Discussing books over a cup of tea with the President of Sri Lanka: March 2024

Mr. Ranil Wickramasinghe was the President of Sri Lanka from 2022 to 2024, not to mention serving as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka five times in thirty years. But he’s also a voracious and very opinionated reader. The first accusation he made after opening Fire through Glass was that a book set in Sri Lanka deserved a more overtly Sri Lankan protagonist. That spiralled off into a longer discussion of Sri Lankan literature and the characters who populate it, all while drinking tea served with liberal amounts of milk and sugar.

I didn’t check it by stopwatch, but the whole meeting took about fifteen to twenty minutes. Frankly, I was both shocked and very honored that I had gotten to take up any part of the schedule of the most powerful man in the country. The meeting happened right around the time Fire through Glass came out, in 2024, and the thing I remember most was how unhurried and down-to-earth he was. We weren’t patted down by security guards, or even rushed out afterwards; he took the time and effort to treat, a new and untested writer as an honored guest, and I will never forget that kindness.