What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast
Oct 19, 2026 · 14 min · 6 segments
In Sri Lanka, grief is as public as traffic lights, but does it help to believe in impossible things?
David SwarbrickHost
The light is very pale, mere whiffs of blue in a transparent, barely sapphire sky, and I sit on the edge of my high veranda, on the very edge, watching the valleys stir beyond.
My mind is as near perfectly blank as any mind can be that has stirred from a dreamless sleep.
No cars, no man-made sounds, no man-made anything, in fact, impinges on my reality except the building I sit within.
Beyond me, in a treasury of trees, I picture an Adam and Eve, a Sri Lankan Adam and Eve, getting ready somewhere else to arrive here later and cause all the trouble that newlyweds like to do.
It is all so very different to how it was just ten hours ago when the electricity failed at eight PM.
Power cuts in Sri Lanka are as familiar here as the engaged tone you hear when you call any call center in any country of the world.
In the darkness, you reach for the phones you forgot to charge earlier, then turn to the candle and matches you misplaced the last time.
And something that looks like a civet or a fishing cat leaping from a coconut tree.
And from far, far off, the stampede of the bashful family of wild boar that like to roam the estate when we, the disruptors, are asleep, or at least are meant to be.
Were I on the street, in a hospital, at a party, or giving my all at the karaoke at Kandy's slightly chilled rooftop bar, it would all feel very different.
The light is very pale, mere whiffs of blue in a transparent, barely sapphire sky, and I sit on the edge of my high veranda, on the very edge, watching the valleys stir beyond.
My mind is as near perfectly blank as any mind can be that has stirred from a dreamless sleep.
No cars, no man-made sounds, no man-made anything, in fact, impinges on my reality except the building I sit within.
Beyond me, in a treasury of trees, I picture an Adam and Eve, a Sri Lankan Adam and Eve, getting ready somewhere else to arrive here later and cause all the trouble that newlyweds like to do.
It is all so very different to how it was just ten hours ago when the electricity failed at eight PM.
Power cuts in Sri Lanka are as familiar here as the engaged tone you hear when you call any call center in any country of the world.
In the darkness, you reach for the phones you forgot to charge earlier, then turn to the candle and matches you misplaced the last time.
And something that looks like a civet or a fishing cat leaping from a coconut tree.
And from far, far off, the stampede of the bashful family of wild boar that like to roam the estate when we, the disruptors, are asleep, or at least are meant to be.
Were I on the street, in a hospital, at a party, or giving my all at the karaoke at Kandy's slightly chilled rooftop bar, it would all feel very different.
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