“Now that you have sufficient alienation, you can romanticise it.” so said Zubair, my friend from childhood – who had been sitting beside me in the ferry – as he got off at his island (mine was still two stops away). Ours had been a serendipitous friendship; his father had been an oil merchant who sold diesel to the four islands on the southern rim of the atoll, carrying his stock in a slow moving boat. On one such trip the meek boy had joined his industrious father, and while disembarking from their ‘theyo dhoni’, took a misstep and fell into the harbour, swallowing seawater in a quantity that suggested nascent suicidal tendencies and was brought to my mother, my island’s indefatigable family health worker.

Zubair and I went on to study at the Atoll Education Centre where I roundly beat him in all subjects for two straight years, and as revenge he married a Slovenian woman with large breasts, to which he disgustingly drew attention by subtle motions of the thumb as it hovered over the phone screen whenever he showed anyone a picture of his wife. His Eid holiday would be spent in a lavish but tasteful home built by his father, which stood out from the shining marble in an island of melon farmers who refuse to be rightly humbled by the poverty like the Lord had intended. When his elderly aunts asked about his wife “is she a Muslim” he answered uncertainly “almost”.

What Zubair had meant was that by dint of the years spent studying abroad, I had been isolated from the island which had made me and the people who had reared me, I can now idealise the experience and use it in my art with piercing irony (I’m an engineer).

I went into a café which had remained unchanged for the last twenty years, run by a former national team volleyball player who used up all its revenue in another café, and after salutary exchanges with my primary school friends (“you’re here!”, “when do you leave?”, “how much do you get per month?”) observed them wince after every sip of coffee. One man entered and yelled “bring me a really bad coffee; if it’s drinkable I will send it back”, to general laughter.

On the second day of Eid I travelled to a nearby island and found myself in the audience of a concert by a troupe from Minicoy. The guest of honor was Dr Hussain Rasheed, current minister of fisheries, who I think enjoyed the show, but his countenance remained unreadable; perhaps due to formal training in science he had reserved judgement for a later date. The performers were all very entertaining, including the juggler, and the MC spoke Dhivehi in a charming accent but my brother in his lifelong quest to make me laugh leaned in and said, “they should learn Dhivehi if they want to juggle in this country”.

I laughed loud enough to startle the woman behind me and the toddler she was carrying (this was at 11:30 pm).

The next day I stopped by my stepbrother’s house; he was a mason but was using his work breaks (4 to 6 hours every day) to work as a carpenter.

“I am making ten thousand cooking spoons for Fathaha Sunbuli.”

“Ten thousand?”

He nods.

“That’s a lot.”

“Probably not for one person.” He replies.

It is my fifth coffee of my fourth day in the island; under discussion was the concert by the inhabitants of Maliku and someone says, “they should learn Dhivehi if they want to juggle in this country”. I recognised the speaker as the teenager who had been leaning into our conversation the other night; few of the people at the table laugh but I glare at him till he looks away.

And thus, I find myself once again on speed boat to back to Male’ leaving a place from which alienation is not possible because of the humor and sheer absurdity. Maybe next time.