The Last Sunday at Galle Face

My family does not do farewells. We do outings that are secretly farewells, where everyone knows and nobody says, and the knowing sits with us like an extra passenger in the car. So on my last Sunday in Sri Lanka we did what we have done on a hundred ordinary Sundays: we went to Galle Face Green in the evening, when the heat lifts and the whole city comes out to walk by the sea.

If you have never been: Galle Face is a long strip of worn green between Colombo and the Indian Ocean, and on Sunday evenings it becomes the city's living room. Kites stack up in the sky like laundry. Couples sit on the sea wall at careful, chaperone-approved distances. Vendors move through the crowd with carts of isso vadei — lentil cakes crowned with prawns — and the smell of them frying is, as far as I am concerned, the official smell of being happy in Colombo.

An ordinary Sunday, performed by experts

We performed the whole ritual with the precision of a family that has rehearsed it for decades. My father complained about the parking, which is tradition. My mother brought a flask of tea, because paying for tea is against her religion. My little brother ran off to the kite sellers within ninety seconds of arrival, which is his tradition, and came back with a red one shaped like a hawk, which he has done since he was six, except now he is nineteen and the kite was, he claimed, ironic.

It was not ironic. He flew it for two hours with the concentration of a surgeon.

The things we did not say

Here is a partial list of sentences that were not spoken at Galle Face that evening, in ascending order of weight:

• “You will call every day, no?”
• “Who will eat the extra rice now?”
• “I am proud of you and terrified in equal measure.”
• “What if you change so much that this stops feeling like home?”
• “What if you don't?”

Instead, my mother handed me an isso vadei and said the prawns were smaller than last time. My father told me, apropos of nothing, that the sea here connects to the sea in England, technically, if you think about it — and then looked embarrassed and walked ahead. This is my father's love language: geography that means something else.

What the sea knows

I sat on the wall while the sun went down and tried to memorise things deliberately, which never works. Memory is a cat; it comes when it wants. I know that in six months I will not remember the sunset, which was in any case an unremarkable orange. I will remember stupid, sideways things instead — the exact sound of my mother shaking the last of the tea out of the flask, the man selling glow-in-the-dark toys who called everyone boss, the way the wind at Galle Face always smells of salt and diesel and frying oil in proportions no laboratory could reproduce.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from standing in a place you love while it is still yours, knowing you are converting it, second by second, into material for homesickness. The Portuguese have a word adjacent to it — saudade — and the Sinhala language, generous with sorrow, has several. But that evening I did not want vocabulary. I wanted the impossible thing every emigrant wants: to leave and to stay, both, fully, and to be forgiven for choosing.

When the light was gone, my brother reeled the hawk down out of the dark — you fly a kite by feel at that hour, he informed me, like it was ancient wisdom — and we walked back across the green as the crowd thinned. In the car, my mother fell asleep against the window, and my father took the long way home along Marine Drive without saying why. The sea stayed on our left the whole way, black and patient, connected — technically, if you think about it — to everywhere I am going.