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I find it hard to write about Sri Lanka because Michael Ondaatje has already done it so well. The 9am heat. The just-bitten skin. The rotting mango in noon sun. The downpour. The ghosts. Peacocks piercing the night. He has captured it all; must not forget. I find it hard to write about Sri Lanka because I am not from there. I swept through it for ten days in November 2019. How am I to understand its history. The lineage confuses me- the Portuguese and then Dutch and British. What came before? What remained, and what left? As we wound our way up to the hill country from Colombo, through villages and coconut trees and faces wandering along the road, I saw glimpses of the remains. White verandas wrapping around low homes. They are now part of the landscape, Sri Lankan. But they came after Ceylon had been there for aeons, they are colonial furniture left behind that the jungle grew around and reclaimed. What were they doing here, I kept asking. Here in this tea country, where we soar high above valleys in a blue train, where were drink in such splendour of waterfalls and the brightest green hills, dancing beneath sun and sky and peppered clouds. There is such peace, but even still, in 2019, there is so little. How did the British get here in the 1700’s? How did they coerce this jungle in to their order? I find it hard to write about Sri Lanka because I am not from there. And yet, as I have found before with other colonised nations, I find textures of my past in hers. The thick, cool air, not yet licked hot by the sun. The sea gently calling. I remember it all from my upbringing in a tropical city by the sea. The British and Dutch and Portuguese were there too. As I lay half-awake in the slatted darkness of our room in Hiriketiya, fan furiously whirring overhead, I could almost believe I was waking up in Durban, 12 years old again. Do not move, try to remember. By day 6 I am drunk on this place. The sunshine. The ocean. The green hills. The food. These kind people who take us home with them for a meal. Who advise us on how much we should pay for a coconut – 60 rupees, madam, never more. I am drunk on the crossover of my memories, how things feel so familiar to me, how things feel so new. I walk around Galle Fort in the quiet heat of the day and touch the stonewalls, built by the Dutch. These people came to my land too. These are not my stories but I know a shade of them. It is a delicious mystery I want to spend a lifetime failing to know. I think how I could stay. In this place which is like home, I could stay. It would be an escape from all the ghosts I left behind me in South Africa, and a return to all the things I cry for in the darkness of London. We leave Sri Lanka on Monday 18th of November. My clothing is thick with sweat and dirt and heat. My heart is heavy. Rajapaska has won the presidency. There is so much I cannot understand. The civil war is not spoken of here. The recent bombings are a sensitive topic. We turn instead to ancient history, to when the teardrop was drawn on a map and claimed by ghosts. On the day of the voting, a group in the north of the island had shot at a bus full of Muslim citizens. All while I ate roti in a hut overlooking the ocean, dreaming of the arrival of ships carrying colonial settlers. I could spend a lifetime trying to know this place and always fail. A memoir becomes a bridge to an island that slipped past me as if in a dream. That I will long for until I find a way to get back to her.