The world is dust and he eats her tears.

The sand is sodden and she wears her life in her hair.

The world is dust and sand and she has salt in her mouth

and her tongue is burnt and he eats her tears.

Her teeth are broken and she wears her life and flowers in her hair.

She draws stars on her skin, she draws stars 

On her hips on her stomach and her breasts.

She is in her teeth and her nails and her hair.

She imagined it at dusk, he heard it at dusk, she wrote it at dawn.

She writes the world in words and the rest she speaks with her wasted skin and teeth and nails.

The world is dust and she writes her name in the sand.

She draws stars.

She understands lines and shapes and concepts and knows the world in words.

Dust can’t be written.

The rest is in her skin, her hair, her nails.

Their souls rest and flow through their fingers. 

They paint with light and dust and ruins.

The ruins are the reason, the light and the dust.

She draws stars on her skin and he draws lines on his veins.

Everything entwined and then winded, entwined.

The world is dust and she wears her life in her hair and in her broken teeth.

She reads books and hopes people overhear her talking in queues.

She imagined it at dusk and he heard it at dusk and she wrote it at dawn.

She watches her face shatter.

Naturally she hates her face.

There is salt in her mouth and her tongue is burnt

And he eats her words (and buckles her shoes.)

She imagines it in dust and he hears it in dust and she writes it in dust. 

She smokes slim cigarettes to look European. 

He draws lines on his veins and she writes poetry and drinks beer.

She has sand and flowers in her hair

And salt in her mouth and she speaks with her skin.

She understood the world through words, lines and shapes.

She wrote her name in the sand and what of her name?

She drew stars on him.

She willed herself old and the world shone with light and dust.

They waited in the moors, the heathers, the tints and the sand.

She was her nails, her hair and her teeth. 

She writes at dawn in the dust.

She smoked slim cigarettes and painted her nails black.

They live through their fingers.

The world is dust and her fate hides in her hair, entwining and winding entwined.

She writes terrible poetry and drinks terrible beer and she is here again.

He draws lines on his veins, she draws stars on her stomach and their souls rest and flow through their fingers. They live in the sounds where her words mean nothing and so she is freed from her lines and her shapes and her concepts.

When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back. My memory seems to reduce itself like the art of origami, folding further and further inwards until it no longer resembles itself. Years become a glance or a smell or a song. And days disappear into nothing. But there are certain memories that I can drag out and they emerge, kicking and screaming but nonetheless pristine and untouched. 

Saying goodbye to Amma is one such memory. Amma was curled on the bed when I said goodbye to her, her body had worn as thin as her nightdress and her greying hair had made an unruly bid for freedom. Her mad eyes looked up at me, woeful and incomprehensive like a dog. The pleading eyes of her psychosis could never tell me what they wanted. The room presents itself in my memory as a sort of prison, shrouded in relentless darkness with only a tiny window and a sharp glare of sunlight. Sri Lanka was no place for me then, a young man. It was drowning in clammy humidity and bitter civil war. I had just qualified as a doctor, and this was my cue to leave. Leaving was all we wanted to do. Some wanted to study at Oxford, to work for the NHS, to make a fortune in the city of London, to be where the Beatles sang. I went and left two of my sisters stagnating in that house, praying to any Gods they pleased. I left my appa concealed in a rusty tin can, also waiting for salvation, to be scattered in the Ganges. And my amma, my amma will always be in that room.

I barely took anything from that house. I wrapped up a few of the most precious books from my father’s library, to protect them from the creeping mouldy damp of the study. I also took a small, engraved box, made from olive wood, that I had admired as a child. The box is now perpetually filled with homeless objects, buttons, pins, coins and hair-bands with my daughter’s long tangled strands still tightly coiled around them. I touched it, when I heard what had happened, in a bizarre nostalgic ritual. I dragged my nail through the dark crevasses of the carving, following the ornate depiction of the Hindu god, Krishna. The coarse surface burrowed in and out by generations of woodworm roughened my touch. It smelt of sodden paddy fields and stale rainwater. The velvety ardour of the interior had faded into a dulled purple. I looked at it indignantly, as if its demise was indecent. It was once the pride of my amma’s house, the mark of her middle-class status, and was now looked at with bare recognition, just another throwaway object. I stood there in a kind of trance, until I sensed the familiar weight of my wife thumping downstairs, and the whining of the kettle labouring the morning’s tea. The house slowly began to animate with the talkative drones of the radio, the clattering of household jobs and the constant yelping from my youngest daughter. After a while I felt the light grip of my wife Marie’s hand on my shoulder. 

