House hunt in Sri Lanka: Seeking the place my father once called home
As Dakshana Bascaramurty was growing up in Canada, her father would reveal almost nothing about his past life in rural Sri Lanka. So when fate took her to the island country, she knew she had to search for the place he left behind
My father holds me up on my third birthday in 1989
DAKSHANA BASCARAMURTY-Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2015
My father never read to me when I was a kid, but could sometimes be persuaded to tell a bedtime story from memory, drawn from a stock of Sri Lanka-ified versions of Aesop’s Fables.
In the original parable of the crow and the fox, the fox flatters the crow, who is holding a piece of cheese in his beak, into singing for him. This prompts the crow to drop the cheese, and the fox catches it. My dad’s version was pretty close to Aesop’s original, except that the hunk of cheese was actually a vadai – a popular Sri Lankan snack that looks like a donut but is savoury and made from lentils.
A crow eating vadai. To a five-year-old growing up in suburban north Toronto, this was an absurd image, and one I added to a patchwork of others in an attempt to understand Sri Lanka, where my parents were from but rarely spoke to me about. I understood a rough outline of why they and many other Tamils had left their troubled country and made Canada their home. I know their history in a meta sense, but few of the details.