Thisuri Wanniarachchi won the State Literary Award for Best English Novel at just 16 with her first book ‘Colombo Streets’. Her new book ‘The Department of Chosen Ones’ is an eye-opening insider’s account of how power truly operates inside the Sri Lankan state set against Sri Lanka’s recent political upheavals.

Published by Vijitha Yapa Publications, the book traces Thisuri’s journey from a childhood shaped by war and ambition to the centre of government, where she served in the Presidential Secretariat as Assistant Director of Sustainable Development – the youngest member of Maithripala Sirisena’s executive staff.

The book follows her resignation during the 2018 constitutional coup and her subsequent role leading Harsha de Silva’s team of analysts at the Ministry of Economic Reforms. Along the way, the memoir features encounters with key political figures including Ranil Wickremesinghe, Mangala Samaraweera, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and senior bureaucrats such as Austin Fernando.

It also incorporates the findings of Thisuri’s PhD research on the impact of political patronage on Sri Lanka’s public sector, asking what it means to grow into one’s convictions in systems where survival so often depends on being chosen.

The following are extracts from Chapter 2:

After my conversation with the President, I walked back out as calmly as I could, my heart racing at the thought of what had just happened. The sunset cast a mesmerizing pink hue over the building. As the car drove away from the snipers and barricades of the Presidential Secretariat into the busy, traffic-choked Colombo, I rested my head on the window and fell deep into thought……………..

Nearly a century ago, my maternal grandfather, a teenager then, got off a bus from Galle and found himself a job as a helper at one of the apparel shops in the Pettah market. He went on to own one of those shops and build himself a suburban mansion in which my mother and her four siblings grew up. His was the Sri Lankan dream, if there ever was one.

My story was a little different. I was born in Colombo, in 1993, at the height of Sri Lanka’s civil war: a time when the country was tearing at its seams, when headlines were soaked in blood and curfews marked the rhythm of our days. But in the house I was born into, chaos wasn’t just in the newspapers. It lived with us.

My earliest memories aren’t of lullabies or bedtime stories, but of polished boots, the clang of metal, and military jeeps crunching over gravel just outside our window. We lived in military housing in an area called Panagoda, tucked behind the illusion of normalcy, but always in the shadow of war. My father, a military officer, was stationed out in some of the most dangerous parts of the country

— first in the East, then in the North — posted away from us for weeks on end.

I was barely three months old when he was transferred out of Colombo to the war zone. He would be gone for weeks, sometimes longer, and every time he left, we worried it might be the last time we saw him. I was too little to understand what war really meant, but I knew what fear felt like, especially when the phone rang. There was always a moment of stillness when it did. A moment where everything paused, until we knew whether it was just a regular call or the kind of news that broke everything. I cannot stand the sound of landlines to this day.

Growing up in military housing was like living on the front porch of a storm that never fully passed. The air always carried the scent of iron and dust, and behind every laugh, every shared meal, there was a quiet readiness — a knowledge that tomorrow could rearrange everything. The jeeps would come like thunderclouds. You could hear them before you saw them — a low, trembling hum in the distance that made your stomach drop before your mind even understood why. They pulled up slowly, like they carried the weight of something too heavy for one man to bear alone. Mothers stood frozen at the doorways, hands gripping railings or the sides of their skirts, bracing for news that could tear holes through families.

We went to more funerals than birthday parties. Even at celebrations, white clothes outnumbered balloons; wails drowned out the sound of children’s laughter. We learned to be careful with hope— to hold it lightly, like a matchstick in a hurricane. Grief was not a stranger in our neighborhood; it was the neighbor. It sat on porches in the evenings, smoking cigarettes and staring into the dark.

Still, somehow, there was love. Fierce, stubborn love. The kind that stitched itself together out of what was left — the shared glances, the whispered jokes, the heavy hands on small shoulders saying without words: you are not alone. But who were we kidding?

We were alone. No one was coming to save us. Just two little kids and a wife, hoping for the best, through funeral after funeral.

One day, a neighborhood boy we played with asked my brother when our dad would be coming home in a box. It hit him like a hammer to the head. He walked home quietly and told us — and it was like a thousand hammers falling all at once.

Eventually, my parents decided we couldn’t live like that anymore. They had taken out a loan and begun building a modest home in the suburbs of Colombo. It wasn’t finished, but they moved us in anyway. The paint was still drying, and the cement smelled raw. But it was ours. And it felt safe — safer, at least. The day we moved in, my brother said it was the happiest day of his life. I didn’t say much, just chuckled away for days. Our home. There were no more jeeps pulling up. No more goodbyes at the door. Just the sound of my brother and me playing in the garden, the hum of a quiet neighborhood, the relief of routine. That half-built home became our sanctuary. It was the first time I could just be a child. And even though the war raged on outside, we had carved out though the war raged on outside, we had carved out a small pocket of peace.

