Home is a feeling
I’m writing from a home I’ve not visited for five years. It’s hot and humid. My clothes are wet, I’m not sure if it’s sweat or water from the two swims I had today. I’m tapping away at my laptop on an open patio with my feet on the cool polished cement floor, overlooking a lush tropical garden filled with trees and flowers and chipmunks that won’t stop chatting to each other. It’s three in the afternoon but I won’t dare step outside for at least another two hours, when the sun will finally lose some of its bite. A ceiling fan blasts with full force overhead.
I’m writing from Sri Lanka and I’m so very happy to be home.
I’ve never lived in this country so perhaps it’s odd that I refer to it as home. I was born in Colombo but my family moved overseas when I was 1. My thaththi says it wasn’t the political instability or the civil war that would rage for years to come. He did the sums on household expenses and it just didn’t add up. He made a stable but small salary as a civil engineer and he needed to support himself, my mother, me, his mother, his three sisters and in time, my mother’s parents. He foresaw that he would be struggling to provide for years to come.
So we moved. First to a workers compound outside Bu Ali in Oman where my ammi gave birth to my malli - we would all tease him about being more Arab than Sinhalese for years to come. We moved with thaththi’s work to Muscat, then Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. For the first eleven years of my life, we spoke Sinhala at home, English at international schools run by British Catholic nuns and heard Arabic around us everywhere else. To feel out of place everywhere was the norm.
Except Sri Lanka, where my parents took us for three months of every year. It was where the world clicked back to making sense again, for all of us. Where we spoke the language, looked like the people and understood where we fit beyond our tiny nuclear family.
In Dubai my family of four lived in a two bedroom apartment. The city was dry and sandy and oscillated between hot and really hot outside. My grandparents’ small house in Colombo was a paradise in comparison, which teaches you relativity, if you’ve ever experienced Colombo’s chaos. The grass was a lush green, colourful flowers tumbled out of every corner and there were many trees to be climbed. The sunny days were spent running around the garden for hours with my cousins, playing on swings my seeya strung up for us. My loku ammas and loku thaththas would feed us, bathe us, clothe us and keep us entertained throughout the day. All this happened under the watchful eye of my archchi, the family’s matriarch.
Each night ended knelt in front of the shrine with my grandparents chanting blessings, with offerings of incense and the many flowers from their garden. We all slept in one room, my cousins and I. There were many nights getting told off for talking instead of sleeping and midnight wakeups to find the one mosquito that snuck through the net we so carefully secured before going to bed.
I could write for hours about those languid days of summer spent inventing games with the creativity that seems endless when you’re a child but requires careful cultivation when you’re an adult. Feet black with dirt and floor polish, Bata slippers constantly lost and found, carrom, three nought four, Cluedo, Monopoly (the quick version where we dealt out all the cards), candles during power cuts, and no aircon in sight, just the comforting, constant hum of fans going all day long.
I was 12 when we moved to Perth – the world’s most isolated capital city – and it became a lot more expensive for us to go to Sri Lanka. We would return every couple of years, every five years, as often as we could afford to. When my thaththi moved back to Sri Lanka, I tried to visit every year or at least every two years. But after the global COVID meltdown of 2020 and my thaththi’s death in 2022, I haven’t been able to return till now.
My grandparents passed away many years ago now, their house stands empty. My cousins have all moved overseas. Still this country feels like home. Such is the power of the memories my family created together.
It’s in the constant hum of the fans around me. It’s in the unrelenting humidity that sees me wake up sweating in the morning and fall asleep sweating in the evening. It’s in the food, the music, the ocean that is never too far away and the melodic tones of my first language.
They say most of the time we do shallow breathing, using only a small percentage of our lung capacity. It’s what they teach you in deep breathing classes, to breathe from the bottom of your lungs. This is what being home, my first home, feels like for me. Like breathing with all of my whole lungs. Like seeing with all of my eyes, hearing with all of my ears and feeling with all of my heart.
Big warm sweaty hugs
Sashi
Beautiful!
this was so transporting. x