Let me begin with this apartment, where a grocery store and six people are all crammed into 400 square feet in the Methsara Uyana high-rise. The people fit themselves around the groceries, which occupy all of the living room and most of the kitchen. Sleeping arrangements are flexible, and visitors and wet laundry must both … Continue reading
Shahidul Alam has long been gripped by the life of a woman he has never met. It’s been two decades since Kalpana Chakma was abducted, but Shahidul refuses to forget her. Standing at the threshold of his latest exhibition,Kalpana’s Warriors, the Bangladeshi photographer pauses for a moment. In the room beyond is the third in … Continue reading
Jan Ramesh De Saram uses his phone as a torch, casting a small circle of light at his feet as he walks down the corridor. The passage ends in darkness, where bats squeak and flap their wings. A row of abandoned rooms are occupied only by an upturned chair or two, lonely rejects from the … Continue reading
When Asoka Handagama released his film Thani Thatuwen Piyabanna (Flying with One Wing) in 2002, he told journalists his plot had been inspired by a story that ran in the papers the year before. The story was about a woman who had lived as a man, marrying a young girl and earning her way as … Continue reading
Vimila Velthas lays out lunch on the table in the courtyard. She has prepared a traditional Jaffna meal – yam, coloured orange with the heat of chillies and cooked till creamy, a spicy fish and eggplant curry served with fat grains of red rice. Velthas presses her guests to eat more and scoffs gently at … Continue reading
The first time I ask Awantha Artigala for an interview, he laughs and says no. This is partly because we communicate in staccato, he in English (my first language) and me in Sinhala (his first language), each of us struggling to frame sentences. So the second time I ask, I decide to go through a … Continue reading
Earth hangs suspended over a stack of old magazines, in what used to be Arthur C. Clarke’s foyer. Parts of the aging space mural are peeling, but the sight is still pleasing to visitors entering the home of one of the 20th century’s greatest science-fiction writers. A floor above, past the green sign on the … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 