‘Please, Chadaiyan,’ she started. I sensed the beginning of a familiar plea to make me involve myself in the running of the house. ‘I need to you help me today. I need to move the dresser into Rebecca’s room, before she gets back this...’ her voice began to trail off as I continued to stand with my back to her, with stiff determined poise. 

‘Marie,’ my tone was loud and impatient, ‘I need to go back to Ceylon. My mother is dying.’ 

I turned and she looked at me quizzically, one facial expression evolving into another and another, ending on a look of worry. Before she spoke I moved to leave the room.
‘I will get dressed and fetch the morning’s paper, but then I must make arrangements.’ 
I watched her face change once more, into one of quiet resolve. 
‘Yes, you must. Of course you must. You must go to say goodbye.’

I took the taxi to Heathrow the next evening, a sulky London night. A clouded, starless sky dripped down onto the hard city. The blurred orange of streetlights cast a fake glow onto the pavements, leading hurried black-clothed figures to destinations unknown. The driver listened to Heart FM, the radio station of choice for London cabbies, supposedly inoffensive. After the obligatory conversation, in which numerous endearing terms were used such as ‘mate’, and ‘pal,’ we sat in a comfortable silence and remained so for the rest of the drive. Entering the airport made me immediately weary. Travelling through time zones is when a watch means nothing and where everyone is perpetually tired. Similarly to a shopping centre, people walk on illogical paths meaning collisions of trolleys and suitcases are inevitable. I kept my collar high and my hat low, intent to avoid bumping into Sri Lankans taking the same flight, who would be sure to presume to know me. The flight was forgettable, mainly because after a few drinks in the transit lounge, I slept. I awoke fully for the descent, hovering over the ruddy blushed land and thick vegetation. The heat was visible - a humid mist blanketed the land. As we descended further the landscape become increasingly urbanised, a tangle of haphazard development. 
My brother-in-law met me at Colombo airport, a tiny, smiley man, but as quiet and charm less as most of the family. 
‘Thambi, you look like an Englishman!’ he sounded delighted, and looked at me with dazed reverence. My vanity stung with the bluntness of his subsequent dissection of my appearance, my big belly, my greying hair and wrinkled eyes. Perhaps I had become like an Englishman, expecting a respectful restraint from such comments. He continued to speak to me in English, not uncommon for the educated in Sri Lanka, wanting to prove their rank. However, I felt it made me a stranger, and I realised the Tamil I heard around me felt unfamiliar and difficult to understand. As we drove through the city, he talked to me about things we passed, and described how things had changed. He pointed out an old local watering hole, one that I remembered from. my youth
‘You see there, that was where Ratinam had been, the last place he drank before he was killed.’ 
‘Ratinam was killed?’ 
‘Oh, it was tragic but not a surprise of course. His home had been raided on countless occasions before. It happened last April…. his past with the LTTE was not forgotten, and of course his journalistic work did not help him. Many wanted him dead… they found his body outside some government buildings. Nothing has been done of course. And there, that over there was the university building your father lectured in, now an accountancy office, but you must recognise that…’
So Ratinam had died. I wondered why I hadn’t heard, and wondered what else I hadn’t heard about that could be spoken about so matter of fact. I hadn’t seen Ratinam, a cousin, since I had left and he was just a boy then. He was his mother’s favourite because his skin was the colour of ivory. The closer we got to my childhood home the stronger I felt a mental regression. Images, people, and sounds I thought I had forgotten hammered at my ears. It was overwhelming, and the sun was turning the van into a greenhouse with stifling humidity. Moisture hung in the air, leached from my skin and seeped into my clothes. I thought of my amma, dying in this climate, labouring to breath in the thick air.

When I saw her in the house, I felt twenty again. She was in the same room, and I was saying goodbye once more. This time she had a birthday card by her bed and photographs on the walls. The card had faded from sun exposure, and I looked inside to see it was from my daughter, but sent some years ago as it was written by a childish hand. Three badly framed photographs hung on the walls, one showing her at a university dinner, a young women, next to her husband, professor of Sanskrit and playwright. Another captured a similar scene, but this time outside the University buildings in Kandy. The third was of my mother’s family, her as a girl not much older than thirteen, standing in strict formation with her siblings. The first couple times I went to her room, she slept. The third time, I went because the nurse called me to say she was awake, and chatting more lucidly than normal. Amma was lying propped up, her wrinkled face set on one side and quivering on the other. She regarded me and nodded as I kissed her dark papery cheek. I showed her pictures of my children and talked to her of the grandchildren she would never meet. As I went to leave the room she muttered something about how everything was Maya, Hindu teachings of the world being an illusion, a dream of duality. 

