A novel in Sinhala about labour migration and what it costs. The central figure is a woman driven by poverty to take domestic work in the Middle East, where she meets with repeated mistreatment, and who returns to Sri Lanka with her mental health broken. The book follows that trajectory rather than a single incident — the leaving, the work abroad, the coming home.
In his preface, Chandrasiri Kalubowila explains that the story was assembled from the accounts of a number of women he had met who had gone to the Middle East and come back. The novel is therefore not a single case history but a composite, drawn from several lives and shaped into one. That framing matters to how it reads: the events belong to the character, but the experience behind them is collective.
The publisher presents it as a book addressed to all readers rather than to women alone, on the grounds that conditions amounting to bonded labour in the Gulf remain a live issue for Sri Lankan households. Domestic work abroad has been one of the country's main sources of foreign income for decades, and the human side of that arrangement — what happens inside a household in another country, and what a worker brings home with her — is the territory this novel occupies.
Please note that the text is entirely in Sinhala. There is no English in the book, so it will suit readers of Sinhala, families keeping a Sinhala-language library abroad, and anyone studying contemporary Sri Lankan fiction in the original. It is published by M. D. Gunasena & Co. of Colombo, a long-established Sri Lankan house publishing in Sinhala and English.
- Author: Chandrasiri Kalubowila
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- ISBN: 9789552126109
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