Colombo

Barnaby and AT's apartment in Colombo is nice. Like, palatially nice. 3 bedrooms, 3 washrooms, huge kitchen, living room with 25 foot ceilings, terrace garden and second rooftop patio. Black granite floors, no prior tenants, and the ocean is an empty-tambili's throw away. As it's sparsely furnished and only two weeks old, we assemble some makeshift lighting from a sack of electrical parts and chicken wire left from the crab trap. I manage to put together a handsome blue floor lamp with a tarpaulin, but not before stabbing a piece of thick wire into the bone of my left hand, sending a ninja-movie-sized arterial spray of blood across the room. Newsflash: I'm clumsy!

Another attractive detail of the apartment is that it's also half as much in rent as my half of our apartment in Montreal. Part of the rent disparity is owed to it being in Wella Watte, a Tamil neigbourhood, which locals might think of as politically unstable, but I've seen no evidence of anything but a bustling stretch of blocks coloured with the pot clatter of cheap restaurants, produce markets, tailors, speakeasy pharmacies and used book stores. Walking home down our alley each night there is invariably a game of badminton between five sisters, parents nearby in plastic chairs, two brothers racing bikes up and down the gravel, slaloming between garbage bags and stacks of dry banana leaves.

Four mornings cycle between traditional English and Sri Lankan breakfasts. I'm always woken early by the monotone songs of roaming vegetable peddlers and harmonic, distorted loops of street carts blaring snack-selling jingles. One afternoon we have some saarongs made at a tailor around the corner, their shop window holding a boy mannequin wearing a bootlegged superhero shirt, the words "SPIDER FREAK" emblazoned above a familiar red web-slinger.

A working week passes, one day is spent in Petah, an grubby industrial area of the city near Slave Island. There, wholesale barrels of Panadol, miles of piping and hundred-pound sacks of chili powder populate hundreds of stalls and makeshift warehouses. Rumbling forklifts driven by teenagers grapple with giant spools of ribbon and palettes of used cardboard. A boy straightens a pile of old nails one by one with a hammer next to a senior assembling a vast net of mini christmas lights by hand. Everything seems slanty and shanty and just-holding together. If the enduring artistic lesson of American Beauty was that discarded plastic bags were heartbreakingly lovely, you could fill a good thousand Tate Moderns with the street art here. Waiting for the boys during a legal meeting in the area, I watch as a stray goat drinks a an entire bucket of bleachy washing water from a food stall, the owner in witness but disinterested. To me, that shit is ten times more beautiful than a shopping bag in the wind.

The national food of Sri Lanka is rice and curry. Rice and curry for breakfast, for lunch curry with a side of rice, and dinner sees rice married with curry. There are different curries, and different ways of getting the curry to your mouth, but the permutations wear themselves a little thin after, ohhhhh, four days. Luckily, there's lots to hunt through at the local markets, and the boys have a decent gas range and compact barbeque. I think I'm going to have to wait till Thailand for some epiphanic food experience.