'Cause Pigs can Fly

One of the last dishes my grandmother made me before she died were panipol pancakes. I called her from office craving it and that evening, came home to a plate of delicious panipol pancakes. Love is about giving, right? But the asking that certain loves allow you to do? We rarely talk about it. I'm not someone who finds it easy to ask for help, for favours, for things. But Athamma wasn't someone I felt any hesitation with. I wanted panipol pancakes, so I asked for it, and I got it. Sometimes, it is that simple. Since her death, I've started making pol toffee for Avurudu. She always made them; light pink, melt-in-your-mouth pol toffee. A touch of rose essence, fresh coconut, over an hour of stirring. As kids, when she made toffee, we would gather in the kitchen, pestering her with 'is it ready yet?' questions. If we kept bothering her, she told us, the gonibilla would eat all the toffee. This was enough to keep us away from the kitchen. None of us wanted to take a ri...

Despite it being past my usual bedtime, I don't want to turn my laptop off and go to bed. I've been so tired lately that I could do with all the sleep I could get. And yet, here I am. Why? Because I feel this weird need to write something. But everything I've started writing about has felt so personal... too personal to put out there, even though I don't really share on social media a lot of my more personal writing anymore. But why not? When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I had this blog on a website called Kiwibox. It wasn't shared across social media as such, but the site itself had this community that would read each other's writing and share our thoughts with each other. Back then, I wrote about everything that crossed my mind. The good, the bad, the sad, the embarrassing, it was documented for the world to read. And I felt comfortable doing that, even when people I knew personally read it. But over the years, something changed. A friend recently con...

During a recent conversation, a friend told me that you need to love, you need to be open to love, even if that love leaves you weeping on the floor. Love, like the Hot Priest said in Fleabag, isn't for the weak, is it? Love hurts. Love makes you cruel. It's awful, he said, while we sat there, realising the Hot Priest was choosing God and not Fleabag. But love is that, isn't? Love makes you so vulnerable that you end up being afraid of it. And this love doesn't even need to be romantic. I know that we often talk about love in the context of romance, but as someone who rarely feels this kind of love (and then too, wonders if it's just attraction), I've been vulnerable within the context of other kinds of love. I've had to push myself through the absolute fear that I will wake up one day to the absence of a friend, the loss of a loved one, an unexpected goodbye. It's terrifying, but I guess, this fear is something we need to learn to live with if we want t...

Voting has always been important to me, even though, admittedly, I haven’t always put a lot of thought into the people and parties I was voting for. I don’t think I can blame this on age, although I also feel like no matter who is voted in, they always manage to screw us over, leading to those who voted for them getting criticised and ridiculed. But this post isn’t about politics or elections or voting (although if you are reading this in Sri Lanka before 4 p.m. on the 14th of November, I do urge you to vote). Okay, I lied. This is about voting. Kind of. My uncle, that’s my mother’s brother, lives next door to us. I don’t think they were extremely close growing up, because my mother spent some of her childhood with their father in Panadura while my uncle lived with their mother in Dehiwala. But it is their relationship as adults that I know about, born when my mother was 30 and my uncle 36 (I think). Anyway, most Sri Lankans aren’t affectionate. Parents don’t tell their childre...

I find myself pleading with the universe to give me one easy week. One week where I don't need to think about work and deadlines or promises and obligations or worries and anxieties. Where to-do lists don't matter. Where my phone doesn't ping or ring. A week of peace and quiet where one good thing is followed by another and I don't have to do anything. An easy week. And it feels so selfish, so self-indulgent, doesn't it? I'm one in 8 billion people. Why should the universe show me extra kindness? But I do think that there should be a limit to what a person has to go through. I've dealt with illness and death, with heartbreak of sorts, with disappointment, with anger and hate, with loss of all shapes and sizes. And I'm tired. And I need a break. And I feel like, yes, we've gotten better at talking more honestly about things like loneliness and unhappiness and being unloved or wanting love. We aren't as embarrassed about these flaws or weaknesses o...

My grandmother and I never had an easy or loving relationship. There was always some kind of tension between us, ever since I was small. And as a result, I don’t have many memories with her. I remember going to her house before heading for an elocution class in the area. I remember a few yellow rice lunches at the house that was later sold and demolished. One of my clearest, earliest memories of her is from a few years ago. I was standing outside their house (the one they moved to later on), waiting for my aunt to come to the gate so I could give her something. My grandmother, returning from someplace, stepped out of a three-wheeler. I gave her whatever it was that I had made for them. She turned to go inside the house, but turned back to me and said: “I thought you hated me.” People will tell you to not talk ill of the dead. My grandmother is now dead so I guess I should talk about more pleasant memories. But I don’t think those who are alive should have to make up pleasant memori...