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.

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.

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.