Years ago my
mother wrote short stories about mice
who lived in the store room in Hatton.
It was magical yet familiar,
a dream set in all the intricate details,
smells and feel of home.
I was in the stories, and Appa and Ammi, Akki,
Saras akka, my cousin Shehan
and Subramaniam aatha the cook.
When I read them now the memories flood
back like a warm, inchoate blanket,
a winter duvet where the years
have gnawed little rips
and the occasional tear.
Sometimes I wonder
whether those days
were ever real.
Whether the vague terrors of childhood
have been smoothed over
with the velvet dust of years.
I try to grasp again the feel
of cat’s whiskers on the back of my hand,
the smell of morning in Hatton,
as if nothing in the landscape had ever been touched.
Complex multi-layered bouquet
of crushed guava leaf,
thrill of chlorophyll like perfume...
as a kid, I remember smelling
it for minutes while in a tree.
Smoky crackle of twigs in the fireplace.
Uneven squeak of floorboards.
Scarred cane wood settees in the sitting room,
furniture we’ve had from before the riots of ‘83
smooth curves jarred by occasional old wounds
exposing the innards of ivory-yellow wood.
Books on Marx and Engels and Mao,
next to a row of frayed Reader’s Digests,
some from the 70s.
I remember finding a biography of Neruda,
didn’t even know who he was
but was fascinated by the word sketches
of his conquests of un-named women
in harvest fields.
Smiling, subservient faces of estate workers
with whom I couldn’t speak, my Tamil too halting.
Even back then I knew vaguely of their grotesque poverty,
having to drink tea from a hollowed out half coconut
gristle still spiky on the outer shell,
breakfast a morsel of unleavened roti bread,
livened only by a bite of nai miris.
Shallow walls of the tortoise enclosure,
residents trundling
in a constrained oval
jaws chewing in slow motion.
They laid an egg once, but nothing came of it.
Sterile white oval,
small work of flawed magic.
Five years later,
In Rajagiriyra we lived upstairs
above the Bandaranaike’s.
I used to slide down
the banisters of those stairs
for hours.
Dreaming up a dozen lives that I
thought I led.
Always been like that. Always will be.
Living in my head.
Living in worlds
I made for myself.
Ten years later, after we moved to Wattala
at lunch I used to read books, TV
blaring in the background
and appa and ammi nearby,
The smell of sambol, mallung salad, fried eggplant...
would drift in the air, mingle with
updates from Saras akka about food prices,
our driver Appuhamy’s lectures on politics,
dog grunts and the smoothness of cats
lurking hopefully on chairs, waiting
for a piece of fish-bone with watchful eyes.
Now, in my own apartment in Clingendael
(watched by a fat Dutch pigeon
on the balcony rail)
I read my mother’s poems.
She has that knack of catching colours
A painter’s eye.
Clear window that cuts through
mundane daily updates, stilted
language of emails.
I wish talking to family was always like this
Clarity and warmth in colour.
I remember as a child,
when left alone
I used to feel their absence
like I had been moved away from a hearth
like someone had tamped down the central heating.
Now, I’ve been away for so long
I have forgotten how
proximity floods the mind
with the fullness of warm silences.
A few days after I got married,
Krystyna and I had a chat.
She said when I arrived at the poruwa
surrounded by family, with my parents,
I had looked strong.
Different from how I usually look.
The memory of it tightens my throat,
made me wonder whether being atomized
had robbed me.
Whether flight from the cocoon
had made me a man but killed the boy
carved sharp lines
but emptied my veins
of some essence I can’t define.
Singha Road to San Francisco,
my family is an uneven web
splayed across the world.
They are like friends I made in early childhood,
chosen by proximity, not personality or chemistry.
But like childhood friends they have seen me
when I was a seed.
Before I put out leaf and grew tall
and bent and green and twisted.
Knew me when my bones
weren’t hardened ,
when I was knobbly kneed.
