'Cause Pigs can Fly

I was going through some old files and came across this document from March 2015. I don't know if I posted it here or on the personal blog I had back then. The writing is from five years ago but I want to save it here so I don't lose it. Athamma Athamma, my grandmother, passed away last week. Sunday night, we all had dinner together, we all ate well, spent time together. We went to bed. An hour later, she woke me up saying she wasn’t feeling well. Asked me to call Amma, my mother. She said she couldn’t breathe. That she was dying. She held my hand. She rested her head on Amma’s shoulder. I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t watch her. She passed away a few minutes later. I never saw her body. But Mami did, and he said that she looked like she was fast asleep. We left the coffin closed. She didn’t want people to see her body. She didn’t want people to see her once she was older and ill. The coffin was surrounded by flowers. It was beautiful. So elegant. Like the person she was. A...

I've been working from home since the beginning of October, when Sri Lanka was hit by its second wave of COVID-19. I left the house once for a work-related event but I've been blessed with a job that gives me the option of working remotely. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm doing as much work as I used to back when I did got to office. I feel guilty about this. I used to work on at least two stories a day but now I usually send in only one. I also get to work in my pajamas, from the comfort of my bedroom, and I don't spend 2 1/2 hours on the road, travelling to and from work. I feel like I'm saving money because I don't spend on transport or food. I put in less effort because I don't have office clothes added to the laundry basked every day. I take three steps at most from my bed to my laptop. I don't have to wait for tuks and trains and buses or walk from one place to another. Given all of this, I felt guilty about asking for a day off. But I also...

It was a few minutes past 3 a.m. and she woke up, drenched in sweat. The fan was blowing hot air at the bed but none of it reached her. She pulled away the mosquito net, hoping that would help, but it didn’t make much of a difference. She winced as the cramps in her stomach got worse. They weren’t painful, but the discomfort was not something she could just sleep through. She tried to ignore them, but the wetness and coldness she felt when she wiped away the sweat on her forehead using the back of her hand scared her. She rolled out of bed and switched on the light. Opened the second drawer of her dressing table and took out a pad. Rarely had periods been pain-free for her. She knew that other people had it worse, but she also knew that that did not mean her pain wasn’t real. When it was really bad, she would toss and turn in bed, cramps in her lower tummy area, pain in her back and calves. She would run to the toilet to vomit the water and painkillers she thought she could keep ...

Mornings used to be easy. Her body would force itself out of sleep somewhere between 6am and 6.30am and she always joked that she never needed to set an alarm. Even when she was on holiday, she would be awake by 6.30am, savouring those moments of quiet before the people she was sharing a room with woke up. This had changed in the last few weeks. Now she had to force her eyes open and it was always past 7am when she was finally able to focus her eyes on the clock that was only two metres away from her bed. Then she would lie there, on the bed, beads of sweat forming on her forehead and right above her upper lip. Not fully awake and not exactly asleep, she would imagine an alternative life. She didn’t know how far in the past it was but she knew it was not set during a time of phones and computers. She lived by the sea in this fantasy. A small hut, thatched roof, yellow walls. She didn’t particularly like yellow as a colour, especially not on walls, but her hut by the ocean was always ...