Nagalingam Ethirveerasingam’s life intersects with both international sport and Sri Lanka’s political history. In 1958, on the day he won the country’s first Asian Games gold medal in Tokyo, communal violence was unfolding in Colombo. Representing Ceylon at the Olympic Games in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956), he secured his place in the island’s athletic record while events at home marked a different trajectory.

With Sri Lankan, Portuguese and French roots, Sister Irene Bartelöt has long been part of the layered social fabric of Batticaloa. She recalls a time when people did not ask about ethnicity or nationality, when, as she puts it, people “just mixed up.” That memory remains central to how she understands the town and its history. Her decision to enter religious life followed what she describes as a quiet, persistent calling.

Father Harry Miller left Louisiana in 1948 as a young Jesuit assigned to the mission in Batticaloa. Travelling by train from New Orleans and by ship from New York to Colombo, he arrived with his close friend, Father Eugene Hebert, as part of a cohort of American Jesuits sent to eastern Sri Lanka following earlier French, Belgian and Italian missions. Jesuits, he would say, did not come for a short term.

Venerable Walatara Sobhita Nayaka Thero serves as chief monk of the Galwadugoda temple, known for its dark stone architecture and long institutional history. He speaks of monastic discipline and meditation practice as daily forms of continuity. In his office, beside palm-leaf manuscripts and administrative files, stands an ageing record player. Since his youth, he has kept a collection of vinyl recordings, including Buddhist devotional songs performed by Muslim artists.

Mohammed Yassin and his family were among the more than five thousand Muslim families expelled from the Jaffna peninsula by the Tamil Tigers in 1990. He recalls the day they were ordered to leave, the hurried journey south and the uncertainty that followed.

At 105 years old, Veerakathy was widely regarded as one of the oldest men in Jaffna. Born in 1906 in Velanai, he left as a child to work in Galle before returning in 1920 to farm tobacco and coconut. He married in 1930 and raised eight sons and four daughters. Six of his sons have since died. “I am still here,” he said, without emphasis.

Bala Tampoe led the Ceylon Mercantile Industrial and General Workers Union for more than fifty years. Born in Jaffna and trained as a lawyer, he moved through several professions before committing himself to the trade union movement. He spoke of strikes in terms of morale and discipline, drawing on military history as readily as on labour law.

Poet and writer Dominic Jeeva reflects on growing up under Jaffna’s caste system and explains why, despite its many injustices, he still proudly calls himself a Jaffna man.

Writer Jean Arasanayagam reflects on her Burgher identity, her experience of 1983 — “the watershed” moment in her life— and what it’s like being married to a Jaffna man.

Helga de Silva grew up in the Kandyan family home that would later become Helga’s Folly — part residence, part performance, part “anti-hotel”. Born into a household shaped by politics and art, she transformed the space into a living canvas. For Helga, the house is not simply accommodation; it is therapy, theatre and a distinctly Sri Lankan domestic world offered to strangers.

Former parliamentarian and retired principal of Methodist Central College, Prince Casinader is also a correspondent. He reflects on his love for the singing fish of Batticaloa and the conflict between Muslim and Tamil communities.

Mrs Sarojini Kadirgamar learned to play bridge as a young girl during the curfews of the 1950s, watching the adults gathered around the card table. The game became a fixture of her social life, connecting friendships that stretched back decades. Born into a prominent Jaffna Tamil family and later living in Colombo, she reflects on the rhythms of a world once organised around clubs, tennis courts and evening games of bridge.

Esan has driven passengers around Jaffna in his Morris Oxford for nearly twenty years. During the years of embargo and fuel scarcity, when many vehicles stood idle, his car remained on the road.After the mass displacement in 1995, he left Jaffna and returned in 2006. On his return, he found that few vehicles could run on the available fuel. The Morris could be adapted.

Sri Naguleswaram Kurrukkal, chief priest of the historic Naguleswaram temple at Keerimalai, reflects on the temple’s great festivals, the devastation of the surrounding area during the war, and the gradual return of pilgrims in recent years.

T. Arasanayagam, poet and English teacher, spoke about his childhood in Jaffna and his first encounter with what he later called “the other.” As a schoolboy he described crossing village boundaries — sometimes literally crawling under fences — before discovering that certain roads were not meant for him.He recalled a friendship with a boy named David that was quietly disrupted by the recognition of difference.

Retired schoolteacher D. S. Amarasekara reflects on the history of his village, Baddegama. Drawing on stories passed down by elders, temple traditions and fragments from the Mahavamsa, he traces how the village’s name and identity evolved over centuries — from the rice-producing lands of Sahalgamuwa to a tax-paying settlement under Dutch rule.

Mrs. Haniah Sultanbawa did not “just carry on” and “get married to somebody” like other young Muslim girls of her time even though she was brought up to do so. In 1960, she became the first Muslim woman from the Southern Province to graduate from a university.

Dr Sivarajah is an expert in community medicine and a lecturer at the University of Jaffna. He reflects on the last thirty years of living in Jaffna and how the challenges keep him on the peninsula.

Sister Pushpam Gnanapragasam reflects on Jaffna identity, the arrival of French missionaries in the nineteenth century, and the role Catholic nuns played during the final months of the war.

Parakrama Dahanayake reflects on growing up in the political shadow of his uncle, former Prime Minister Wijeyananda Dahanayake. Having served for years as his uncle’s private secretary, he recalls a life shaped by politics and explains why he eventually decided to enter public life himself.

