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.
Linga lived to see the house completed in 1996, but not for long. Soon after she moved into it with her daughter and grandson, she got sick and died. The house is still standing, however, and still occupied by her family – including her grandson: the acclaimed playwright S Shakthidharan, or Shakthi, as he is known among friends and colleagues.
It is Shakthi, who lives there with his mum, wife and children, who is now telling the improbable story of the house and his grandmother, or thathamma: “a force of nature and bigger than life itself,” he says, and one of his favourite people.
If Linga had any fear about dismantling her house and family and relocating them overseas, “she hid it very well,” Shakthi says. “But also I believe she was thinking into the future. And she knew that if she went through the pain of dismembering and re-membering this house, I would be caught in a guilt trap” – here he laughs – “where I would have to inherit the pain she was going through in that act, to keep it safe and alive for future generations.”
This is indeed what happened. And the story of that reckoning – painful, transformative and ultimately rewarding – forms the backbone of Shakthi’s new memoir, Gather Up Your World In One Long Breath.
It’s not the first time Shakthi has used art to share his personal history: his extraordinary 2019 play Counting and Cracking parlayed the story of his family and 20th-century Sri Lanka into an epic, emotional drama that captured audiences around the world, and won a swag of awards, including seven Helpmanns and the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature.
His next plays, 2022’s The Jungle and The Sea and 2025’s The Wrong Gods, moved further afield, tackling chapters in Sri Lankan and Indian history respectively. With Gather Up Your World In One Long Breath, he returns closer to home to deal with unfinished business.
The family’s improbably resilient, continent-hopping house is a symbol of a democratic and social dream that was shattered seemingly overnight in July 1983, and later reforged in Australia. It was a place of belonging for a single mother and her son as they tried to make a new life in an unfamiliar and often unwelcoming country.
But the house was also a trap: a place where the mother and son fought; a place Shakthi came to see as “a kind of prison”; and a sinkhole of debt that became an almost impossible financial burden for his mother, Anandavalli, a Bharatanatyam dancer, choreographer and teacher.
It was the prospect of losing the house that eventually forced Shakthi back in his late 20s, after almost a decade carving out his own life and a promising career in the arts, so that he could help his mum pay off the debt. His girlfriend, who would become his wife, followed.
Returning to the house was a major turning point in his life that he describes now as “the best and the worst thing at the same time”. It also coincided with his realisation – after years of helping others tell their stories – that his own family history was “a great mystery that was important to my whole community, that they all knew about in detail, and I didn’t know”.
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In 2010 Shakthi returned to the homeland he left as a baby, where he met an uncle who gave him a box of letters that unlocked the story of his great-grandfather, C Suntharalingam, an Oxford-educated mathematician who became a prominent politician in post-independence Sri Lanka. Suntharalingam spent decades fighting for his vision of a harmonious multicultural and democratic society, only to see the dream disintegrate under a majority-Sinhalese government. In his later years, he propagated a different dream: a separate homeland for the country’s Tamil minority; a dream that the Tamil Tigers then decided to pursue militantly. “My great-grandfather would have respected their goals but abhorred their use of violence, especially against civilians, both Tamil and Singhalese,” Shakthi says.
After moving home, Shakthi also discovered that his father, who had dropped out of his life when he was a teen, had been living a lonely life in a tiny granny flat in a neighbouring suburb. The two tentatively reconnected, slowly establishing a new relationship. Three years later, Shakthi’s father was diagnosed with an intractable type of Parkinson’s, and the son found himself transitioning into a primary carer role with someone who was more than an acquaintance – but not quite a dad.
It was in the difficult months preceding his father’s death in May 2023 that Shakthi began writing his memoir. The spur was a particularly bad day between Christmas and New Year. He was fielding calls from his father’s hospital, arguing with his mum over a computer issue and trying to toilet-train his younger son while the older one was having a Meccano-related meltdown. The house was a mess. He and his wife were slipping into arguments too easily. “It was feeling like too much,” he says. “[But] this weird thing was happening, where I was also feeling this very quiet joy or deep contentment. And I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.”
Eventually, he came to a realisation: “I’d never really understood what it meant to be in a family … That contentment was the joy of finally being inside a family – that I’d made with my wife. And that felt like something I wanted to understand properly and deeply.”
Writing became his way of doing that, and the resulting memoir is configured as a series of intimate, frank conversations with the key people in his life – and the house itself, which he addresses as if it were a “living, breathing being”.
“We are our relationships – not only with the people we love, but with the place that we feel we most belong to,” he tells me.
Through writing the book he came to fully understand this. The process also helped heal his relationship with his mum and – in a different way – with his dad.
And what of the house? “Look, if nothing else, I’ve been a very good Sri Lankan Tamil parent, because this book is probably the best guilt trip ever for at least one of my sons to become the next custodian of this house,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t mean it as a piece of well-tailored emotional manipulation. But it’s worth its weight in gold, just for that.”