My mother used to say I could make a stone talk and a dead person dance.

I was the youngest of eleven cousins on my mother’s side, and my cousins knew how to use that. Whenever they had a questionable plan, they sent me. Being the youngest had its charms; I could get away with pretty much anything. When we were small, we visited our grandparents almost every weekend and for every occasion, like clockwork. It was one of those visits, when I was about seven or eight, that we nearly ruined an important ceremony.

That year, my grandmother hosted the Katina Pinkama, a sacred Buddhist ceremony held at the end of the annual rainy season retreat observed by monks, typically in October or November. Temple devotees and their families take turns organizing this ceremony each year, preparing the offerings and food through the night before taking them to the temple in a procession before dawn. My grandmother had waited years for her turn.

By the time we arrived at my grandparents’ house, I could see that everyone was excited about the event. The house was full of my aunts and uncles moving around in a hurry. Some were arranging the offerings, others were sewing the robes, and all the aunts were busy preparing food in a temporary outside kitchen set up for the occasion. And I found my cousins on the road playing cricket with neighborhood kids and joined them. I spent the whole day playing cricket and drinking a ridiculous amount of Orange Crush.

After we finished dinner, our parents told us to go to bed. We were supposed to wake up around two or three in the morning to prepare for the ceremony. Even though they had prepared two rooms for us, we all snuggled up in one room, pushing two beds together. But nobody felt sleepy. Then the cousins started sharing stories one by one. First came the stories about getting into trouble (for no reason, according to them), each cousin telling a different version while the others corrected them. At some point, someone switched to ghost stories.

I don’t remember who summoned the ghosts.

One cousin told us that there was a ghost living in their house. According to him, this ghost only came out when he stayed up late studying while everyone else slept and the house was quiet. He would hear footsteps in the hallway and the sound of the kitchen cupboards opening and closing. But whenever he checked, no one was in the hallway or the kitchen, yet he always found a kitchen cupboard door open. Then everyone started coming up with theories about which dead relative was wandering around with unfinished business. But I thought whoever it was, it must be a very hungry ghost.

Then Nimesh said he’d once seen a ghost up close at a friend’s house, an old bungalow in the middle of a tea estate.

“That can’t be true. Did you really see one?” Sonia sat up and asked, eyes wide, hooking her arm through my sister’s.

“Yes, I was there for a week last August for school holidays. One night, I woke up thirsty in the middle of the night. So I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. That bungalow was really old. Even with the lights on, it was really dark at night.”

“Why did you go out in the dark? You should have placed a glass of water next to your bed before you slept, like my mom.” Thilini, the eldest and wisest sister, pointed out, as usual.

“Well, I didn’t know there was a ghost waiting for me. Do you want me to tell the story or not?”

Everyone went silent. Some of the cousins crossed their arms and held themselves tightly. My sister, Sonia, and Thilini held each other’s hands.

“So I was walking to the kitchen through a hallway, passing a few rooms, and I could see the living room. There was another hallway on the right side of the living room to go to the kitchen. The living room was dark. Just a little light was coming in from the hallway. Then...”

There was a loud thud, and we all jumped. Sonia screamed. She squeezed her eyes shut and clapped her hands over her ears. Nimesh burst out laughing, and I realized that he had made the noise using the headboard. Thilini and Sonia hit him with pillows until another cousin stepped in to stop them and asked Nimesh to continue the story.

“When I got closer to the living room, there was a man, more like a see-through white glow in the shape of a man, floating around the living room. It made a few rounds, turned into the kitchen hallway, and disappeared. And it didn’t have any legs. Just from the waist up. Honestly, I got freaked out and ran to my room and closed the door.”

I couldn’t help imagining Casper floating inside that bungalow.

“Maybe he lost his legs when he died.”

“Was that the resident ghost?”

“Didn’t you say anything to your friend?”

“Did you ask him whether he had seen it too?”

Everyone fired questions at him at once. All Nimesh had said was that he didn’t want to spend another night in that bungalow, so he left the next morning.

A few more cousins shared more stories they had heard from their friends. I felt the room grow darker and colder with each story, and after a while I felt my sister’s fingers pressing into my arm.

Then Nuwan started a story about Maha Sona, one of the most feared demons in Sri Lankan folklore. According to some stories, Maha Sona could kill a person by striking them from behind and crushing their shoulders and sometimes leaving a handprint on their back. Some people also believed that anyone who faced him went mad with fear or fell terribly ill.

