You cultivate, Dewa thinks to herself, a taste for what is unusual, savour it as if it is something you must add to the experiences of your palate, tasting just a little more of the great cauldron of flavours that emerge from this continent, changing constantly, teasing the senses, making you take pleasure in what, in a different life, might even repel you, so that you feel that even in this tinge of bitterness that lays its aftermath on your tongue, there is more, there must be more delight than in the predictability of sweetness.

They search for more food, sit down and eat hot dosai, crisp and light, plain or masala—filled with onions and potato—with chutney from some white seed finely ground, and sambara. They ask for coffee. Two stainless steel lotas are brought in so that the hot milk and kaapi can be poured from one utensil to another to reach that perfect mixture of hotness and sweetness. They enjoy the food, say it is excellent. This is conveyed to the proprietor of the restaurant. He comes and sits at their table.

‘I am not so satisfied with the dosai today. It can be better,’ he says.

‘No, no, we find it very good,’ Sri remarks.

The waiter wants to talk.

‘I am from your country. My father was a milk vendor there. I know Pettah, Kayaman’s Gate. Maybe I will come back, one day.’

There is a certain feeling of regret, of homesickness that these exiles seem to bear. Many come up to them and say, ‘We were once there in your country. We remember. Come and see us. Have a meal with us.’ It is as if they too want to join them on that return journey to an island they had once lived in. A country better known, more familiar than the place they now live in. Yet it is within the ambience of this very strangeness that new discoveries and explorations must be made. Perhaps that once easily acquired familiarity has grown so stale that there are no more subtle gradations between what is sweet, or sour, or bitter. Taste and flavour are what they have always been so that the taste buds find nothing new. Here, in this country, biting into an apple is not like biting into a fruit. It is like biting into, tasting the flavour of, breathing in the fragrances of flowers—jasmines and roses from the garlands which are piled up in baskets used to deck the hair and adorn the gods.