A British traveler returns to Sri Lanka, her homeland until the age of four, where she struggles with identity as she tries to reconnect to a forgotten past.
Ayubowan. Welcome.
In the past 18 hours, I’ve crossed two continents. In the span of the next 18, I might just reach the front of the customs queue.
Ayubowan, Ayubowan.
Time is kept in the intervals between passing one bright-eyed poster and the next; each of a different person, but the same word, the same warm greeting. A promise to each traveler–You’ll love it here. You’ll never want to leave.
After an age of shuffling, the suitcase of a blissfully ignorant stranger biting at my heels, I finally step outside. It’s that breeze again–the one that rushed when the plane doors first opened. This is the first wave of realization that I’d returned after all these years. One breeze alone carries a lifetime of memories that for so long were out of my grasp. British air could never compete, after all. Not with this dry heat, charged with distant thunder and a swirl of dust. Standing here now, at the entrance of Colombo International Airport, it well and truly sinks in. A whole year of fantasizing about this trip–this breeze, this view–and here I finally am, blinking in the early morning sun in Sri Lanka. My Sri Lanka.
This is my moment, where time should stand still. But my moment is duly submerged by the families and couples bustling around, charged and alive.
There’s an elderly woman trembling behind the belt barrier, rosary draped around her clasped hands. I hope she finds who she’s looking for. I barely finish the thought before a toddler zips past, nearly knocking the duty-free from my sweaty grasp. He jumps into the older woman’s arms. Neither is strong enough to hold the other, and both sink to the floor in a blinding scene of relief and affection. I bite my bottom lip. Perhaps more tired than I thought, my bags suddenly feel heavy, and my dry eyes begin to well. I blink upwards to the dazzling blankness of the noon sky.
Ayubowan now rings in my mind like a prayer. Welcome home.
I’m 7 years old again, scurrying past the lamplit patio after dark, having been caught up playing in a nearby glade, where the road cuts off. I’ve never stayed so late before, and never played alone. But I had a fight yesterday and–in my childish pride–ran off alone. This isn’t so bad, I tell myself. You don’t need her. I rush through the door that evening, proud to find the way back home myself.
…
But the living room, usually basked in light and laughter, is barren and looming. It’s the first time I know solitude, and the darkness that comes with it. I stay on the patio instead, clinging to the cricket song as a diversion from the quiet. Perhaps it’s a dream, a conspiracy of my mind, of how a house so full might be without its light, without its people.
…
They aren’t far, after all, but draining a nearby stream, with neighbors and the shopkeepers across the street, searching for-
A jolt from one of the tires stirs me awake. My mouth is dry from hanging open, and I’ve drooled over my jersey sleeve.
‘Ah, you are awake? We are not there yet. Sleep more if you like,’ the cab driver’s lined eyes smile through the rearview mirror.
As the car whips from the highway into a rural slip road, I gaze out the window. The streets are growing, or rather shrinking, into a manic display of buildings. They all seem connected somehow, but also not at all, like each window has its own architectural identity. One is bordered by dusty red panes and climbing flowers. Another is an industrial gray, where not even a fly would resolve to land. In my disoriented state, it feels like the car is growing bigger, as the streets squeeze tighter. People are even starting to walk on the road as the pavement runs out. I watch a merchant on the roadside, barely batting an eye as bikes and cars evade him by a hair. His stall is piled high with fruit of every color. Mangos, plump and still connected by the branch. My mouth feels drier still.
The cab driver clears his throat. ‘You are visiting family?’
I pull the hair out of my mouth. ‘Yeah, this is my first time back.’
He utters some curses into the traffic. I, too, side-eye the other cars, barreling down the streets like they’re in a hurry to the next life.
‘Back? So you were born here?’
‘I was, I lived here until I was four.’ I wince at his surprise that I ever belonged here. Like I can’t have been a child here once, ducking through the alleyways and charging through the streams, sleeping on a coarse mattress as the fan hums through the night. Speak to me in your language. It’s my language too.
‘You know, last year I visited Canada to see my daughter.’
I force a smile, fatigue rising at this exchange. My British sensibility secretly banks on the conversation fading.