Nuwan lowered his voice.

“Someone at school told us this. It had happened to his friend’s mom.”

Everyone squeezed a little closer to Nuwan, and my sister held me a little closer.

“It rained heavily the night before. Early in the morning, his mom went to his sister’s room to wake her up. It was around five o’clock. But when she entered the room, she noticed a strange orange light coming through the textured glass window.”

“What was that?” Sonia blurted, clutching the pillow to her chest.

“What?” everyone whispered, looking around.

“The orange light…”

Nuwan gave her an irritated look and continued.

“Wait until I finish the story. So that orange light looked like it was coming from a fire burning outside. She opened the window to look and saw a large bonfire near their boundary wall.”

“How could anyone light a bonfire after all that rain? The ground would still be wet. And at five in the morning?” the wise sister asked.

“Exactly! His mom was wondering the same thing. Then she noticed a man standing on the boundary wall, at the far right corner, closer to their gate. She could feel his gaze… she knew he was watching her. He started walking slowly along the top of the boundary wall toward the bonfire. He was very tall, unusually, and was wearing a colorful sarong.”

Sonia hugged the pillow to her chest and held on to Thilini’s hand.

“Even though his mom could see his figure, she couldn’t see his face… it was covered in dark shadows. So she called out, ‘Who’s there?’”

Nuwan tried to imitate her with a ridiculous high pitch. But nobody laughed.

“But he didn’t answer. He continued walking toward the bonfire until he reached the place directly opposite his mom’s window and squatted on the wall, facing her. His mom could still see his body in the firelight, but his face remained hidden in the shadows. Then she felt his face tilt up and look straight through her. His mom thought she saw two burning eyes staring back at her.”

“I don’t want to listen to this,” someone whispered. I think it was Sonia since I could hear her grinding her teeth at that point. But Nuwan wasn’t finished.

“His mom slammed the window shut and ran to find his dad, who was still sleeping. She woke him and told him in a hurry that a strange man was outside, sitting by a fire. Still half asleep, he followed her into his sister’s room and opened the window. But there was nothing. No man. No fire.”

The room was silent. Everyone was staring at Nuwan’s mouth.

“So his dad decided to go outside and check. And his mom followed him as he walked toward the boundary wall. Apparently, the ground was really wet and muddy from the rain. And there were no footprints near the wall. Not a single trace of ash where the fire had been burning. Then he checked behind the boundary wall to see whether anyone was hiding there, but there was nobody.”

Nuwan lowered his voice even further, and I could barely hear him now. I shifted and got a little closer to him.

“Then his mom pointed to the exact spot where she’d seen the man squatting. His dad stepped closer and touched the wall. It was hot. As hot as a burning stove. He almost burned his hand.”

The room had gone so quiet that I could hear everyone breathing. We stayed like that for another minute or two. Then, as usual, Sonia opened her mouth first.

“What happened to his parents? Did they die?”

“No. But his mom went kind of mad, and they had to bring a Kattadiya (exorcist) and do a thovilaya (exorcism).”

After another long silence, my sister announced that she was hungry. Apparently, that reminded everyone else they were hungry too. The adults were still busy preparing food in the outside kitchen. To get there, someone had to go through the back door, cross a dark outside corridor, and then walk through the back garden to the other side of the house, where the kitchen was built. Nobody seemed brave enough to make that walk after hearing all those ghost stories. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw everyone’s heads turn toward me.

“Me? Again?”

“C’mon… You’re not afraid of anything!”

I honestly can’t remember whether those stories frightened me or made me more curious. But I didn’t feel particularly afraid to get out of bed and walk to the kitchen that night. Perhaps my greed for sweets felt more important than hiding from imaginary ghosts and demons. So off I went searching for food.

The living room was dark and quiet, except for the voices coming from the back of the house. I thought everyone must have finished preparing the offerings, and the only thing left was food. I had almost reached the back door when I heard footsteps behind me.

I turned around, but nobody was there. I listened for a moment. Nothing.

I thought I’d probably imagined it after hearing all those stories, so I turned back and kept walking. Once I opened the door and stepped outside, it was so dark that I almost went back to find a flashlight. But after a moment, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I could make out a few shadows in the moonlight. I decided I could manage without one. So I started walking along the outside corridor toward the back garden. I heard pots clattering and adults talking in the kitchen ahead.

