We Own The Country We Grow Up

She Had Lived In That House Fourteen Years, And Every Year She Had Demanded Of John That She Be Given A Pet Of Some Strange Exotic Breed. Not That She Did Not Have Enough Animals. She Had Collected Several Wild And Broken Animals That, In A Way, Had Become Exotic By Their Breaking. Their Roof Would Have Collapsed From The Number Of Birds Who Might Have Lived There If The Desert Hadn't Killed Three- Quarters Of Those That Tried To Cross It. Still Every Animal That Came Within A Certain Radius Of That House Was Given A Welcome-the Tame, The Half Born, The Wild, The Wounded.

The Desert Could Not Be Claimed Or Owned — It Was A Piece Of Cloth Carried By Winds, Never Held Down By Stones, And Given A Hundred Shifting Names Before Canterbury Existed, Long Before Battles And Treaties Quilted Europe And The East ... All Of Us, Even Those With European Homes And Children In The Distance, Wished To Remove The Clothing Of Our Countries. It Was A Place Of Faith. We Disappeared Into Landscape.

I Have Spent Weeks In The Desert, Forgetting To Look At The Moon, He Says, As A Married Man May Spend Days Never Looking Into The Face Of His Wife. These Are Not Sins Of Omission But Signs Of Pre-occuopation.

There's A Lot Of Thievery Involved In Writing. You're Breaking Into Other People's Spaces And Other People's Stories.

That's Anil's Path. She Grows Up In Sri Lanka, Goes And Gets Educated Abroad, And Through Fate Or Chance Gets Brought Back By The Human Rights Commission To Investigate War Crimes.