I’m a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I’m a member of both countries.
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.
I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.
Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars.
If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.
He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light.
Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
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...
He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.