After a few steps, something tapped my right shoulder. I turned around, expecting to see one of my cousins.

Again, nobody was there. I looked around, trying to figure out what had touched me, when I felt something cold on the back of my neck. I froze.

Was that his hand?

I didn’t want to touch my neck. The story was still fresh in my mind. But whatever it was, it kept moving. I slowly reached for the back of my neck, grabbed whatever it was, and held it up to the moonlight.

A millipede.

A real, wriggling millipede.

I shook it off as quickly as I could and rubbed my hand on my pajamas. Then I started singing the rest of the way to the kitchen, loudly.

When my mother saw me, she wanted to know why I was still awake. I told her I was hungry. My voice came out hoarse from all the singing. She wasn’t very happy about me wandering around the kitchen at night, but she gave me a couple of milk toffees and a Helapa, a Sri Lankan sweet made with millet flour, coconut, and kithul treacle. Two of my favorite sweets. While eating them, I found a small container and filled it with more milk toffees and Helapa with the precision of a spy securing evidence. Once I was satisfied with my collection, I hid it behind me and slipped out of the kitchen, wishing I were a ghost that no one could see.

Once I was safely out of sight of the adults, I grabbed another milk toffee from the container, shoved it into my mouth, and hummed my way through the back garden to the dark corridor. I’d almost reached the corridor when I noticed something at the other end.

A white shape.

It was moving toward me very slowly. I stopped walking and tried to figure out what I was looking at. It reminded me of a statue wrapped in white cloth. Then it came a little closer. And I heard the familiar scrape of loose flip-flops against the floor. I looked down. Its feet were covered too. But I could still hear the flip-flop sound when it took another step forward.

Seriously?

Someone had covered themselves with a bedsheet and was pretending to be a ghost, and I wondered which cousin was under it. I started laughing at it. Apparently, the ghost hadn’t expected me to be so amused, so he started making a horrible growling noise. That made me laugh even harder.

Then I heard a terrifying scream behind me, followed by a loud crash. I turned around. My aunt was running back toward the kitchen, screaming, “Holmanak!” A ghost.

And there, scattered across the garden soil, were the broken pieces of a large pot along with the milk rice that had been inside it.

The adults came rushing out to the back garden within moments to see what had happened. I stood there, still holding my little container of stolen sweets, while the ghost behind me quickly dropped the white sheet to the corridor floor as if he’d only come to walk me back to the room.

My mother’s gaze moved from the broken pot on the ground to the container in my right hand, then to the bedsheet on the floor behind me.

“Did you think this was a good time to play a prank?” my mother asked.

Nimesh quietly moved to my side and slipped his hand into mine. I looked at my feet, wanting to avoid everyone’s tired and angry eyes. They’d spent the entire night preparing for the ceremony, and now, thanks to my cousins’ brilliant idea, they had to cook another pot of milk rice for the monks.

Every one of us got a proper telling off that night. It didn’t seem like the right time to point out that the prank had been meant for me.

P.S. This story took a lot of untangling. Thank you, , for generously reading my messy first draft and helping me see what I really wanted to tell, and how to tell it.

P.P.S. My cousins appear here under borrowed names.

About eight to ten months before we moved, a friend and I had started building an idea around education and professional learning, and another friend joined us as it began taking shape. We had formed the company and laid the foundation. We started testing parts of it with soft-skills workshops at universities around the country while figuring out the bigger plan behind the scenes. I loved that stage, when you feel that everything is possible and you are excited by the thought of creating something from scratch.

By the time we were moving, I was fully focused on building this startup while still doing my day job. And I had slowly become a workaholic, building my whole life around work and determined to be the best at whatever I did. Perhaps I was making up for the years I lost by starting my career so late. So I worked harder, learned more, took on more, and convinced myself that this was what ambition looked like.

Outside of work, life whirled at the same speed. I was part of a big and close-knit community. Living close to our parents meant weekend lunches and dinners were family policy. We sprinted between houses, my side one weekend and my husband KP’s the next, keeping count so neither family could say the other got more turns. I looked forward to quick catch-ups with friends after work and long weekend get-togethers that were basically free therapy. And the rest of my free time mostly went to networking events and social gatherings.

At the time, I didn’t realize how high I was on all of that. I could keep on going because I liked crossing things off my lists and knocking out my goals and having things to do and places to be and moving toward something. I liked that energy and buzz. And I thought that was simply what life was supposed to look like.