Still, the war followed us. The sounds of jeeps pulling up and boots pounding the ground had faded, but the threat never truly left. My brother’s school baseball team — eight boys — was blown up in pieces in a bombing at the train station. The news was always filled with grim stories: buses torn open by explosives, families vanishing without a trace. At school, we practiced evacuation drills, learned how to crouch beneath our desks, how to run for our lives if the worst came.

Over time, we became desensitized. Civilians were dying in front of us — women, children, families. On the news, the war was simplified into numbers. Soldiers fallen. Terrorists killed. The reporting turned tragedy into arithmetic. But what we saw wasn’t numbers. We saw children being targeted. Whole neighborhoods wiped out. The media told us it was us versus them. That we were the victims. And for a long time, that was all we could believe. We didn’t realize — or maybe we didn’t let ourselves realize — that there was suffering on the other side too. Children dying. Families grieving. Villages burning.

When my father came home on his breaks, it was like the world lit up again. For those few days, we would block out the world. He was our whole world. He poured all his energy into us. We’d laugh, play, stay up too late. And when I finally fell asleep, I would sleep better than I had all month. Euphoria. A utopia. But when it was time for him to leave, it broke me. I’d cry and cry, refusing to let go.

Eventually, it became too painful for him too. So he started leaving in the dead of night —3 or 4 a.m.— before we were awake. I’d wake up and search the house for him, even under the furniture, convinced he must be hiding somewhere. Eventually, the tears dried, and we began the wait for the next time he would come home. That was my childhood. A kind of waiting.

Growing up, my father’s monthly return from the war zone was the most joyful part of my life. While my mother worked a full-time job and my father was often away, my brother and I spent many afternoons with our grandmother. She was a southern woman who cooked like one — rich, flavorful meals that I still crave to this day.

But she didn’t just feed us; she saw us. She was one of the few people who could tell — without needing to be told — just how much my brother and I struggled with our dad being away. She knew the rhythm of our sadness. The days of the week, the weeks of the month he was gone — they showed up on our faces like a calendar only she could read. Some days I’d be glowing, unable to contain myself. “Guess who’s coming home?” I’d yell, running to her, breathless. And my grandmother would get on her knees, cradle my face in her palms with tears in her eyes, and tell me she never needed to be told when he was coming home — she could see it on my face………………..

The end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in May 2009 marked the close of the brutal, nearly three-decade-long war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist militant organization that had waged war for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east of the country.

The final months of the war were devastating, with intense fighting concentrated in the northeastern region and a massive civilian toll, especially among those trapped in no-fire zones. When the government declared victory, the country stood both relieved and shattered—grappling with deep trauma, ethnic distrust, and the haunting legacy of wartime abuses. The guns had fallen silent, but reconciliation, accountability, and healing remained elusive goals in the fragile post-war landscape. But for me, all that mattered was that it ended. My father was alive, and my family was safe. We had made it through. In that moment, victory didn’t look like flags or parades; it looked like no more coffins. It looked like my mother’s shoulders relaxing for the first time in years. It looked like sleep without fear. Victory.

For me, the war was my villain origin story. It was why I got into public service. Why I wanted to protect what we had. Why I felt I owed a debt to those who died so that my family could live. I wanted to turn this graveyard—its fertile, blood-soaked soil—into something that could bear fruit for all. To build something better out of what had been broken.

On that pink-skied evening, as I left the President’s office and the car drew closer to home, that familiar feeling from my childhood sprang inside me: extremely scared, yet incredibly happy. I had just quit on a President who was on the verge of becoming a dictator……

Working for a President whose credibility was deteriorating every day, I was carrying a weight on my conscience. I was carrying it with me everywhere, even home. Working for him, going home didn’t feel like going home; it felt like I was constantly working, even when I wasn’t. I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t sleep. Looking in the mirror, I felt complicit in an ugly problem that was hurting the country more than it helped. But that day, I felt that weight off my conscience. I knew that I was going to sleep well that night.

This time I was really going home. It felt good; I had done the right thing. I had proven to myself who I really am. Outside, the pink sky was turning a dark blue, but leaning my head on the car window, I couldn’t help smiling. I felt like that child again, running to my grandmother’s open arms, my six-year-old voice chuckling in happiness.

Guess who’s coming home.

(The Department of Chosen Ones is priced at Rs. 4,000 and available at Vijitha Yapa bookshops)

 

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