Tom Shakespeare: “Çooking up a Past” in “Collection. No Small Inheritance” …. https://farmerofthoughts.co.uk/collected_pieces/cooking-up-a-past/ …. no date indicated …. but it was clearly written after the tsunami and, in my reckoning penned in late 2005. I have imposed haphazard highlighting …. and devoted much time to this essay because it is a marvellous and introspective ethnographi tale — one that (A) grapples with profound issues and changes in attitudes to illegimate births in UK in the period 1950s to the present, while also (B) serving up fascinating vignettes about the lifeways of the Westernized Ceylonese middle class in the 1950s … and again in 2005.
The airport was full of English fans, heading to Colombo for the first of three test matches against Sri Lanka. On the Emirates flight to Dubai, they seemed to be drinking the plane dry, first of beer and then whisky. On the second leg, I tried to sleep, blocking them out with ear plugs. At dawn, I declined the offer of breakfast. But when I smelled the meal I quickly changed my mind. It was fish curry with kiribath and seeni sambol my first taste of the real Sri Lankan food that I would be eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of the month.
After twenty years away, I was travelling back to Sri Lanka, to understand part of my cultural inheritance and investigate my mother’s roots. I had been eating this food for forty years, and cooking it for more than twenty, but I had only previously made one visit to my ancestral home. ng Having discovered more about my father’s past, it was time to hear about the other side of the family tree. Since my teenage years, my mother and I have spent more time squabbling than bonding, and I was excited as well as anxious about the prospect of more than two weeks alone together.
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