The Sound of Leaving

What a thirty-minute cassette taught me about distance, family, and departure

4 min read15 hours ago

Iam an immigrant. That fact feels settled now, almost administrative, but it did not begin that way. I left home when my mother was forty-two and my father forty-nine — ages that once seemed fixed and permanent, like furniture you assume will always remain in place.

I was born in Sri Lanka at a time when the country described itself as socialist and behaved accordingly. There were queues for essentials, shortages that were explained with confidence and resolved with nothing, and an absence of anything recognisably Western. Life was orderly in theory, constrained in practice. Ideology was everywhere — spoken with conviction, endured with patience.

My father believed in it, genuinely. He was a socialist and a civil servant of some standing, responsible for running the largest local government council outside Colombo. Authority was familiar to me from an early age. Politicians, policemen, and officials came to our house regularly — sometimes announced, often not. Files were opened on our dining table. Conversations drifted in and out of rooms. Government, to me, was not abstract. It knocked on our door.

My mother stayed at home. Her work was us. There was no confusion about that, and no indulgence either. She ran the household with firm, unyielding competence. There was little room for argument. Childhood, under her watch, was not sentimental; it was instructive.

By the time I was old enough to notice, many young men — never the girls — were leaving Sri Lanka. England, Germany, the Middle East. Departure became a quiet aspiration, spoken of carefully, as though naming it too openly might attract misfortune. So when the chance came for me to go to Dubai, I took it without hesitation. Leaving behind the queues, the shortages, the smallness of choice, I took that chance with the full and unquestioning backing of my parents.

There was a complication. I was bonded to the government to serve five years in overseas telecommunications. The bond carried a penalty. My father, without drama, offered to pay it. That was how it was settled. And that was how I found myself in Dubai.

This was before phone calls were possible. Before instant reassurance. There was only mail. Snail mail. A letter took two weeks to arrive. We wrote every week, faithfully, but time did not cooperate. Questions crossed mid-air. Answers arrived too late. News was missed, misaligned. We learned to live with delay.

Then, one day, an option presented itself — to send a cassette tape home. Thirty minutes of voice. I took it immediately.

The idea came to me unexpectedly. A supervisor named Mohamed, from another department at the hotel, had been involved in an accident. It became the subject of much conversation. He was hospitalised, treated, and sent back to his apartment with instructions for bed rest. Like everyone else, I went to see him during his recovery.

By the time I arrived, Mohamed was tired. Each visitor wanted to hear the story — how the accident happened, how he was treated, how close it had been. Repeating it again and again had exhausted him. So he devised a solution. He recorded the entire story on a cassette, in English on one side and Sinhala on the other. When a visitor asked, he simply pressed play on his stereo cassette player.

I watched with a mixture of amusement and admiration as he avoided repetition, spared himself explanation, and let the machine do the work of memory.

That was when it occurred to me.

I went into my room when my roommates were out and recorded the tape in a single sitting. It felt strange, speaking into silence, addressing my parents, my younger sister, my brother, knowing they would hear me weeks later. I joked. I spoke about my dreams. About prices in Dubai. About how I would buy a car in two years and bring it home. I asked about their well being, about my friends. I tried to motivate my siblings. I spoke about my life, which bore little resemblance to Sri Lanka. I complained — unashamedly — about the absence of my mother’s curries and my father’s morning breakfasts, meals I had taken entirely for granted while living there.

In the seventies, when international calls were still a rarity, this felt like the best I could do.

It was a TDK 60 cassette. One uninterrupted half hour of my voice on one side; on the other, I recorded Boney M songs for my brother. I spoke as though they were listening in real time, as though distance could be negotiated by voice alone. There was no script, no notes, no erasing, no editing — none of the conveniences that would later make such intimacy casual.

Only much later did I understand what that tape really was. Not just communication, but rehearsal. Practice for separation. For learning how to speak to people who would no longer be immediately present in my life. Leaving home, I would discover, is not a single act. It is something you continue to do — quietly, repeatedly — long after you have gone.