4

AMAYA

Five Days before the Wedding

It’s funny what you call home. Some find it in a place, others in people. You can find it in a smell, in a smile, in a feeling. Home is where the heart is, people say. So where’s your home if your heart has been broken into a million pieces, over and over again? Do you have to dig through the rubble to find a sense of belonging, or has the idea of home disappeared, along with everything else?

It took two hours to get into Colombo, so it was dark by the time we pulled into the neighborhood I had grown up in.

Cinnamon Gardens, the upscale part of Colombo 07, was, well, upscale in every sense of the word. I didn’t really notice my privilege until I went to the US and was shocked by the size of my dorm room, which was roughly the size of my maid’s bathroom. So yes, I had an indulgent life, financially anyway. Growing up in the large house that my father built my mother to echo the sprawling colonial-style home she lost her claim to when she decided to run away and marry him, I had little understanding of the world around me. The poverty that laced the Colombo city limits, just one or two streets over from my home, was like the dregs of a bad dream. I was vaguely aware that it existed, but apart from the usual yearly donations at Christmas, and the various charity clubs we used as an excuse to hang out when we were in school, I’m embarrassed to say that I’d lived in my own little bubble where I was both spoiled and neglected in equal parts.

But Cinnamon Gardens had changed. Just like I had, I suppose. Once a carefully sectioned-out collection of beautiful, large villas that housed Colombo’s wealthiest, it seemed that most homes had been converted into foreign embassies and official buildings. I noticed a few restaurants that certainly hadn’t been there five years ago either.

“So, looks like apartment life has finally taken over, huh?” I asked Mahesh. He’d spent most of our trip into the city arguing loudly on the phone in Sinhala about a shipment delay and had just hung up.

“You know how it is, no, Akki? Suddenly, from nowhere all these buggers decided to build these massive apartments and all our idiots decided it would be the fashionable thing to buy one. Everyone’s renting out their houses now and living in these soulless concrete monstrosities. How they can manage in such tiny spaces, I’ll never know.”

What Mahesh called tiny was probably about four times the size of my apartment in LA. But one thing we Sri Lankans were used to is space, and why wouldn’t we be? Up until very recently there was plenty of it to go around—if you’re from upper-class Colombo anyway. The less than 1 percent that existed in a world of their own. A world that I was a part of, that I’m still a part of, if I was being honest.