And I never stopped or had a reason to ask myself whether I really valued everything that I did. I loved disappearing into my day job without ever questioning whether it was really what I wanted; I met people whenever they asked, without thinking about whether I actually enjoyed spending time with them; I kept attending meetups and events, without questioning whether I really had to be there; I never thought I had a choice of saying no to someone close to me. Everything in my life was something I had chosen once and had become a routine that never got a routine check.

Then I got on a twenty-two-hour flight, and that entire life became a memory.

The day after I stepped into the new apartment, I started organizing the apartment, sorting out my son’s school, exploring the neighborhood, and thinking about how to furnish our new home. I spent those first few weeks combing through stores looking for things for our new home with the excitement of a new bride because, for the first time, I truly had a chance to style a home exactly the way I wanted without a side eye or a comment about something not matching the family heirlooms.

Even with all that going on, I had more free hours in the day, which made me wonder whether time was moving slower. I hadn’t felt that way in years. For years, twenty-four hours had never felt like enough; I wanted more time.

Now I had all the time in the world and nowhere particular to be. I thought I would feel free or happy that no one was controlling my schedule anymore. But I felt empty. I had been so used to measuring my days by how much I accomplished that having very little to do and nowhere I needed to be felt like I had lost part of myself.

Then I came across William Bridges’s book Transitions. He describes this emptiness you feel during a period of change in your life as a fallow time between an ending and a beginning. That was exactly where I was. My old life was over, and the new one hadn’t really started. I was still grieving what I had left behind: my people and my career.

I especially missed the startup because I had to step away just as it was taking shape. I tried to find a way to keep it running from here, but with the time difference and how much of it needed me there in person, I let it go with a heavy heart. So I did what made sense to the old version of me. I tried to restart my career as soon as possible so I could have some sense of purpose. I thought that would be my beginning.

I began searching for local meetups and conferences and started showing up. It was a familiar setting I had been to many times, and I knew what to expect. I eventually connected with a few people and volunteered to give a short talk at one of the meetups. It was the worst talk of my life.

Speaking in front of people was not new to me; I had delivered workshops and survived the nerves plenty of times. But that day, even before I got to the building, one question kept playing on a loop in my head: “What do I really want?” I had no idea where it came from. Then anxiety took over completely. I stood there looking at everyone’s faces, trying to remember what came next. Even my usual breathing trick did nothing. It took me a while to recover, and I got through the rest of the talk by sprinkling in self-deprecating jokes. But that question kept me up at night for several weeks after that.

The week after that, at another meetup, I stood there among a group of people trying to move into the field and waited for my turn to introduce myself. I had my pitch ready. That part had never felt awkward to me before. I even taught it in the workshops I ran for my startup. But that evening, when it was my turn, I paused a bit longer than I expected and introduced myself as just someone who had recently moved and was looking for a new job, without delivering my prepared pitch.

That was when I started wondering whether I wanted my old life back as badly as I thought I did. I wanted meaningful work again, certainly. But did I also want the long days, the weekends spent catching up on whatever was changing in the industry, and the constant feeling that there was always something else I should be learning or doing? Did I really want to rebuild my whole life around work again?

Meanwhile, I was still calling my new life empty while spending my days doing things I actually liked. Some mornings, after my son left for school, I read at home for hours with my coffee, without rushing off to anything else. On others, I went straight to a coffee shop or the library and stayed for hours. No one disturbed me during these times except occasional messages from my husband asking where he had put something or checking whether I was alive. I started walking more and going to the cinema, and I even tried sketching and coloring. I spent entire afternoons with no particular purpose, and whenever someone asked whether I was free to meet on short notice, for once I could say yes.

I had been living inside a painting that everyone helped me make, and I realized that I could start a new one on my own, even if all I managed was a stick figure.

All this time, I had been very good at adapting to whatever was already happening around me. But now it was time for me to ask myself questions I had rarely asked before: what work I wanted to do, what mattered to me, how I wanted to spend my time, and what kind of relationships I valued. I knew I still wanted work that mattered and kept me engaged, and a job that provided a decent living. But I no longer wanted this work to consume so much of my life that everything else had to negotiate for whatever time remained. I wanted to close the laptop at five and be done for the day.

