Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

"Imagine having to ask / members of another society / to look for the stolen and subsequently lost / bodies of your own relatives."

"I don't write for critics and reviewers, nor do I cater to a wider audience (by which one usually means a white audience). My work is always addressed to a very small audience: Sri Lankan readers reading in English."

Before I discovered this project, I never imagined the drum as anything more than an inert object behind glass, one that I knew belonged to my people but was so far from home that it didn’t have meaning anymore.

“The only ones we never killed were the wall geckos. Armed with nothing but silence, the hopeful geckos slithered across the empty spot, across the walls, only searching for their way to the roof.”