I often have a dream, inspired by a Buddhist Jataka story I was told as a child. In the dream, I am my mother and I run in panic through a landscape that resembles the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka, the soil sandy, the parched riverbed rutted; thorn bushes rip at my clothes, leaving bloody scratches on my body. In my arms, I carry an infant. I am being pursued by something fearsome and, looking back, I see that it is my grandmother, incarnated as the demoness Kali. Her face resembles one of those Sri Lankan devil masks: a snout of a nose, bulging red eyes, matted black hair, small tusks protruding from the corners of her mouth, pulled back in a hideous grin.

I am no match for my grandmother, who is fleet of foot, and she easily overcomes me and bars my way. I clutch my child to my chest, pleading, but I am helpless against my grandmother, who snatches the infant from my arms and opens her mouth wide to consume him.

For the first six years of my life, I did not know my grandmother because she and my mother had a falling out when my parents married. My mother was just eighteen years old when she met my father. He was twenty-five and a boarder in a neighbour’s house, having come to Colombo for a junior executive post at an insurance company. My grandmother opposed the marriage because my father was Christian and Tamil, my mother’s family Buddhist and Sinhalese. But perhaps she also sensed the great weakness in my father, even though he had a good position at the time, with a prestigious company.

My father might have been willing to back away, but my mother, who had inherited her will from my grandmother, had made up her mind. It was she who masterminded the elopement, arranging everything from the quick ceremony in a magistrate’s officeto their brief honeymoon in Kandy. By the time they returned to Colombo, my grandmother had disowned her daughter.