A Family’s Pharmacopoeia
A Family’s Pharmacopoeia
Long before we learn to question the things we are given, we absorb the world through the quiet routines of our elders. Every household carries its own unspoken theology of healing — a patchwork of faith, habit, and panic passed down from one generation to the next. In our home, that theology was divided cleanly down the middle: on one side sat the ancient, earthy traditions of my grandmother, and on the other, the crisp, modern certainty of my father’s preferred doctors.
It is curious, the things we inherit and the things we quietly set aside. I have never believed in the indigenous treatments of my island — not the boiled roots, not the bitter concoctions, not the ancient alchemy of bark and belief. That scepticism was my own, though I cannot say where it began.
It was certainly not from Kadayamma.
My paternal grandmother was sixty years old when I entered the world, already anchored in a rhythm of life that modern pharmaceuticals had never penetrated. She swore only by ayurveda. Her doctor — a man in a crisp white shirt and a tucked sarong, his teeth stained the reddish-brown of perpetual betel — operated just two short bus stops from our home. I would sit beside her in his dim practice, quiet and wide-eyed, listening to the soft murmur of their voices as he prescribed combinations of herbs, spices, minerals, and dark oils I could not name.
Afterward, we would walk to the ayurveda shop in Kiribathgoda. I remember watching the shopkeeper weigh out dry bark and pungent powders, wrapping each portion into neat little parcels of old newspaper before placing them in her waiting hands. Those parcels held a world I did not understand, a world she trusted completely.
The divide in our household was sharp, though it was never spoken aloud. Kadayamma’s second son — my father — could not have been more different. He had no faith in local remedies. His trust lay entirely in Western medicine, or “English medicine,” as we called it then. If a doctor did not prescribe colourful capsules, bitter mixtures in glass bottles, or a round tablet wrapped in foil, my father was hardly convinced it was medicine at all.
Between my grandmother’s dark oils and my father’s clinical bottles, I grew up somewhere in the middle, mostly shielded from the traditional brews. The only local remedy that ever touched my lips as a child was a warm, earthy coriander brew, administered whenever a cold took hold of me.
Even then, the lines blurred. I still remember those feverish afternoons when I was made to sit over a steaming pot, a heavy white bedsheet draped over my head to trap the thick vapour. Sitting there in the dark, breathing in the scalding air while sweat ran down my face, I never quite knew where one world ended and the other began — whether that steam was an ancient ayurvedic ritual or simply a practical English remedy passed down through the house, nameless and unclaimed.
Yet long before I was old enough to make sense of doctors or remedies, Western medicine had already claimed its place in my life. As a two-year-old, I contracted whooping cough — a deadly illness in those days. I remember nothing of that ordeal, but it left a deep mark on my mother. Her anxiety was boundless until I finally pulled through. She viewed my survival as nothing short of a miracle, and she never let me forget it. The doctor who treated me gained her complete, unwavering trust, and from that day forward, he held a permanent place as our family doctor.
Two years later, when I was four, I was admitted to Lady Ridgeway Children’s Hospital in Colombo for a hydrocele operation. My mother never left my side. She slept on a narrow hospital bed near mine through the entire four-day stay. Despite the clinical surroundings, my memories of that time are surprisingly warm. The nurses were gentle, and my grandfather Lewis visited frequently, sitting on the edge of my bed to weave grand, imaginative stories that made me forget, for a little while, where I was.
When the time came to leave, it was my grandfather who carried me out to his car. Returning home brought its own peculiar trial — for days, while the incision healed, I was not allowed to wear pants. To my four-year-old self, that restriction felt endlessly embarrassing, a small humiliation I carried with the gravity only a child can muster.
Decades have passed since then. All that remains of that hospital stay is a tiny, faded scar — and the quiet realisation of how deeply our early lives are shaped by the care, the beliefs, and the gentle rituals of those who came before us. We do not choose the medicine we are born into. We inherit it, along with everything else, and spend the rest of our lives deciding what to keep.
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