‘She’s an engineer,’ he grins, gesturing to a few faded photographs on his visor. One is of a young girl with dark, speckled skin and even darker hair. The other is newer, a graduation photo. Her skin is lighter there–no doubt from that wintry Canadian sun–and so is her hair, streaked with caramel highlights. My heart swells, imagining what he would give to have his little girl in the back seat, ducking in and out of the view from his mirror. I smile for real this time, throwing my pompous disinterest to the wind. ‘What’s her name?’
A rain spell comes and goes in the conversation that has ensued. My driver’s name is Joseph; his daughter’s name is Diana. She’s 22 in two months, loves American food, and is spending her first summer away from home to pursue her next degree. Joseph laughs a lot; it’s a very pleasant sound. Joy looks the same in any language.
‘You are studying too?’
‘No, I-’
I jump as a distant car alarm punctures the ambience, my heart lurching for the fourth time in the past hour. Amidst the familiarity and sunlight, a rush of anxiety forms a knot in my chest. Every smell and sound oozes with nostalgia, sickeningly sweet: the scent of rotting fruit pulsing beneath the cries of the market; the flick of a cotton dress; an abandoned slipper; the rush of water. My surroundings don’t curl around my memories. They seem indifferent instead, coldly moving on because I left.
You’re home, I tell myself, again and again. But the voice in my head is no longer mine.
The car slows to a halt.
‘We’re here,’ Joseph chirps merrily.
My back, that had been curled against the jutted car door, now throbs from the handle’s imprint between my shoulder blades. Now trudging up the chalk-white stepping stones to the house, I crane my head to squint at the giant silhouette before me. I suddenly recall the parable story my mother often read, The Prodigal Son. A boy leaves his father’s house at the first sight of his inheritance. He leaves with everything for nothing; and returns with nothing for everything.
I stand now in the cool shadow of the house, hesitant to enter. The door is a solid-looking brown. It swings wide open, just as it always did. Always welcoming; always waiting.
A climbing flower borders the frame, where the white paint had curled against its vines. Clay pots of different colors and sizes line the entrance like little foot soldiers, each boasting the same flower. Udavadiya. Orchids, of all colors, bowing their stems before every new visitor. Or in this case, an old one. I fight the urge to stay here, hiding in this tableau. It all has such a tired grandeur to it. It’s like something so used to change, but which hasn’t changed at all.
I trail inside and drop my suitcase against the rust-colored tiles. The living room tells a different story today than the one from my dreams. The white outer walls do not have a square foot without a hanging vine and the odd scuff or peel, yet the walls inside gleam undisturbed, save for the open windows, and the squares of sunlight they invite. I bask in the glow of this space, where sunbeams themselves stop to rest.
An evening breeze sails through, wafting up wet sheets draped over wicker chairs and carrying a rich, savory aroma from the next room. Distant chatter and the nudging of kitchenware fill the ambience. My mouth tingles, recalling my last meal being a can of salted Pringles from about 15 hours ago. I pick the skin around my nails, partly from hunger and partly from mustering the courage to call out to the faceless voices.
By chance, a woman darts out the far door, muttering about the washing. She gasps upon seeing me, hand flying to her chest. I can only smile sheepishly.
After catching her breath, she carols into the air, ‘Theyyane, she’s here!’
The chatter escalates as a stream of figures bustles into the room, babbling various phrases.
‘You’re here already? My goodness, how tall you’ve grown!’
‘You came! My goodness, I didn’t hear a thing! Ayyo, who left the bedsheets out?’
‘Who is it?’
‘Come! Goodness, so skinny! Come eat!’
Within a second, I am enveloped in people and noise. The lump in my throat returns, along with a knot of emotions and memories, yet to be unravelled.
Two children once stood here. Opa auntila, they had called them–Little Miss Busybodies. They gazed up at these faces with large, round eyes, anxious to understand the ways of the world. Now I stand, years later, in the shadow of those children long gone. My eyes are just as wide, a well of all the things I’ve seen and learned. Yet still they search for that missing twinkling pair.
My aunty cups my face, as if she sees the turmoil coursing behind my eyes like a current. ‘Welcome home,’ she says. And I believe her.
One day, I’ll see beyond the guilt. One day, I’ll forgive the child I was. But for now, they’ll do it for me. And so I face this love pulsing around me, deciding I deserve it, in the sunny house that I grew up in.
