Christobel Weerasinghe née Kotalawela was born on the day her father became a member of the Legislative Council. It was the beginning of the 1920s and the life she inherited was one of extraordinary privilege – her family could trace their genealogy back to the kings of Kotte and in the present her father, Sir Henry Kotalawela had broken all records with 26 consecutive years as a member of the Legislative and State Council.

I was never a believer in the existence of ghosts. While I was quite prepared to grant possible spiritual existence after physical death to living beings like man and even animals, I was not prepared to grant even the remotest possibility of such spiritual existence to inanimate objects like clothes, shawls and hats.