning; I will remember the sudden fall of afternoon flash rains; I will remember the wide crimson stairs and you sitting on them watching the TV through the window bars.

You laugh, saying the logical thing, what I knew you’d say, something bland and vague, and you are amused and teasingly patronising. You’re getting ready to go out somewhere. It’s early in the evening and you’re getting dressed, pulling clothes from the various corners of your room. You move swiftly, darting around the bed and my watching self.

I will remember you doing chin-ups on the bar in the empty garage; I will remember you standing silent at the entrance; I will remember you sprawled lazily across the sofa, arguing.

A year later, the night before we leave one last time, you come downstairs. We’re all watching a movie that really isn’t worth watching. You walk in just as the spy’s unrequited love appears at the top of a flight of stairs. She wears a long red dress and the man in his tuxedo is suitably taken aback at the sight of her. We pause in our various distractions to catch the moment. I grin, amused, trying to be.

It’s clear you’ve come to say goodbye. You’re gearing up to say the appropriate things and to say them genuinely, but I’m having none of it tonight. I keep my eyes fixed on the screen, watching the movie that isn’t worth watching, where women stand sleekly bewildered at the tops of stairs and in their graceful silence render men awestruck.

You say nothing and slip out. I saw you smile, a small tight smile, before you left.

I forget now.

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 »

among the first things I noticed were missing – this was years and years ago, long before my last trip when I sat in that house and waited for the things to come back that had left while I was gone, without my knowing.

Spectacularly tall, in their thinness they seemed to almost brush the side of the building so that more than once I was tempted to stretch over the balustrade circumventing the roof, to try to touch those thin, blinding leaves. But my arm would dangle in the air between and the distance would suddenly drop through, weighted with the heaviness of the light, and I would remain stranded on my side of the roof, the trees on their side as deceptively slender as ever. Untouched and untouchable, they didn’t poke the sky so much as seem to approach it, their tips just tickling the bottoms of the flimsy clouds, bending gracefully with the breezes that brought citynoise with them, shaking themselves back into position, never quite vertical, but willowy, curved liked peeled branches and not the full-fledged trees that they really were.

Lithe, they stand even now in my memories as though they were merely overgrown saplings, little girls with long, long legs and clear, gap-toothed smiles. So I was surprised, the trip before last, or the trip before that, to find they had been cut down. The sky seemed uninteresing in the space that had been opened up with their absence. Without those pointed heads forever nodding there, there was nothing for the clouds to weave through, nothing to bring out the blue. Nothing of comment there, now.

And the trip after that, remembering that I’d asked the year before, when I asked again about the trees, they told me again that they’d been cut down. I nodded and said nothing in reply to their silent bemusement, my elbows on the low cement wall, my head turned to the left, a corner of the red kitchen balcony just poking through my field of vision.

That roof. I used to love that roof. There was space there. Slipping past the grownups and their protests that I was too old for this – Continue reading this entry »

And, oh, what was this – was I nostalgic? Was I missing a place I couldn’t believe I had really been in? Mere moths ago.

Now: the house is silent outside my headphones; there is a lamp shining in my face, a brightness constant in my eye; the room is dark beside; and I am staring, jaw clenched, at a bright square supported on my too-small table: pictures, pictures slide past: faded, over-exposed, beautiful, mediocre, peopled and empty. Continue reading this entry »

I get the usual question, “Is your family ok?”
And I give what is becoming my standard response.

No one in my family was killed, and this is surprising because my father’s side lives in Pottuvil, which is right next to Galle, which was one of the most publicised spots in the country after the tsunami. In fact, one of my cousins, 6-year-old Shifa, lived in Galle.
School had just finished when the waves hit, and Shifa and her classmates had just begun heading home. I have her on video. The quality is crap and it’s dark, but it’s clear that her face is perfectly straight as she narrates her story. The class teacher, on seeing the oncoming waves, collected the kids and put them all up in a tree, and only then climbed for safety himself.
Of the the 30 kids in her class, only 6 survived.

She now lives in Pottuvil, with the rest of our extended family. Her parents worry that sending her back to her old school, which has reopened, would be traumatising.

I remember that night, after she told us her story for our “records,” she had nightmares and woke up crying.

So this is the story I tell people when they ask how my family is. And a few days ago I got the strangest response.
The woman I’d been speaking to looked at me with a look in her eyes that made me uncomfortable; it was almost a hungry look, something slightly savage.
“Did she grow?” she asked.
Confused, I stammered, “She was six at the time -”
“No, I mean, did she grow … mentally?”
“Oh.” I paused, Shifa’s face in my mind’s eye. She was one of the few people I’d been comfortable speaking Tamil with my whole month in Sri Lanka. I only ever saw her at night, when she was home from school, and so her memory is inextricably linked with that black, sequinned sky.
“I don’t know.” Something about the question made me withdraw, made me regard this woman with something like distrust. “I’d never met her before, I hadn’t known she existed, so I don’t really know whether she grew or not.”