I no longer wanted a life that moved so fast that I missed enjoying each moment because I was always busy preparing for the next thing. I wanted space to explore new things and get excited about them, and also to slow down and get bored at times.

So I made a list of jobs outside my field that I could imagine doing. Library assistant was on it, next to bookshop clerk and professional organizer, which was probably inspired by my decluttering-snob habit of reorganizing the same cupboards over and over again. I still applied for jobs in my field but treated getting back into the same industry as optional while carefully choosing which ones I wanted to apply for. I also slowly stopped going to most of those networking meetups and spent more time talking to a few people I genuinely liked.

I’m glad I took that path, because one of those close connections grew into a friendship and led me to an opportunity that really mattered to me, work that I valued, with enough space left for the rest of my life. The first Monday after the onboarding period, I closed my laptop at exactly five o’clock, just in time to help my son with his homework. For the first time, I felt like work could be an important part of my life without taking over all of it.

During work hours, I was fully focused. I still wanted to learn fast and be the best at what I did, and I kept finding ways to improve how things worked. But at the end of the day, I closed the laptop and went back to my personal life without worrying about work. That hasn’t changed.

Moving forced me to slow down during that transition and spend enough time outside my old routine to see it clearly. I’m still the same ambitious woman who started her career late and had something to prove. I still care about my career and what I do, but now I also want room in my day to notice my own life. I don’t want to chase every opportunity or attend every obligatory social event anymore.

I still miss my old life at times, and sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed and kept building the startup. Some days, I still crave that buzz and the feeling of being needed everywhere. Then I go for a long walk, something I never had time for before, listening to the birds and enjoying the first warmth of the sun on my cheeks.

The smell of roasted garlic and sesame seeds made my stomach growl as if I’d been starving for weeks. I took the top half of the bagel off and peeked inside. Underneath the arugula were slices of boiled egg, cucumber, and halved grape tomatoes, all held together by some kind of creamy spread. I dabbed a bit with my little finger and tasted the spread; it was mayo with some cheese. I quickly took a Lactaid, cursing my lactose intolerance, which has gotten worse since I moved to this country.

The first bite gave me a satisfying crackle of toasted crust, then filled my mouth with creamy mayo, cheese, egg, and peppery arugula. Even with my mouth full, I couldn’t wait for the next bite. Then my teeth snapped through the cool cucumber, and a few more bites later, sweet tomato juice burst across my tongue. Mmm… heaven… I gobbled the whole sandwich. I felt full and satisfied, but my greedy mouth was not; it wanted more.

The perfect egg bagel sandwich!

That accidental sandwich became my go-to whenever I want a sandwich. Apparently, whoever delivered it knew what I wanted before I did. But I hadn’t had one in about two months. This weekend I skipped my usual meal prep, so the sandwich got stuck in my head like a song on repeat.

On Monday midmorning, I placed the order while sitting in a meeting. I kept my poker face through the rest of the meeting and sneaked glances at my phone every few minutes to check the order status while my stomach rumbled like an old generator. I was scared to unmute my mic because, at that point, my stomach had opinions about the meeting too. Once the meeting ended, I opened the app to check the map and stared at the tiny icon moving down the street, getting closer to my house.

And finally, the little car reached my house. My Monday was about to improve considerably.

I had only half an hour to peacefully enjoy my lunch before my next meeting started. Excited to finally satisfy my weekend-long craving, I unwrapped the sandwich with shaking hands, ripping the soft white paper.

At first glance, I knew something was wrong, even though it looked and smelled the same. I took the top half of the bagel off to check inside.

No eggs!

I put the top back on and lifted it off again, as if the egg might appear on a second try. Still… no eggs.

They had screwed up my order again. My hands were already shaking from hunger because I had survived the morning on coffee alone, and now they were shaking with something closer to rage. I didn’t have time to order another one. I opened the fridge, hoping I could at least add an egg myself; no eggs there either. Then I remembered grocery shopping was on that evening’s to-do list since I’d skipped it over the weekend to relax.

After a long sigh, I ate my sad, eggless sandwich while mentally cursing whoever had forgotten the important part. My stomach wasn’t happy about the meal I’d just served it for lunch. My anger hadn’t subsided either.

I opened the app, remembering there was an option to report problems, but by then it was too late. I had already eaten the problem. So I left a bad review. Still annoyed, I tapped on the order details.

