Anuk Arudpragasam

It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, that the closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the intimate warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else, as if the only way we can hold time still is by trying physically to prevent the objects around us from moving.

Rani, his grandmother’s former caretaker, had died.

sudden or violent deaths could occur not merely in a war zone or during race riots but during the slow, unremarkable course of everyday life that made them so disturbing and so difficult to accept

fulfilled or disenchanted, satisfied

Trincomalee and Vavuniya when he was a child and a longer trip to Jaffna

There was an element of self-hatred in these labors, he knew, a desire to punish himself for what he’d escaped by exposing himself to it as violently as he could, but it struck him now that perhaps there was also something religious in his devotion to understanding the circumstances under which so many people had been erased from the world, as though he was trying to construct, through this act of imagination, a kind of private shrine to the memory of all those anonymous lives.

if he wanted to help in a meaningful way it would have to be in a way that was sustainable for him in the long term, without having to abandon all his needs for its sake.

and thinking of his return to Colombo now it seemed to him, as he stood there in front of the window, that something vital had been lost over the course of the previous year, the sense, so strong for most of his twenties, that his life could be part of some larger thing, part of some movement or vision to which he could give himself up.

Krishan turned from the window and looked around at the room in front of him, the room he’d grown up in with his younger

Taking his lighter out and sparking it with his thumb