And I couldn’t place what it was about that seemingly innocuous question that troubled me. The understanding of it comes and goes in blurred flashes. The sense that this was a romantic question, a breath-takingly naive question, the sort that we ask when we have no idea whatsoever what we’re really talking about. As though something holy had been betrayed, trampled on, photographed by blind tourists.

Growth?
Like it’s something you casually mention in small talk. How one’s soul grows, whether in leaps or bounds, after spending a day (that’s how long the child was missing) in a tree, watching people die. How children’s memories are imprinted with bodies being washed away, and the realisation that parents are as mortal and unreliable as everyone else.
As though these were things I could succintly put into bite-size sentences to make it easy for her to understand, easy to swallow, to digest.
As though really, it was for her own growth. Her own search for meaning, and she wanted to find it in someone else’s tragedy.

I think that her question unnerved me, because it reminded me of the problems I’d had with our alms-giving in Sri Lanka. We all think that there is power in helping others, that some sort of beauty must surround us because we help others. It becomes about us, not about the action, not about the victim. It’s not as obvious as, say, a celebrity donating a few thousand to some “exotic” charity while reporters and photographers crowd around. It’s much more personal than that, and much more systemic, too.
We’re out to save the world, as though the world were an entity that cannot live without our help. We’re out to save the world, because we think that unless we have seen death first hand, we cannot grow. We do it for purely selfish reasons; we want to grow.

I don’t know what it is; still it eludes me. Why I felt so uncomfortable when I taped the things we did, why I draw back when people assume an understanding they can’t handle. Why this understanding eldues me.
Surely I don’t have to go half-way across the world to understand myself.
And surely, you don’t need to devour someone else’s most private moments to come to terms with your own emptiness.

When we were finally able to creep out, I blinked in confusion. It looked like sunrise was nearing – but we couldn’t have waited that long, in that stifling room with the sleeping bodies. Our whispered words had marked the passing time; it hadn’t been that long.
But this wasn’t sunlight.
For the first time that I could remember, I could see by the light of the moon. There were no streetlights, no blinking signs, no cars even. Nothing to intrude on this silver light that spilled everywhere.
The stone well gleamed, a squat cylinder rising ponderously from the dark velvet sand. There were shadows, actual shadows at night; there was that much light.
Everything was so clear. This was no confused stumbling in a narrow midnight hallway.
I could see, when I turned her way, the line of her cheekbones, as clearly defined as though we were standing under a noon sun. But their angles glinted differently; they were not golden. The dark of her eyes were made blacker for the night and they shone brighter under the moon.
We sat down near the well, and I dug my feet in the sand, felt the silky grains lodge between toes. In that wind-carressed silence, it was hard to talk. It seemed disrespectful to break that stillness with our voices, made weak by that liquid light.

The first night there, I spread my mat on the sand and prayed out in the open, under the moon.

In Kalmunai, I was often serenaded by Zeenath, a four-year-old in whose I spent a few days.
She recited the following:

The Jaguar. (The capitals were audible, exceedingly so.)
One day the jaguar saw its spots
Lots and lots (preferably pronounced “lotht and lotht”)
Oh my, oh me.
Oh me, oh my.
Who did this to me -
And why. (Stress on that last word.)

Yes, and why.
The nostalgia becomes tempered with pain. And just a little bitterness, just a little anger.

This is the morning after, weeks after.
Has it been weeks?
Kingston timelessness has set it, warping my mind, slowly rotting my memories. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

There has to be a report soon, something tangible, at least some semblance of proof. Labelled pictures, reams of hole-punched paper, plastic covers. Perfectly parallel lines of words, one following the next, everything in beautiful order. Everything so neat, all the boxes carefully closed. Nothing untoward, nothing not fitting in.

And I cannot do it. I cannot make the words fit the pictures, because we drove by so fast and while I was taking the pictures I wanted to be seeing outside a camera lens. I cannot make the words reflect the voices, because written words are flat, lacking character and nuance and sound. I cannot explain the silences that were unavoidable, gut-wrenching, and even now dark. Because that has nothing to do with why we said we went, and everything to do with everything.

So I give up on this report. Instead I open up a Word document, insert the dates and let the words flow. The ones that no one will read, the ones that make sense, the ones that blur more than they reveal. Everything. Weeks late, I attempt to detail everything that happened. And find to my sickening horror that too much has faded away. In characteristic fashion, my mind has failed me. Again.
Is nothing holy?

