I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.