My family left Sri Lanka for Canada 18 years ago, two years after the civil conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils boiled over into riots that destroyed parts of Colombo. A few years ago my parents started visiting the homeland for six months or so to escape the Canadian winters. They were there recently, and gave me a call. The country seemed headed for peace, they said. So they decided to buy a house.

I put down the phone, went to the glass doors of my study and looked out at the frozen Canadian landscape. It had snowed that morning and the trees were sculpted in white. My partner Andrew and I bought this house in Toronto a few years ago and it stands, as residences do for many gay couples, as an abiding physical symbol of our relationship. This wasn't the first home he and I shared. In 1997 we set up house together in Colombo for a year, in a country where homosexuality is punishable with 12 years in prison.

The house my parents rented for us there was huge: high, high ceilings, a great winding staircase to the second floor, three massive bedrooms, two washrooms—one of which was the size of our bedroom in Canada. "It's a mansion," Andrew gasped. Various relatives and friends of my mother came to visit, to ogle really, at the utterly bizarre situation of two men trying to keep up a home. (My first novel, Funny Boy, left no doubt about my sexuality.) One of my mother's friends ran her finger over the inch of dust on the dining table and asked, "How are you boys going to keep home?"

The answer was Chandini, a brisk, olive-skinned, eternally cheerful woman who had worked for my family off and on for years. "Chandini!" my mother's friend cried, "I fired her last week. That woman will never step foot in my house again. Have you forgotten," she asked, "Chandini's love affair with the bottle?"

I started to remember Chandini's binges, the operatic fights with her husband, and the times my mother—a doctor—had to take her to the emergency room to have her stomach pumped. "Darling, how could you have forgotten?" my mother asked me a few days later. "The thing is to get her first thing in the morning. She's sober then. Give her a good breakfast. Her lunch will be a liquid one."

The next Monday my mother accompanied Chandini to our house. As I watched her come up the front path, I felt a lump growing in my throat. "Ah, Babba," she said, when she was by me. She touched my arm. So much was in that gesture: the passing of time but also the circular nature of life; the fact that she, who had cleaned for me when I was a child, was now cleaning for me, an adult.

Chandini's first two visits passed uneventfully. On the third Monday, she was late, weary and her eyes were bloodshot. "Babba," she said, "I'm not feeling well. Could I lie down for a bit?" We didn't have a servant's quarters with a cot or a mat. "Why don't you use the guest room upstairs." I started to lead the way upstairs. "No, Babba, I'm quite comfortable here." To my horror, she stretched out on the floor by the dining table, her hands folded under her head for a pillow. "You go upstairs and do your paadum, Babba." (Chandini called my writing paadum, or studying.) I went to my bedroom but, try as I might, I could not write. I tiptoed downstairs and sat on one of the steps, my knees up to my chest, watching her sleep. I noticed how old she had become, the gray in her hair, the lines on her face. A great misery took hold of me.

Chandini had opened her eyes and was looking at me. "Ah, Babba," she said.

The next week, Chandini asked for a loan to fix the roof of her house and I gave it to her. Five hundred rupees—barely $10. With that windfall, she didn't show up the next week. Nor the week after. Ants took over a corner of the dining room, cockroaches began to colonize the kitchen. Finally I asked my mother to find her. "You have to understand," my mother explained, "people who are so poor live for the day. Only those with money can afford the luxury of living for the future." The loan was forgiven. Chandini came back to work.

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