Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath: An Extract

S. Shakthidharan’s memoir Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is a story of fallibility, forgiveness and grace. It’s a paean to fatherhood and family, and the love and conflicts that make us. It was commissioned and published by Powerhouse and won the Multicultural Award in the 2026 NSW Literary Awards. There will be an accompanying program featuring artworks, performances and readings when Powerhouse Parramatta opens in 2026. This extract brings together two separate sections from the chapter ‘A Dream Remembered’.

You began life as proof of an argument.

For tens of thousands of years, the whole lot of us – great clans, entire dynasties – congregated at the northern tip of our teardrop island, speaking and living a Tamil life, while below us was the majority of a Singhalese nation. We were Jaffna farmers: our livelihoods were ruled by monsoon and harvest, our society by caste and gossip. There was the home, the temple, the jungle in between and the oceans beyond. And it was enough.

But when the British came, they brought something new: English. My great-great-grandmother was just curious enough to send my great-grandfather to an English-language school. After all, according to the gossip, it would get you trousered employment in the city. The gossipmongers were, of course, wrong: English got you far more than that. In one generation, my great-grandfather went from treading the wellspring each morning to purposefully sneezing during the daily Lord’s Prayer at boarding school; travelling from there to the halls of Oxford, coming up with such calculations they gave him prizes only the British had previously won; before returning to the homeland to become the only Tamil member of the cabinet of the first post-independence government of Ceylon. We moved out of Jaffna, for the first time ever. We weren’t cocooned in the north anymore. We were amongst it all – in Colombo, in the big city, in the south.