In July 1983, as her home city of Colombo burned and her Tamil countrymen were being killed by their Sinhalese neighbours, Linga, a Sri Lankan grandmother, decided to dismantle her family’s home and send it out of the country to safety. The palatial house, which had been built by her father four decades earlier and had hosted Sri Lankans of different religions, ethnicities and classes, was dismembered and packed into containers. Eventually, the house was shipped to Sydney, where the family had landed in 1985, fleeing what had devolved into a full-blown civil war.
Soon after the house arrived, Linga’s husband died, and her family’s generational wealth evaporated – stolen by a man back in Sri Lanka whom she’d entrusted with managing it. Nevertheless, over the next decade, through force of will and irregularly scraped-together envelopes of cash, she ensured the family home was rebuilt – reconfigured as a “double-bricked Sri Lankan McMansion” – in Homebush.