They fit me like we’ve
spent time together
in a womb
or a sardine can.
They are not my size and shape
but the concave in my body fits the convex in theirs.
The kinks in my limbs and the pointed ends of my mind
fit into familiar groves in theirs.
After some years, and a few thousand miles,
the groves and kinks have become unfamiliar
silted over by change and age
and exposure to different
kinds of sunlight
and wind.
Email and voices on a telephone, record
only imperfectly
this inching apart
like the blue-grey tint on a Hiace van's rear window
making the landscape on the other side
seem obscure, unreal.
Once you meet in a year or
two, the differences
in face and skin and timbre
of voice
and mind
are as disorienting
as walking out of a dark cinema into daylight
or a shift in the tarmac beneath your feet
That’s it I think. The ground
beneath your feet.
When I see appa and ammi
somewhere other than in Wattala
they seem strangely out of place
like people shipped in by time machine.
One a Peter Pan in a world that doesn’t understand
the need for fantasy or crocodiles with clocks in their stomachs,
or the joy of crunching lettuce.
One a silent weight
of cigarette smoke and man-smell
blunt, true, scarred and brittle as old iron,
quiet as an empty room with someone
in a chair in the shadows.
While getting a haircut
I searched in the mirror
for appa's and ammi's features.
The giant forehead perhaps.
Maybe the beginnings of my father’s nose
Akki has a big forehead too,
although hers is round
and mine is oddly oblong.
Laabi writes of a nomad
who confuses one city with another,
one continent with another
gets tangled in tongues,
of pounding on the bars of separation...
No wonder emails don’t feel real.
They’re like a yoghurt cup on a string,
taken with you through
the wardrobe
in those Narnia books.
I wonder whether writing down
these thoughts will change things,
like breaking an ants nest to see within
or capturing an insect
to stick it on a cork screen.
But I don’t care.
I have no other way of holding on to those days
memories that wrinkle and deform
like fresh basil leaves overnight.
Intangible as evening light
beginning to fade
on a dirt road.
who lived in the store room in Hatton.
It was magical yet familiar,
a dream set in all the intricate details,
smells and feel of home.
I was in the stories, and Appa and Ammi, Akki,
Saras akka, my cousin Shehan
and Subramaniam aatha the cook.
When I read them now the memories flood
back like a warm, inchoate blanket,
a winter duvet where the years
have gnawed little rips
and the occasional tear.
Sometimes I wonder
whether those days
were ever real.
Whether the vague terrors of childhood
have been smoothed over
with the velvet dust of years.
I try to grasp again the feel
of cat’s whiskers on the back of my hand,
the smell of morning in Hatton,
as if nothing in the landscape had ever been touched.
Complex multi-layered bouquet
of crushed guava leaf,
thrill of chlorophyll like perfume...
as a kid, I remember smelling
it for minutes while in a tree.
Smoky crackle of twigs in the fireplace.
Uneven squeak of floorboards.
Scarred cane wood settees in the sitting room,
furniture we’ve had from before the riots of ‘83
smooth curves jarred by occasional old wounds
exposing the innards of ivory-yellow wood.
Books on Marx and Engels and Mao,
next to a row of frayed Reader’s Digests,
some from the 70s.
I remember finding a biography of Neruda,
didn’t even know who he was
but was fascinated by the word sketches
of his conquests of un-named women
in harvest fields.
Smiling, subservient faces of estate workers
with whom I couldn’t speak, my Tamil too halting.
Even back then I knew vaguely of their grotesque poverty,
having to drink tea from a hollowed out half coconut
gristle still spiky on the outer shell,
breakfast a morsel of unleavened roti bread,
livened only by a bite of nai miris.
Shallow walls of the tortoise enclosure,
residents trundling
in a constrained oval
jaws chewing in slow motion.
They laid an egg once, but nothing came of it.
Sterile white oval,
small work of flawed magic.
Five years later,
In Rajagiriyra we lived upstairs
above the Bandaranaike’s.
