This is the eighth of a series featuring Canadian writers' true tales of love.
The quarrel began, as many lovers' quarrels do, over a triviality - getting the milk. By then, Andrew had been in Sri Lanka three weeks. It was his first trip to the country that had been my home until I was 19, and which I still considered home, at that point, despite 11 years in Canada. I had left that morning to do research for my second novel, Cinnamon Gardens, and had asked Andrew to get milk from the local store. I got back hot and exhausted to find out he had not done so. It was the culmination of a growing number of stresses between us and soon I was yelling at him, listing all the things I had done to make this trip work. "And you have not thanked me for any of it!" "Thank you," Andrew shouted in response.
We had known each other four months, having met at the launch of my first novel, Funny Boy. Looking up from signing books, I had found before me a devastatingly handsome man with the poetic, patrician looks of an Edwardian hero in a Merchant Ivory film. We immediately slipped into an easy intimacy, as if we had known each other all our lives, and we had been going out just a week when we said we loved each other. It was I who suggested that Andrew join me for my trip to Sri Lanka. He accepted and I was overjoyed.
He arrived a month after I did and when I saw him coming through the airport gates, I felt my heart thump in my chest. The first few days were bliss. We had never shared a living space and could not pass each other without kissing. We spent long afternoons in bed holding each other and talking.
Related Articles
But then things began to go downhill. What neither Andrew nor I had anticipated was just how foreign he would be in Sri Lanka, how helpless. Nothing summed this up so much as the reason he had not gotten the milk. For Andrew, just going up our street was a challenge as it involved making his way through a gamut of curious and occasionally hostile stares from the neighbours. Then there was the question of getting across the busy road to the store. Traffic hurtled in both directions, no one respecting the lanes, cars and scooters cutting in and out, everyone ignoring the crosswalk. Poor Andrew could not do what came so naturally to a Sri Lankan - dart to the middle of the road, stand there while traffic rushed by within an inch of you, then, when there was a small gap, rush across to the other side, signalling all the while madly for the oncoming traffic to slow down or stop.
Andrew was also bored and trapped. I was often away doing research and our rented house was in an isolated suburb. He had nothing to do but read or watch TV programs in a language he did not understand. Periodically, a troupe of monkeys would come visiting, jumping up and down on the roof, sounding like bombs going off, which further frayed his nerves and, because monkeys are often vicious and rabid, made him frightened to go out in the garden. I should have been more sympathetic, more understanding, but Andrew's foreignness scared me. It made our relationship seem suddenly frail and impossible. I loved Sri Lanka and if he could not love and belong in it, how did we work together? Out of fear and despair at losing this person I loved so much, I became angry with him.
A simmering tension grew between us, only heightened by the fact that Andrew often had to accompany me to dinners at the homes of friends and relatives; dinners at which he would sit in silence, largely ignored as the rest of us reminisced about the good old days. Finally Andrew reached a breaking point at a party, when one of the female guests took an instant dislike to him and stared at him coldly when introduced, probably because she was homophobic and he was the living representation of my sexuality. At dinner, noticing the way he was scooping up the curries with pieces of chapatti, she declared with sweet malice for the whole table to hear, "Aw, look, why look, he is making little pizzas."
"And," Andrew later yelled, having informed me that he would not attend another dinner or party, "I was not making little pizzas, I was eating exactly the same as everyone else."
Nothing quite tests a relationship like travelling together. It shows you the weaknesses in your union but can also strengthen your love. And we did love each other. So once we had let out all the steam we needed to, we sat down to share our feelings and points of view. One of the things this trip to Sri Lanka was making us realize was that we were really in a ménage à trois - Andrew, me and Sri Lanka. We were both understanding that the longing and passion an immigrant feels for the country he has left takes up a lot of emotional space. We had to learn to negotiate and cope with this third element in our relationship.
Once we had come to understand this, our relationship got even better. Andrew joined my father's club where he would relax by the pool while I rushed about town, doing my research. I began to say no to some of the dinner invitations. We looked forward to our ritual gin and tonic at the club, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean. Soon he was falling in love with Sri Lanka, too. In the years to come, we would make many trips back, even spending a whole year there. Andrew would soon be crossing the street in true Sri Lankan style.
Shyam Selvadurai is the author of Funny Boy, which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, which won the Lambda Literary Award for children's and youth literature.
