Romesh Gunesekera
Quotes by Romesh Gunesekera
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Sure, cricket on a beach on the isle of Jura is different from a Test match in a stadium in Galle, 6000 miles away, despite the sea air.
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I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.
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At 16, I started reading trashy stuff, anything slightly naughty and risque.
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The nationalist movement supported Sinhala by suppressing Tamil; there were competing nationalisms. It was a fundamental mistake to make parallel streams in education - or a calculated political gamble. Politicians were playing with it.
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To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.
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Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
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I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.
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Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.
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Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.
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In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
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