“No Egg”

I read the order details multiple times to confirm what I was seeing. In the requests section, instead of selecting “No Mozzarella,” I’d selected “No Egg,” which was sitting right above it.

Damn, Sumu!

I checked my review to see if I could delete it, but couldn’t find a way to delete or edit it. Of course I couldn’t. Apparently, the app was very committed to making sure I lived with my choices. Guilt crept in as I thought about the poor person somewhere in that store who might now be wondering what they’d done wrong.

I sat there, still hungry, staring at the bad review I couldn’t take back, accepting that the only person who had screwed up my order was me. I mentally apologized to everyone I’d been cursing for the past ten minutes and left a second review, a glowing one this time.

Then there was this one book.

I found it at home when I was very little, lying on a desk in the room at the far end of the house. It was the first book I remember reading by myself, a Sinhala translation of a collection of Russian fairy tales. It was named after one of the stories, Vasilisa the Beautiful.

The greenish-black velvet cover was faded, and the picture in the center was barely visible. The pages were smooth and had darkened with years of use. I remember pressing the book to my face whenever I opened it, breathing in that timeworn, earthy smell. It reminded me of my grandfather’s old printing press.

I never figured out how that book ended up in that room. I don’t remember ever seeing it before the day I found it, and sometimes I wonder whether someone had left it there for me. It became my most precious possession.

When I was around nine or ten, I discovered a Saturday morning TV show about books. Every weekend, the show invited authors to talk about their new books, and I was fascinated by the stories and what inspired them.

Whenever a children’s book appeared on that show, I begged my mother to buy it for me. She didn’t have a big budget to spend on everything we asked for, but with enough persistence and daily pleading, I managed to melt her heart from time to time and get a few of the books I had seen on the show. But those few books weren’t enough to keep me going for long.

When I ran out of new stories to read, I reread the old ones until I could almost recite them from memory. Once I knew every scene, I started rereading my schoolbooks and the children’s papers my mother bought me once a week. I was always craving more stories.

At ten, I made myself a promise: once I grew up, I would buy one book every month.

I was eleven when I first had access to a library, after transferring to a new school. It wasn’t a big library, but it had a good collection of translated children’s and young adult books, including some newer, widely known titles. We could only borrow one book every other week, but I was grateful for that steady supply of free books. The school also held a book fair every year, and I saved all my pocket money so I could buy books at discounted prices. It was my Disneyland.

I was thirteen the first time I sneaked a romance novel home. We weren’t allowed to read them at school or at home. That didn’t stop the girls from smuggling some of the novels everyone was talking about into school, and one girl in our group got hold of the most popular one.

That afternoon, I hid it between my textbooks so my mother wouldn’t see it and pretended to study while I disappeared into the story. I didn’t notice her standing behind me until she snatched the book away and yelled at me for reading something so “inappropriate” for my age. I begged her not to take it. She made me promise to return it to its owner the next day, then took it with her anyway.

I waited until everyone fell asleep that night. Then I took the flashlight I had hidden under my bed and went looking for the book. I found it on top of my mother’s sewing machine. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning and finished it, sleeping for only an hour or two before going to school. That whole day was a blur, and I felt a little ache in my heart every time I thought about the ending. It led to a yearlong hunt for romance novels.

One morning, when I was fifteen, I was sitting with my friends around the big central table in the school library, talking in hushed voices during our library period, when the other end of the table suddenly erupted into laughter. We started laughing too because we couldn’t hold it in, even though we had no idea what everyone was laughing about.

Within seconds, the librarian was standing beside us. She asked us to follow her to the front, then took our library cards and locked them in her desk drawer. We were suspended from using the library for a year. I was furious. The next Saturday, I dragged my mother to the public library and asked her to buy me a membership for the year.

I felt as if I had stepped into another century when I first stood among the shelves of that public library. Old books filled the shelves and stacks, carrying that dusty smell of paper that had been sitting there for years. I skipped the Sinhala section and stood in front of the English shelves, wondering whether to try one for the first time. I picked up an old copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and wondered how many people before me had stayed up late reading just one more chapter from that same copy.

It took me ages to get through it, with a huge Oxford dictionary beside me, looking up unfamiliar words every few minutes. I wanted to understand every word and every sentence. I wanted to form the pictures in my head and play out the scenes the way I could when I read my own language. At first, it was slow and painful work. Gradually, I learned to understand the writing more quickly and guess the meaning of new words before looking them up. Eventually, I could read without reaching for the dictionary every so often.

