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This article is part of the Sri Lanka-themed September special edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable.
The piece you’re reading now is by Thinesh Thillainadarajah. Thinesh is an Eelam Tamil Queer lawyer and creative hailing from Toronto, Canada. Aside from his day job as a banking lawyer, he is the creator and producer of You Have Been Told A Lie, a podcast that chronicles the journey of the Nadesalingam family and Tamil asylum seekers, geopolitics, border surveillance, and Australia’s complicity in human rights violations domestically and abroad. You Have Been Told A Lie won Best News and Affairs Podcast at the 2023 iHeart Australian Podcast Awards. He is also the creative producer of Hot Sauce, a gathering that aims to create an intentional space to celebrate the lives of queer people of colour. Thinesh has also been involved in Community Engagement with the Darlinghurst Theatre Company, the Griffin Theatre Company, and most recently with the Belvoir Street Theatre for their productions of Holding the Man and Counting and Cracking.
[Editor’s Note: Some names and identifying features in this article have been changed or obscured.]
The Politics of Our Homeland
I’d been given the task of hauling four bottles of duty-free Cuervo to Chennai. Rajan was to bring the gin. The three of us were huddled around a dining table in Redfern, wine glasses in hand, weaving a web of plans to ensure that Nayika’s Chennai wedding would be the celebration it was meant to be. Rajan and I were Sri Lankan Tamil, whilst Nayika was of Indian Tamil descent. We were close friends, shaped by our distinct national backgrounds, but bound together through culture and tongue. With a 100 of Nayika’s nearest and dearest flying to Chennai for the 600-person wedding, every point was connected and no one was going to move without purpose. An invisible infrastructure had been put together to give order to the chaos of this Indian wedding, just like the city of Chennai itself.
As we started to down our second bottle of Tempranillo to orchestrate our itinerary in the days before and after the wedding, I glanced at Rajan and jumped at the idea of going to Jaffna, Sri Lanka—a reflex.
Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu in South India, was now a Jetstar flight’s cost and distance away from Jaffna. I say ‘now,’' because up until 2022, there was no active airport in the north of Sri Lanka, and returning to the North where my family is from did not come without significant risk.
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