I used to slide down
the banisters of those stairs
for hours.
Dreaming up a dozen lives that I
thought I led.
Always been like that. Always will be.
Living in my head.
Living in worlds
I made for myself.
Ten years later, after we moved to Wattala
at lunch I used to read books, TV
blaring in the background
and appa and ammi nearby,
The smell of sambol, mallung salad, fried eggplant...
would drift in the air, mingle with
updates from Saras akka about food prices,
our driver Appuhamy’s lectures on politics,
dog grunts and the smoothness of cats
lurking hopefully on chairs, waiting
for a piece of fish-bone with watchful eyes.
Now, in my own apartment in Clingendael
(watched by a fat Dutch pigeon
on the balcony rail)
I read my mother’s poems.
She has that knack of catching colours
A painter’s eye.
Clear window that cuts through
mundane daily updates, stilted
language of emails.
I wish talking to family was always like this
Clarity and warmth in colour.
I remember as a child,
when left alone
I used to feel their absence
like I had been moved away from a hearth
like someone had tamped down the central heating.
Now, I’ve been away for so long
I have forgotten how
proximity floods the mind
with the fullness of warm silences.
A few days after I got married,
Krystyna and I had a chat.
She said when I arrived at the poruwa
surrounded by family, with my parents,
I had looked strong.
Different from how I usually look.
The memory of it tightens my throat,
made me wonder whether being atomized
had robbed me.
Whether flight from the cocoon
had made me a man but killed the boy
carved sharp lines
but emptied my veins
of some essence I can’t define.
Singha Road to San Francisco,
my family is an uneven web
splayed across the world.
They are like friends I made in early childhood,
chosen by proximity, not personality or chemistry.
But like childhood friends they have seen me
when I was a seed.
Before I put out leaf and grew tall
and bent and green and twisted.
Knew me when my bones
weren’t hardened ,
when I was knobbly kneed.
They fit me like we’ve
spent time together
in a womb
or a sardine can.
They are not my size and shape
but the concave in my body fits the convex in theirs.
The kinks in my limbs and the pointed ends of my mind
fit into familiar groves in theirs.
After some years, and a few thousand miles,
the groves and kinks have become unfamiliar
silted over by change and age
and exposure to different
kinds of sunlight
and wind.
Email and voices on a telephone, record
only imperfectly
this inching apart
like the blue-grey tint on a Hiace van's rear window
making the landscape on the other side
seem obscure, unreal.
Once you meet in a year or
two, the differences
in face and skin and timbre
of voice
and mind
are as disorienting
as walking out of a dark cinema into daylight
or a shift in the tarmac beneath your feet
That’s it I think. The ground
beneath your feet.
When I see appa and ammi
somewhere other than in Wattala
they seem strangely out of place
like people shipped in by time machine.
One a Peter Pan in a world that doesn’t understand
the need for fantasy or crocodiles with clocks in their stomachs,
or the joy of crunching lettuce.
One a silent weight
of cigarette smoke and man-smell
blunt, true, scarred and brittle as old iron,
quiet as an empty room with someone
in a chair in the shadows.
While getting a haircut
I searched in the mirror
for appa's and ammi's features.
The giant forehead perhaps.
Maybe the beginnings of my father’s nose
Akki has a big forehead too,
although hers is round
and mine is oddly oblong.
Laabi writes of a nomad
who confuses one city with another,
one continent with another
gets tangled in tongues,
of pounding on the bars of separation...
No wonder emails don’t feel real.
They’re like a yoghurt cup on a string,
taken with you through
the wardrobe
in those Narnia books.
I wonder whether writing down
these thoughts will change things,
like breaking an ants nest to see within
or capturing an insect
to stick it on a cork screen.
But I don’t care.
I have no other way of holding on to those days
memories that wrinkle and deform
like fresh basil leaves overnight.
Intangible as evening light
beginning to fade
on a dirt road.
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