My sixth year of life is timestamped by a stupid thing I did at a kindergarten friend’s house. It was my first time visiting, and his mum gave me a banana as a snack. When I finished it, I was too shy to ask where the bin was. I guess I was a taciturn child. I tried to hide the peel, tucking it into a corner of the kitchen.

I remember the house being full of unfamiliar people who mixed English with a language I didn’t understand. My heritage is Sri Lankan, and I looked very different from the others in the house. They were not Anglo-Saxons, but fair-skinned, and perhaps it was the first time I had been in the house of someone whose skin wasn’t brown. I remember the white tiles, cold and strange under my bare feet. I remember that detail because we always wore slippers at home. Most of all I remember the dread of knowing. Knowing the banana peel wouldn’t just disappear, that someone would find it, and something bad would happen.