Walking Between Missed Connections
Walking Between Missed Connections
Overseas travel brings familiar disruptions: missed connections, altered plans, routines undone. Yet it offers a freedom almost too much to handle: the permission to stop, linger without explanation, and move according to one’s own schedule. I have never found it tedious. Perhaps my mild compulsions help; walking steadies my mind and shapes thoughts that might otherwise drift.
A morning walk through Independence Square in Colombo can be disorienting. The paths curve back on themselves, and walkers move in steady circuits, their purpose no longer entirely mine. Yet in their rhythms — faces set in effort, habit, quiet resolve — I catch a faint familiarity: the country I left behind fifty years ago, rehearsing its daily routines without me.
I have visited Colombo six times in the past two years, a personal record. In my early years in Dubai, I travelled more frequently, returning every six months to see my parents, younger brother, and teenage buddies. Then, money held little significance; its presence or absence barely mattered. Now I understand money well enough. But time — especially time with friends — has become the scarcer currency. My parents are gone, my younger brother lives in Canada.
Each return feels quietly therapeutic. It is less a visit than a searching — an attempt to find roots loosened and half-forgotten fifty years ago, perhaps still there if one walks slowly enough.
Leaving my friend’s home on Cambridge Place — still known, with colonial persistence, as Cinnamon Gardens — feels different from my exits in Sydney. Household assistants offer their good-morning wishes and ask if I need anything. Help is assumed, not requested. I nod to the security guards, weave past a small fleet of parked cars, one of which is a Maybach, and step onto the road.
A hundred metres north, modernity takes over. To cross, I press a button and wait for a signal lasting ten seconds. I am grateful for my health, managing the fifteen-metre crossing just in time. But I cannot help thinking of the elderly, the infirm, those who move more slowly.
The city is efficient, urgent, unforgiving. Buses lurch forward, three-wheelers honk loudly. Municipal sweepers — almost always old men, grey-bearded, their legs marked by wounds or veins — tend the pavements. Some greet me, and I am never quite sure how to respond. Security guards and household dog walkers pass; the imported poodles seem more valued than the humans caring for them.
I pass the police station. A young constable, thinner than one of my grandsons, holds a gun almost too large for him. Another pedestrian crossing allows perhaps fifteen seconds — more generous, I assume, opposite the Ministry of Sports. Even efficiency has its hierarchies.
Independence Square is alive with movement. Men in shorts and synthetic tops stride past, as if responding to delayed instructions from their bodies. A few women walk with composure, moving through this largely male domain. Most are no longer young; forty, fifty and beyond. Their shapes tell stories: bellies strain forward, limbs unevenly claimed by time, proportions altered by years of sitting, indulgence, neglect. Yet they walk with purpose, circling the square in quiet acknowledgment of mortality. They seek not grace, but reprieve.
I keep to the left on footpaths, as my grandmother taught me. Here, local walkers coming in the opposite direction keep right, and our paths collide in small, unspoken negotiations. Arms swing freely; each person seems enclosed in their own momentum. Sri Lankans often speak of community, of a collective spirit, but here it feels quieter, less flattering: a world experienced from the centre outward, others noticed only when they obstruct the way.
Before the 2024 government change, I sometimes saw ministers and their entourages walking as if they owned the land. Politically aware since my youth of Sri Lanka’s injustices, I ignore them. They know I am not from here. I wear my AirPods and listen to a Joe Rogan podcast instead.
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