My understanding occurred when I was seventeen. By then, out of sheer loneliness, I had become an even more voracious reader and was the favoured client of a book-man who turned up at our gate once a week, an old wooden tea chest filled with books roped to the rear carrier of his bicycle. He would spread a pink tarpaulin on the verandah floor, then lay out his recent findings, each sun-bleached, monsoon-curled tome handled as if it were the finest glass, that raw-rice odour of pages in the tropics rising up to me as I knelt on the other side of the tarp. I chose what I wanted, then gave back the volumes I had bought the last time. He credited me a certain amount for these returns and I paid the difference. I devoured practically anything. Georgette Heyer, Victoria Holt, Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Leon Uris, Tolstoy were all swallowed in great gulps. I also favoured the biographies of old Hollywood stars, whose movies I would never see, there being no market for them in Sri Lanka.