Until I picked up The Lord of the Rings.

I struggled with the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, for months, but loved every minute of it. Spending so long deciphering the words, picturing every scene, and living inside that world made me fall in love with Tolkien’s storytelling and worldbuilding. It was the longest I had ever spent reading a single book.

Reading English novels opened up a whole new world of adventure and fantasy that I had never had access to in my own language. That curiosity about unfamiliar creatures, technologies, places, and worlds has never really left me since.

The first time I hung out with my husband, KP, I was twenty-one, and he took me to his parents’ house. The first thing I noticed was the doors… doors full of books. Each room had a wooden sliding door, and the lower half of each door was a bookshelf. I had never seen anything like it. That was also the first time I had seen a home so full of books. I was gawking at the bookshelves when KP’s mother came into the living room. From her stern eyes and pursed lips, I could tell she was not very pleased to see me.

His mother sat down across from me and started asking questions. Everything from me to my parents to my grandparents. I answered almost mindlessly while trying to read the titles on the bookshelf behind her. I remember seeing Arundhati Roy on one spine and Nelson Mandela’s face on another. After about a hundred questions, she got up and disappeared through one of the half-open bookshelf doors. I immediately started checking out the books, thinking my interrogation was over.

A few minutes later, she came back with her two daughters. KP’s sisters were lovely and chatty, and the questioning eased into a more comfortable conversation. The whole time I was there, I couldn’t stop admiring the books and bookshelves, thinking about how convenient those sliding door bookshelves were, how much space they saved, and how beautiful they looked. We got married the following year.

We didn’t buy much furniture for the new apartment; it was a small place with one bedroom. But we did buy a bookshelf. I stacked the few books I had collected over the years on the middle shelf. For the first few weeks, I stopped in front of it almost every time I walked past it, just to admire it. My apartment, my bookshelf, my books.

A couple of months later, KP’s work took us to Sweden for almost a year. One morning, while exploring Lidingö, I came across its public library. I was thrilled and immediately wanted to check whether I could get a library card during my stay because I had brought only a couple of books with me. The library was completely different from the ones I knew back home. Those libraries had always felt old, as though they had been preserved in time. Lidingö Library felt modern and bright.

I went to the front desk to ask about getting a library card. They gave me one immediately. I hadn’t expected it to be so easy or free. Back home, getting a public library membership had involved a fee and a much longer approval process.

Most of the books in the library were in Swedish, but they also had a good English section. I started going to the library every morning to read for a few hours. I carried books with me everywhere and read outside whenever I could. It became one of the best parts of my time in Sweden.

Once we returned home, I couldn’t keep my promise to buy one book a month for very long. One book became two, then three, and a monthly visit to the bookstore turned into a weekend ritual. My collection grew like Jack’s beanstalk, quickly outgrowing the little bookshelf I had once stood in front of and admired. Before long, books were taking over every corner of the house.

Then, a couple of years ago, I had to leave them behind and move continents. After spending so many years collecting them, leaving them was harder than I expected, even though I knew they were in safe hands with my friend.

But eventually, I started again. Now, in this new home, another bookshelf has filled up faster than I imagined. The shelves are packed, with a few stacks beside them. And there’s a pile of new reads that never seems to shrink.

I’d be a completely different person if I’d never picked up Vasilisa the Beautiful all those years ago. It was my first love, and I still wonder how it found me.

I opened the rear door as gently as possible and was about to get in when I caught a bad smell. I turned around a few times and inhaled deeply but couldn’t figure out what it was or where it was coming from. I smelled myself to make sure that I hadn’t left the clothes in the washing machine too long without drying them. But I only noticed my perfume, nothing damp.

Just as I sat down in the back seat and closed the door, the driver woke up. He adjusted his seat and greeted me with a big smile, and I settled in for the ride with a warm reply.

A little way down the road, he started closing all the side windows. Suddenly, that bad smell, like damp socks and sweat, was so strong that I was scared I would throw up the coffee I had just before I got into the car. I glanced down and saw the seat was discolored and covered in stains. And the cubby and cupholders were filled with trash.

All this time I thought the bad smell was coming from outside and would go away in a few minutes once the windows were closed. Apparently, I was wrong. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could stay in this car all day with this smell. I opened my side window halfway. But the smell was still so strong that I covered my nose with my scarf.