I cannot believe now that I was anywhere but here, in the cloying heat of an unnaturally subdued street in the “better” half of a formerly famous town, now with more than its fair share of high-security jails.
I was never one to believe, never could accept inevitabilities. This last month it was my saving grace, so perhaps there is some sort of grace in our failings.

I want to capture everything now, everything. Every blink of the eye. Every curve of the mouth. Every word, every sound, every glint of light. And I can’t.

He was your textbook example of the benevolent racist, a man with assumptions buried so deep, I quickly dismissed the possibility of easily dismantling them. That is not to say that he was a “bad man,” per se. It was just that he couldn’t see how he was racist, even – especially – when he was going on about some culturally-educating encounter he’d had.

Case in point:
We were waiting in Heathrow (but it might have been Doha, after a while it was all just cold metal), and he asked me, “So do you feel Sri Lankan now?”
I replied more sharply than I expected, “I’ve always felt Sri Lankan. I’ve never doubted that.” I did not tell him that I’ve never known and still don’t know what it means to claim a specific nationality, especially Sri Lankan. I was a stranger, and I never felt it more than in the town where I’d been raised. But I couldn’t have explained this to him – it would have required a different understanding of the world entirely for him to have seen what I meant.
And he asked, “Would you live there?”
This I had decided weeks ago. “As long as it was on my own terms.” And then, almost vicously, “I wouldn’t live in Canada, if it wasn’t on my own terms.”
Surely not a surprising sentiment to hear from a kid who’d just been through the hell I’d been through. But he started back a little and his eyes widened; he hadn’t expected that.
Again, I didn’t explain to him what it meant to me to be able to “live on my own terms” – mostly because I know that I never will live on my own, and only my own, terms. Life requires compromise – there’s a wonderful bit of cliche for you; it rolls off the tongue beautifully.
But I knew what I meant specifically, if not generally, and I had no desire to explain myself to him.
He blustered, “Well, but the weather and all …”
And then I felt a little guilty for having perhaps have read too much into his questions. But only a little. Why ask loaded questions if you’re expecting superficial answers?

Big D. would have been proud of my answers.
They echoed the last words he’d said to me.
I’d been scrambling to have one last conversation with him, because I didn’t know when I’d see him again. The van was waiting in the front yard. All the luggage had been loaded. Everyone was dressed, even me.
So I asked him about Kuwait. Asked him if he’d liked living there.
Never one for small talk, he replied, “I can’t say I didn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“If I didn’t like it I shouldn’t have stayed there.”
I protested that there’s more to life than black-and-white morality, that sacrifice might be involved, making what is undesirable necessary. But I stammered and stuttered, smiling inside, because this was classic BD and I loved him for it.

I became proficient at taking pictures through the windows of whizzing cars. Many of them turned out surprising well.

Hambatota (pronounced HUM-mun-THO-tuh) was the second worst hit town in the country. It lies right along the coast. Travelling to it, we drove along the shore. Before the tsunami, we would not have been able to see the water; there would have been buildings blocking the view. I didn’t know this at the time – only afterwards, when we walked through the rubble, did I see this. But it’s hard to comprehend. It was almost as though I became inured to the destruction – I had no idea what the area had looked like before, and everything I saw seemed to fit in with the image of a country that had been at war for twenty years. So it wasn’t really that strange to me.

And what I saw wasn’t even half of it. Everything short of actual walls and floors had been removed – there were no bodies, no heaps of discarded concrete, no pointless miscellany. Occasionally, we’d see half a boat lying in the middle of a room with only one wall. The boats must have been easy to break. In the interests of floating, they’d been made from a light spongy material – something like cardboard.
What we did see, what had been left behind as a testament to the destruction were bare foundations, staring up at the bright bright sky and bleak, empty houses with walls torn off. It was a very neat madness; surreal, but manageable.

In Hambatota we visited some of the camps. Most of the victims – they’re called refugees in Sri Lanka – continue to live in tents. These tents are emblazoned with the colours, logos, and nationalities of their generous donors.
We also drove out to the New City. Again, I was aware of an acute lack of perspective on my part. While the others could remember the tangled jungle that had stood in place of the razed ground in front of us, I could not imagine anything except what I was seeing – even in spite of the living jungle looming at the clearly demarcated edges of the City. I had to take everything at face value because I had no idea what else to expect. And so the painfully straight rows of identical houses standing on smooth red soil was fact for me, where for others it had a dream-like quality of disbelief.
The New City was far away from the water and the government intended to transfer the victims to these houses. I have no idea how they intend to fit everyone in that neighbourhood. Hambatota was the only place where I saw evidence of the government providing new homes for the victims.

We spoke to some of the survivors. One was a 6-year-old cousin of mine; I have her on video.