From the memoir: As a native and tourist, an economist travels through Sri Lanka’s past and present

I was born on January 27, 1965, in a small nursing home in southern Colombo. I was taken straight from the hospital to a new family home on Hindu College Square, Ratmalana, almost opposite the Ponds factory Daddy managed.

This was home for my first five years. It was a plain three-bedroom bungalow with a small patch of lawn in front, ringed by a low parapet wall, at the non-factory end of the square in what was then a quiet, leafy, spacious little town. Ratmalana is not far from Colombo as the crow flies, but back then it felt like a distant outpost. Before urban settlement, Ratmalana had been full of coconut estates. In my childhood it still had vast patches of green – paddy fields and fruit and vegetable orchards, punctuated by “shanties” wattle-and-daub huts where the local poor lived. Not far away was Ratmalana airport, Ceylon’s first airport, and its international airport until 1967. I cannot recall hearing any noise from that direction. All it had was a small, twee art deco terminal, a short, narrow runway, and a clubhouse behind the terminal where Daddy sometimes met his friends for evening drinks.

I have faint memories of my first home…

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