Me and my wife went for a movie yesterday. We decided to take a walk to the cinema because we don't own a car. There were some buses at that time but the weather was good and we love long walks so we decided to use the good old "two stroke engine" ( means walking on two feet ). There is a Sri Lankan restaurant on the way to the cinema that makes a mean mutton roll.We've had it through delivery but never visited the place, so we decided to drop in and get some mutton rolls to eat on our way. Being an expereinced cowboy I always keep a lighter and a bottle of water in my pockets, and given that the movie we were going to watch was "Dr Strange", I knew I had to summon some sorcery to survive that 2 hours and 6 minutes including the post credit scene. I think it was divine intervention that they had a herb store next to the mutton rolls place so while my wife went in to order mutton rolls, I got mine fried in the parking lot. It was taking a while for my wife to come out and I was getting lost in the void, so I decided to walk in to the Sri Lankan restaraunt to check on my wife ( and the mutton rolls ). Immediately when I opened the door and walked in it felt like I walked into a Thosei Kadei in Wellawatta.The whole place was smelling of spices, rubber mats on the white tiled floor, all the works. The place was run by a Jaffna Tamil elderly couple and they were chatting with wifie when I walked in. "This is my husband" she said and the first thing the akka ( lady ) of the kadei asked me was "aah smoking ah??". I don't know whether she was reffering to the wet grass smell coming from me or the smoke that was filling up the place with all the frying. They also make a mean Brinjal curry so I conveyed my compliments to the chef, turns out that all the dishes are made by akka herself. Then naturally, I went on to have a chat with the gentleman of the couple. Through the haze, I was wondering what should I call him? Aiya, Sir, Mudalali, or be adventurous and go for "Anna". But I am a very dry mofo these days so I decided to drop all the emotional shit and just call him "brother". Now again, I was initially thinking of writing this as an emotional post full of references to the War, Sinhala - Tamil relationship in Sri Lanka and all those other good stuff. But like I said before, these days I am emotionally dry as the mutton roll in Rolex hotel Wellawatta ( Rolex is a great joint but they have horrible mutton rolls ). Also, it was the classic Sinhala- Tamil homie situation where he doesn't speak Sinhala, I don't speak Tamil, and we both speak horrible English. On top of that I was baked like a croissant so communication wasn't exactly clear. But what I did understand from him, was two things. 1 - he wants the Rajapakshas to go home #goHomeGota. 2 - He was very happy about the Sri Lankan young generation who he said "young guys on the field know about everything, more than our generation". It made me very happy to hear an elderly homie like him speaking very highly of the youngsters. We were motoring along in our hatharabeeri conversation and he very kindly said "I can make coffee if you have time". But sadly, we had to go watch Dr Strange. I told him we have to catch the movie so he said "aah movie aah, go to movie with THIS!" and gave me two packets of chips on the house. He also had given my wife a bottle of water earlier after hearing that we walked all the way. We said our good byes, grabbed the freshly fried mutton rolls wrapped in a paper bag, opened the door, and went from spice smelling small room to the North American outdoors with a mild spring-summer breeze flowing across. And The mutton rolls, bro they were delicious.
