On my last night in Trincomalee I couldn’t sleep. I lay frozen on the hard single bed, wide-awake and petrified. There I was, a foreign woman, alone in a glass-fronted room on the ground floor of a half-empty beach hotel on the war-ravaged coast of Sri Lanka. But was I really alone? I could feel the presence of other humans but I couldn’t hear anyone. Yet, I could almost smell them. It was unbearable. I just had to look outside. I put on my glasses, crept silently to the window and slowly drew open the flimsy cotton curtain a pinch.
Montrealer Mariam Pal’s memoir, Ballet is not for Muslim Girls, will be published this year by Renaissance Press. Find Mariam on Twitter @mariampmontrea1.