A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.
Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.
The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.