That evening I sat on the old wicker chair, drowsy in the dying sun. The front of the house was thriving with various life forms. Fat ants trailed in and out of the cracked, parched ground avoiding the upside-down beetle, drunkenly flailing his needle-legs. The air reverberated with the falsetto whir of the crickets, harmonising with thousands, the demanding bellow of a toad and anarchy of birdcalls. The amplified wailings of a nearby mosque’s call to prayer oddly synced with nature’s racket. People sit a lot in Asia, and I had forgotten how peaceful it was to listen to the chaos. Occasionally I would hear a moan of muddled Tamil from my mother inside the house, she yelled for my father. I thought of her, and what she would become. I wondered whether my memories of her would become a collection of prudently construed images, whether I would remember her psychosis that plagued my childhood, or her by my father’s side, made a middle-class woman by his university teachings. Would I think of her talking of Maya philosophy or her not remembering my name? Some memories are already fictionalised based on family legend and sun-blanched photos. I think of her sister, a hazy girl behind a screen of flames, her excruciating death that determined my existence. She was eighteen, and my mother was sixteen. My mother’s sister was the eldest girl, engaged to marry my father the next day. The story tells of her lighting the nightly oil lamps and catching her sari alight with fire. She spent two weeks dying. An accident of course, never referred to as suicide. I imagine my mother, meek and cursed with madness, next in line to marry her dead sister’s betrothed. I sat on that wicker chair, and I felt the weight of my mother’s life, the dragging guilt of her sister’s death, the quiet subservience to her husband, the pull of insanity. I felt the weight of my responsibility to the past, to my country that I ran away from, to the family I detached myself from. The same jasmine bush formed a thicket around the veranda, that familiar swoon of heady sweetness. Those tiny white flowers were there when my mother gave birth to her seven children in that house, and they will continue to tangle round the walls after she disappears. I long for my childhood, listening to the lagoon in Batticoloa, watching the morning fisherman and dreaming I was a man. I long for that dry season when I was ten and I stopped attending school for two months in favour of playing cricket with the village boys. I long for my sisters and brother to be in this house again, noisy with fights and games. I want to be at medical school, drinking on tables and drunkenly singing Beatles song accompanied by my friend on the guitar. I want to sit in the porch of my house and argue with my father about everything, late into the night. I would like to tell this story as if I did not go back, only to say goodbye again.

I have unwittingly discovered the best possible way of starting a health kick. 

 Deciding to set a challenge to spend the day eating only chocolate and chocolate related items, after two days of heavy drinking. It is the best way of achieving your dietary goals, because when chocolate becomes obligatory, you never want to eat it/think about it/look at it/smell it/taste it/reference it ever again. Writing this is excruciating. Tomorrow, I am going to eat like a fatty reformed by Gillian McKeith and I am going to be loving it. Or else I will just eat bacon and lick salt. 

Upon deciding to take up the chocolate challenge for the day, both my conspirator Erika and myself, felt instantly satisfied, like the challenge constituted some kind of productive behaviour for the day. Utterly pointless things are infinitely more appealing than things with point. (See: avid Hollyoaks watching and the Slimfast diet.) 

This lasted over our breakfast (a Galaxy pro biotic shake) which we consumed with self-satisfied nods at one another. It continued when we had our brunch (Cadbury's Clusters and more self-satisfied nods) and finally culminated in an eventual realisation that we had gone too far to end it, yet the idiocy of making ourselves feel as awful as possible with no discernible logic dawned on us over lunch (a waffle with Chocolate Mousse warning*.) I ate it with the same relish as a celeb eating a kangaroo's testicle. 

'Why can't we do things like save the rain forest though?'

'Too hard.. actually this is really hard too.' 

My head hurts, my stomach is making the sounds of a sickly sweet one-man-band and all I can hear is the sounds of my broken clock ticking on the floor. I can never look a waffle with chocolate mousse in the eye again.... not that I ever have.  

Just received a text. From Erika. She's had a cheeky sandwich. The sensible fool. I must not cave to temptation. More chocolate then. 

*Might die.