QUESTIONS of TRAVEL
it was early evening when I arrived in Colombo. We’d leapfrogged a day from New York, and everything felt half-dreamed. On my first flight, to Dubai, old men had peered out the bulkhead windows to check for the first lines of dawn, then dropped to the cabin floor in prayer. Dessert was apricot cake draped in cream. A teenage girl wore a bright pink T-shirt that read “Never look back”. The Gulf Times was full of Middle Eastern justice – “Woman to be lashed for insulting morality police”, “Arrest of atheist bloggers urged” – and chilling dispatches from my own country: “Tear gas and baton rounds can’t keep the peace in Missouri.”
I’d come to Sri Lanka on assignment for a travel magazine. The premise of the feature was the magazine paid you to fly somewhere for a week but told you only 24 hours in advance where you were going. It was the kind of assignment that made other people jealous, but there was also something a bit shameful about it, as if it had distilled a certain colonial arrogance into a jaunty journalistic lark: I’ll just show up ignorant and narrate this place! But had I turned down my free trip halfway around the world? I had not.
The next morning, I was planning to head north to the Jaffna Peninsula along the A9 highway, through the vast northern scrublands known as the Vanni. This was the territory controlled for many years by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as the Tamil Tigers, until they were finally defeated by Sri Lankan government forces, in 2009, near the shores of the Nanthikadal Lagoon, a final siege in which thousands of civilians died. One UN report put the number at 40,000. It’s impossible to understand what it means to go north in Sri Lanka without a basic map of the fault lines that catalysed the civil war – a Sinhalese Buddhist majority in the south; a Tamil minority concentrated in the north, with the Tigers fighting for a separate state – and some sense of that war’s enduring aftermath: the damaged infrastructure and persistent ethnic tensions in a territory still thick with military presence.
In frantic preparation, I’d been reading deeper into the conflict. Every time I thought I’d found its beginning, I found another beginning that came earlier. Maybe the war
