“It had been in those months of waiting probably that he’d first become aware of the absence inside him, the longing for a life that existed beyond the boundaries of the Colombo and Sri Lanka he knew, an absence that he hadn’t felt as an absence so much as a kind of willingness to be drawn elsewhere, an absence that made him, paradoxically, more present to the world around him, more delicately aware of its surfaces and textures and moods.”
