One year after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, my family travelled to the city of Jaffna after the main highway leading to the country’s north reopened to tourists. Driving up the narrow, two-lane road as it became progressively bumpier, the busy towns, Buddhist temples, and green rice paddy fields of the central region gave way to scrubland sparsely broken up by army checkpoints, villages with ruined buildings dotted with bullet holes, and small roadside stores in front of which sat people whose eyes followed our van with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. We were met by the same enquiring eyes when we reached Jaffna, a port city whose temples and institutional buildings are marked by Hindu and colonial Portuguese architectural styles, respectively. Jaffna’s population differs culturally and linguistically from its neighbours in the southern provinces of the island, where my family originates. Essentially, we had landed in a foreign country.
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