When we stopped at a traffic light, I glanced at the front and noticed the driver’s eyes half-closed, then fluttering. My heart stopped.

Is he still sleepy? Is he going to fall asleep at the wheel and get us both killed?

My life flashed before my eyes: crashing into the car in front of us at full speed, me lying in the hospital, with KP and my kid next to my bed, thinking about how they manage home stuff without me, about all the work I’d have to cover after I recovered, my friend’s baby shower, my travel plans. It was not the best time to get into an accident.

I stared at him like my mind could force his eyes open and make him alert. My typical introverted brain didn’t want to start a conversation with a stranger that early in the morning, but I realized my life might depend on coming up with something to ask. Then I noticed the radio playing at a very low volume, and I asked him to turn it up. He gave me a sideways glance while turning it up and said,

“Oh, I have a question for you. I have lots of Indian friends.” And he paused.

I said, “Okay…”

I was glad to hear him talk, but curious where this conversation was going. And I didn’t want to take the scarf off my nose for a lengthy conversation at the time. I just wanted him to be focused and awake.

“Did you have an arranged marriage?”

Whoa, it’s way too early and way too personal for a stranger, mister!

I never expected that question from him. The usual first questions I get from strangers are about where I’m from, what I do, whether I’ve been here long. No one asked about my marriage before. And I wondered, why would he assume that I was married? I wasn’t even wearing my wedding ring. I couldn’t work out what other clue gave it away. What if I was single? And why did he assume that I was Indian? Well, we South Asians all look a bit similar; sometimes we can’t even tell the difference. But there’s still a whole ocean between me and India.

I took a deep breath through the scarf.

“Oh, I’m not Indian. And no, I didn’t have an arranged marriage.” I answered in a neutral tone.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were Indian. Where are you from?” He asked.

“I’m from Sri Lanka.”

“Where is that? I’ve never heard of that country.” He asked in a high-pitched voice.

I mentally thanked my father for getting us a huge world map when we were little. And thanks to the “find the country” games I played with my neighborhood friends using that map, I still remembered most countries and their locations.

The conversation continued as I explained Sri Lanka’s location, weather, culture, and food, while he talked about wanting to visit. Every time I removed my scarf to talk, I felt nauseated because of the stench, and I wished I could cut the conversation short. Thankfully, we reached the destination before he ended up questioning my whole family history.

When I got into the next Uber on the way back home, I sniffed the back seat before I even sat down, put on my headphones, and didn’t take them off until I got home.

And then the news came in that we must move immediately, within a month or so, for him to start his new role. I was at my workplace when KP sent me this message. Since I couldn’t wait until the evening to get answers to my questions, I called him.

“How can we pack all the books within a month?” I blurted out even before I could hear his voice.

“What?” He sounded confused.

“I mean… one month? You said we have more time, and this might never even happen. How can we settle everything within a month and move? And where are we–“ I breathlessly spilled all the things on my mind when he cut me off.

“Slow down… It’s a new project, so I have to start immediately. And… There are some options… I’m about to step into a meeting. We’ll talk about the details when I’m back home.”

That evening, we decided the best option would be for him to leave first to start his new role on time and find an apartment, while I settled things at home and followed a month later with my kid.

“The books, I don’t know what to do. Should I take them?” I asked him.

“Do you want to? This could be temporary. We don’t know what kind of place we’ll get, or whether we’ll have to move around until we settle. And you can buy more books, all the new releases, when you’re there.” He said.

I stared at the bookshelf next to the couch, which housed most of my favorite collections from Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan, Patrick Rothfuss, Christopher Paolini, Deborah Harkness, Naomi Novik, Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, Margaret Atwood, Liane Moriarty, Kristin Hannah, Tana French, Gillian Flynn, and Philippa Gregory. After a long staring game with my books, I promised them that I would collect new books and sequels from their collections once I settled into the new place.

Over the next few weeks, I handed in my resignation, stepped down from the startup, and started settling the household while helping KP with his departure.

The evening after KP left, I poured a glass of wine and cleaned and packed the books into cardboard boxes to send them to my friend’s house while 4 Non Blondes played in the background–Linda Perry screaming inside my head, “And I say, hey, what’s going on.”

A month later, on a cold December evening, after twenty-two hours in the air, I stepped off the plane at Atlanta airport with my kid and two suitcases, searching for that familiar smile to start the new chapter of our life.