Rose-coloured glasses
For immigrants, children of immigrants, and those pained by nostalgia.
My memories of Sri Lanka are drowning in sweet idyllic water. Sweet, like the rambutan that grows along the gates of my home, rich in colour and the laughter of children. Idyllic, like sunlight peeking through an outstretched hand; warm to touch yet scarcely limited. Drowning, like the few glistening memories struggling to stay afloat after eight years away. The sticky sweetness paints my memories pink — so that I sometimes can’t tell what is fact and what is fiction.
To say I miss my home country is to say I miss my childhood, I miss being taken care of, I miss knowing nothing but joy. I miss the oasis of an imperfectly perfect wonderland; uncomfortable, sweaty, scary. Just — perfect. I still walk the halls of my grandfather's house in my sleep. A relic that danced where I walked. How empty it will be when I return. Do the green and pink mosquito nets still hang from the ceilings, crowding over two twin beds in the room my mother shared with her sisters. The nets that never worked anyways, I always woke with newfound bumps on my ankles.
The house that withstood our foreign jet lag. My brother and I, sneaking out from the bedroom with our sleeping parents and into the living room. Hesitantly clicking on the lamp from the 90s. Playing cards through muffled giggles until sunrise. Light that breathed magic into stillness. Perfectly imperfect. Toilet seat across from the bucket we bathed with. Broken AC. Cold falooda, you’d slurp it down in one solid chug. Chipping stone fence that enclosed the property. Perfect enough for me.
I cling to these memories like summer sweat clings to my underarms, forehead, nape of my neck, each and every crevice of my body. It engulfs me. I think about it obsessively. Constantly test myself — can I draw the floor plan of my old house? Is my aunt's kitchen blue or green? — to see if I can unlock something else, or if my memory is deteriorating. The repetition seems important. If I don’t have my memories, what do I have?
I need to remember how the streets of Polgasowita sound; the steam from clay pots erupting in half-outdoor kitchens, the whizzing of motorcycles, the distant hum of machinery, the shaking of branches and arguments between birds and squirrels.
Everything that I write is about Sri Lanka. Everything. How can I accept that my obsession is based on a false reality? A child's eyes. Is that the purest form of love? Or a misplaced loyalty that paints a false narrative? The thing they don’t tell you about loving a myth — is that you believe it the most. You’re married to it. So loyal that when reality, objectivity tries to creep up on you, the urge to reject it outright is stronger than the urge to grow.
My grandfather is no longer alive, and that version of Sri Lanka died with him. The one where I remember boredom as freedom. When politics were as foreign to me as return tickets. Where the only soundtrack was the laughter of children. But I know too much now. My rose-coloured glasses are forever lost. I never took them out of my suitcase the last time I went, and now I can never look through them again.