C.K. Sankarakumaran stepped into the shoes of his father and grandfather as a guarantee shroff, a kind of banker. He reflects on his two homes of Kandy and Jaffna.

Poet and teacher Somasundramoorthy Pathmanathan — known as “Sopa” — remembers a time when the baker in Jaffna was Sinhalese and the tailor was Muslim. He reflects on how war reshaped everyday life in the peninsula.

Retired school principal S. Thoradeniya reflects on a lifelong love of reading and a long-held ambition to translate the novel that first captured his imagination as a schoolboy — Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Encouraged by a Belgian missionary teacher at Ampitiya College during the difficult years of the Second World War, books opened a world beyond the classroom and helped shape his life as a teacher and educator.

Dushyanthi Nugawela Wijeyawardena reflects on growing up in a household where her father was Buddhist and her mother Christian. Rather than choose for her, her parents encouraged their daughters to respect both traditions and make their own decisions about faith.

Lejmal Hussein reflects on the vicissitudes of working as a migrant labourer in Saudi Arabia for nineteen years, away from his family.

Mohammed Hussein Ismail, known to everyone in Galle Fort as “Major Hussein”, is believed to be the oldest man living in Galle Fort. He recalls the years he spent working in Trincomalee after the Second World War and the British soldiers who became his customers.

Jaffna’s Catholic bishop, Rt. Rev. Dr. Thomas Saundaranayagam, reflects on a time when the north and south of Sri Lanka were closely connected — through shared schools, travel and worship. He speaks about the ruptures that followed, and the role of the Church in advocating for truth and reconciliation.

A member of Negombo’s Bharatha community, Selvam Croos Moraes reflects on discovering an archival photograph of the Donoughmore Commission in which his father appears as a member of staff. He speaks about his distinctive community and the challenges he faced in getting the photograph recognised as part of Sri Lankan history.

Seventy-five year old Batticaloan Annaviyar Arasaratnam is a koothu master. Hailing from Karavetti, he knows over twenty different koothus. He talks about the history and different styles of this ancient art form and his struggle to keep this traditional Tamil theatre alive today.

“But Dutch Bar is the best,” Margaret Ootschorn repeats. At ninety-two, she is among the oldest members of the Portuguese Burgher community in Batticaloa. Displaced after the 2004 tsunami, she now lives in Thiraimadu, a resettlement village built for her community. Though she has moved many times in her life, it is Dutch Bar she still calls home.

Veteran journalist ”Kala Keerthi” Edwin Ariyadasa looks back on 64 years with Lake House as a reporter and editor, working on both Sinhala and English publications. He talks about his voracious appetite for books as a child, and his career as a journalist.

Sri Lanka’s legendary filmmaker Lester James Peries reflects on his early life in cinema, his mentor Lionel Wendt, and the films that launched his career. The interview features excerpts from his film Rekava (1956) and The Song of Ceylon (1934), directed by Basil Wright.

“Prior to that, there were no Bohras in Sri Lanka,” Inayet Akbarally begins, recounting a story told each year at community sermons. Around two hundred years ago, famine struck Kutch Mandvi in Gujarat. During a trading voyage carrying dried Maldivian fish, his great grandfather Careemjee Jafferjee was forced by storm to divert his vessel and land in Galle. That unintended arrival, around 1830, marked the first Dawoodi Bohra settlement in Ceylon.

Chandra Schaffter opened the bowling for Ceylon against England in 1954. He recalls a period when club cricket in Sri Lanka was organised almost entirely along communal lines: Sinhalese, Tamil, Moor, Burgher, Malay, Parsi, Bohra. Membership was often restricted to those of a particular community. Yet he remembers these divisions not as sites of hostility but as the basis for what he describes as “the friendliest rivalry that one could see.

One hundred-year-old Jesuit priest Father Vito Perniola came to Ceylon from Italy in 1936 and has lived here ever since. Granted Sri Lankan citizenship in 1970, he devoted his life to the study of Buddhist texts. As a linguist, he learned both Pali and Sanskrit and went on to teach Pali to Buddhist monks and nuns.

Judge Christopher Weeramantry is a former judge of the International Court of Justice and the senior-most retired judge in Sri Lanka. His campaign against nuclear weapons proliferation is famously captured in a dissenting judgement during his tenure at the ICJ, as well for respecting the environment. Taking inspiration from his elders and borrowing from the wisdom of world religions, the judge has been spreading his message of peace for decades.

Byron Unmani was an elder in the Veddah community of Vaharai. Displaced several times, they had to adapt to their new environment, and were now fishermen, living off the sea when they once lived off the forest, hence their name, the ‘Sea Veddahs’.  He talks about the loss of the native language of the community of Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants or Wanniyala-a-Aetto literally 'forest-dwellers' as they call themselves.

Sam Wijesinha has had several careers from criminal lawyer to Chancellor of The Open University. As President of the Prisoners’ Welfare Association, he focused on reforms to better the lives of prisoners and their families. His commitment to education extended not only to helping his poor relatives but the children of junior staff when Secretary General of Parliament.

At eighty-three, Mrs Subramanium continues to work as the personal assistant to the head of Uthayan, one of Jaffna’s most widely read newspapers. While her sisters emigrated to London and Canada as conflict intensified, she chose to remain. Despite constant invitations to join her family abroad, she refuses to leave Jaffna, her work, or the life she has shaped around what she calls simplicity.