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.

Writer Jean Arasanayagam reflects on Burgher identity, memory and belonging. She speaks about growing up in a cosmopolitan Burgher household, the convivial social world that shaped her early life, and how the violence of 1983, “the watershed” moment in her life, altered her sense of identity. Married to a Jaffna Tamil, she reflects on the layered histories, friendships and tensions that have shaped Sri Lanka’s communities.

Helga de Silva grew up in the Kandyan family home that later became Helga’s Folly. Part residence, part performance, part “anti-hotel”, she turned the house into a living canvas and a distinctly Sri Lankan domestic world shared with strangers.

Mallika Talwatte reflects on courtship in the 1940s and the social expectations surrounding marriage, and how she came to accept remaining single as her destiny.

V.S. Alagan, the Hindu keeper of a Catholic cemetery, reflects on his life among the graves and the burial customs of different faiths.

Samarakone Bandara performs poojas and other rituals at his devalaya in Kandy. He reflects on his life as a kapuwa, his years living in the forests of Sri Lanka, and the journey that eventually brought him back to Kandy.

Mrs Rasheed remembers the sudden death of her husband and the life she built afterwards, raising five children on her own. Nearly forty years later she still speaks of their marriage with devotion, saying that her greatest satisfaction was knowing she had been “a good wife”.

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.