Oct 20 2004

from an old email.

Today, my world changed and my life was dragged along with it. It wasn't a big dynamic change, announced with lightning and moving tectonic plates, as one would imagine these things were. It was instead, a shifting of sands. The world as I knew it fell away from me for an instant, and when the clouds had stopped blurring everything was the same again, although imperceptibly changed. I had finally discovered who I was, and who i could never be again. I was a writer.

Whether time would tell me if I was good or not was irrelevant. Today I found out who I am. Whatever I had expected upon attending his reading, I had not expected this. I had not expected this instant awareness, this instant attraction. I felt as though upon meeting him, an old memory of mine was rewoken. I felt as though I had known him my whole life and I felt as though I had the rest of my live to devote to him. It is known that I am particularly susceptible to passions. But I knew his body too,his vigour, his quick movements belied the hyperawareness of a man not used to people or to society. A man uponst whom everyone else necessarily imposed themselves on. A man who I had fallen in love with when i was 16.I know that all this will seem incredibly fanciful, and melodramatic. A writer has to write a story about everything and this will seem one in a thread of many. but believe me when I say this, I had not expected this. I had expected to be provoked, to be stimulated, to see the head that had produced lines that were never to be forgotten,etched into my awakening mind at 16. I had not expected this... absolute knowledge.I could not take my eyes off him. He was home, as in Sri Lanka, a land he knew better than me, a land that he had written about much more evocatively than I could ever hope to do so, he represented the West, and its voices, but most horrifically of all, the thing I did not expect, was that he represented a Dutchman living in Asia. Of which all had one in common, the same alert piercing eyes, the same uneasiness with which they integrated into society, the same hesitance before they spoke ofthemselves. He reminded me most of someone I had once known deeply, of Home, of the war and of the book that had changed my life.

All this I could not tell him, although I wanted to. For the first time that evening he spoke of himself. And I could tell after he spoke, for he ended abruptly as though having spoken more than he had wished to, that it was as surprising to him as it was to me. He spoke of how he had started to write another novel set in Sri Lanka, but the voice and the structure was similar to Anil's ghost and so he had stopped. He spoke also of how he had gone back, how he had gone back after Anil's Ghost and how he would always continue to go back.I could no longer speak. The man's voice when he read of the history of stones, of writings in leaves of palimpsests, of genesis,of lives in Polonaruwa and places I thought only I knew about, for none of my friends or people knew this except my parents. And he said something that he didn't say to anyone else, this man of few words, this man who said it took him 2 years to read his own book out to the public because that was how long it took him to be comfortable with the own characters he had written. The man who had refused to talk about the work he was currently engaged on.Perhaps I am romanticizing as I am wont to do. but this encounter, I can only tell you in this moment, my life changed. I had gone into that room, thinking of being a writer, and I had come out, knowing that I wanted to write something that he would be proud of.