(No) Coffee Demons

My parents, both Sri Lankan, weren’t overly religous — dad occasionally attended Buddhist Temple and mum was staunchly atheist despite my Anglican grandparents. Moreover, I grew up in Melbourne Australia, a long way from the traditions of my forebears. Indeed, very little about my childhood was ‘Sri Lankan’, I can’t even speak the language. So as a child I could never understand why my parents insisted on adorning our mantle piece with an ancient replica of a terrifying pagan ‘snake mask’ used by the ancestors of the Sinhalese people. Such was my horror that they eventually took it down and stored it in a cupboard, the door of which I refused to open, lest the mask reveal itself to me, until well into my teenage years.

So you can imagine my surprise last week when visiting my cousin’s home in San Francisco; I hauled my luggage up three flights of stairs to see an even bigger version of the mask staring at me defiantly from his wall. However at 35 years old, I was no longer terrified and even started feeling a strange connection to my heritage… then it clicked, looking at the mask was like looking in the mirror without my morning coffee.