You could call this an experiment in borders. An experiment in boundaries. Something that might seem familiar in Sri Lanka, or maybe very distant. Nobody talks about boundaries here. They just DO them. It's an ugly fact of life. Like gravity. So maybe it was gravity responsible yesterday for the young eagle falling to ground from high up in its ...

Pardon me for being rude. Pardon me for being negative. What's wrong with me that I have to stay on a negative path, that my train of thought goes round and round in a room of negativity? Reverberating negativity. Why can't I get out of it? Is it me?Forgive me I'm just a foreigner. I don't want to harp on ...

The baby eagle falls from the treeIts wingspan is hugeIts talons and beak are sharp and curvedIts eye has that look It's put in a cage to protect it from crowsThe parents watch from on highIt hasn't been injured, it drinksThava picks up the cage and it saunters to the waterHe takes it by the tips of its wings and ...

More perspectives on forgettingThat idiot graybeard must have told me ten times that weekend how he helped his brother "Buddhi" out by lending him Rs 8000. What did I care? What did I care to hear it? What could it have been meant to signify to me, a stranger there for the weekend. I must have heard the Buddhi story ...

Let's. Hurry up and get rid of it.Let's hurry up and bury it. Let's hurry and burn it Or burn what's left of itOr burn and bury it. Hurry. Let's. Participate in the act of forgetting. Let's call it "resilience."Let's pave it overPut a new building in its placeWiden the road next to itMake it a green spacePlan it away. ...

What about the people who came before? The people who flattened these fields with their feet and with buffalo, the people who built the dam and filled in the wewa. The people who moved here and used the forest and its wood and its creatures and its wild honeybees? What about these people, the people who were here or somewhere ...

Just when you think you're getting a handle on things, starting to get the lay of the land, a new, deeper problem arises. The problem and conceptualizing it seems as deep as a crater. Jagged lava and volcanic ash walls all around it or a smooth drop into the still water that fills it to the brim. Next to the ...

Around here people don't say it's hot. "Hot climate" is what they call it and it's a hotness like no other. A barren hotness, a penetrating hotness, a draining hotness. I look forlornly at the bicycle I rode 60km a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't go across town in it now. Five to six AM is old men's time ...

A few weeks ago Janet noticed a new shop on the main road. There was a celebration going on outside, covered seats, music, families, flowers, and food being served, so she mentioned it later to our host, Mr. Thavaraja. Thava picked me up in his car and we tooled over that evening. It was short enough to walk but Janet ...

Janet wrote to our son Ben yesterday that we'd love if he could come to Sri Lanka while we're still here. It's not the first time she or I have written and it's a bit of a mystery why he won't find a way to make the trip. She wrote in her email a truism that we remind ourselves of ...

It's not a watermelon. It's not a cucumber. It's not a squash exactly. Not a pumpkin either though it was served to us once in a peculiarly watery "pumpkin" curry. "Gourd," I guess, is an apt name. We had the juice a couple of weeks ago for the first time by order of Thavaraja. "Tell them I want you to ...

Looking at your world, the one you live in and asking the question how did we get here and what are we doing here? This is a challenge that goes so far beyond the daily tasks. The tasks may be hard, like cultivating a plot of rice. There are parts of the work that are backbreaking. It's like you must ...

A mine has blown up the road with a hole as big as a house. The villagers are brought there, ordered to stand around the hole, and they are shot. Why did they bother to bury them down there?The bodies are covered in sand. In a day or two they are exhumed. International peacekeepers heard about this massacre and they ...

I want to ask you what it was like working with hundreds of severely traumatized people. I want to ask you how it felt when your work went from interviewing hundreds of severely traumatized people to interviewing thousands of severely traumatized people. How was your work possible? How did you "summarize" your work?When you were speaking with a severely traumatized ...

Another session with two of the boys, Vidushun and Clinton. Last week I'd been asked, begged to join them in the pool. Our next date was to be yesterday, Sunday, at 12:30, between kids' classes. Clinton is a strong swimmer and Vidushun much less so. Vidushun had spent time during the week learning the crawl from a YouTube video, placement ...

My Fulbright project is cultural landscape ecology, a broadly interdisciplinary exercise that combines nature, the built environment, and human response. As I hoped it would, the project has taken me in unexpected directions, demonstrating for me the heuristic value of such an undertaking. New questions and a changing focus are vital components of a critical analysis, more important I think ...

You said it my friend. Let's put the bad things behind us. The only way is to move forward. This is what you said: "Funny thing, you forget the hatred." Funny thing you forget the hatred. You pronounce hatred so precisely. I have to roll what you've said around and around because you choose your words ever so carefully and ...

It was 1981. Just under two years before so-called "Black July" of which we read only the most ingratiatingly brief reports e.g. "On night four the rioting spread to..." So let's start by saying the "hostilities" hadn't started yet. They were a ways away. Way far away. Janet remembers you told us that a Tamil family's home had been firebombed ...

I can remember is an act. I can remember is agency. I can remember produces energy, is of energy, portends energy, releases energy. It spews and sprays and rolls and explodes in energy and energy giving. It draws energy and it is the source of energy. I can remember is light but not the bogus light of fireworks false and ...

Silence was my enemy. Day by day, hour by hour I had to figure out how to fight it. All around the silence was sound. Roosters, dogs, horns, kovil music, the thrashing of huge palm fronds as they crashed to the ground, the whine of eagles and the smaller whine of mosquitos. Dishes crashing in the kitchen, a clap of ...