Two Suitcases and a Spice Tin

The airline's website says it plainly, in a font that has never had to make a decision in its life: checked baggage allowance, 30kg. Thirty kilograms. I have spent twenty-six years accumulating a life in this house — books with sand in their spines, a drawer of birthday cards, my mother's handwriting on the backs of photographs — and the arithmetic of leaving says all of it must now compress into two suitcases and a number.

For the first week I treated packing as a logistics problem. I made spreadsheets. I weighed things on the bathroom scale by holding them and subtracting myself. The spreadsheet had columns for essential, replaceable in the UK, and sentimental, and the third column grew like a vine until it strangled the other two. It turns out almost nothing I own is essential and almost everything is sentimental, which is either a beautiful fact about my life or a terrible fact about my packing.

The inventory of a departure

By the second week I had become ruthless in strange, specific ways. The rules I invented made no sense to anyone else. My old university notes: scanned and abandoned without ceremony. But the ticket stub from the first time my father took me to the planetarium — laminated, packed, non-negotiable. A person who watched me pack would have concluded that I was preparing for a very sentimental apocalypse.

What actually made it into the cases, in the end:

• Twelve books, chosen by a process of grief I do not recommend
• One sari of my grandmother's, wrapped around the laptop like armour
• Photographs, printed, because clouds fail and servers forget
• An umbrella my mother insisted on, for a country she has only seen in dramas
• The spice tin

The spice tin

Every Sri Lankan kitchen has one — the round steel tin with seven small bowls inside, holding the entire flavour of a household: chilli, turmeric, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, mustard seed, curry powder that my mother roasts and grinds herself and refuses to write the recipe for because recipes are for people who weren't paying attention. When I lifted ours to pack it, the smell rose up like a hand on my shoulder. I stood in the kitchen and cried for exactly four minutes, then wrapped each bowl in cling film like I was handling museum artefacts.

My mother caught me doing it and said nothing, which is how I knew it mattered to her too. Later she quietly replaced my cling film with proper seals and added a small bag of roasted curry powder she had made that morning. Neither of us mentioned it. There is a whole language in my family made entirely of things placed silently into bags.

What the scale cannot weigh

Here is what I have learned from the bathroom scale: the heaviest things I am taking weigh nothing at all. The sound of the ceiling fan in my room. The particular blue of the sea at Galle Face at six in the evening. My father humming while he waters the plants, always the same three songs in the same order, a playlist he has been curating since before I was born. The exact weight of my mother's hand on my head when I fall asleep in the back seat of the car, which I am too old for and will never be too old for.

I read somewhere that migration researchers call this anticipatory homesickness — grieving a place while you are still standing in it. I have been doing it for weeks. I walk through the house at night touching door frames like a superstitious burglar. I have started narrating Colombo to myself in the past tense, which is unfair, because Colombo is not going anywhere. I am the one who is leaving. The city will keep having its evenings without me, the kottu carts will keep their metal drumming, and the sea will keep arriving at the wall, indifferent and faithful, whether or not I am there to watch it.

Tonight the suitcases are standing by the door, zipped, weighed, exactly 29.4 and 29.8 kilograms — because I am my mother's daughter and we do not pay excess baggage fees on principle. The spice tin is in the middle of the larger case, padded on all sides by clothes, the safest object I own. Tomorrow: the airport, and whatever comes after airports.

I keep thinking about the word emigrant. It sounds like a person who has finished doing something. I do not feel finished. I feel like a sentence interrupted at the comma — Colombo on one side of it, and on the other side, a country I have never seen, a lab I have never stood in, a version of myself I have not met yet. She had better be worth the baggage fees.