Every family has its myths. Mine was about a name — a long one, the kind that still carries weight when older relatives say it slowly, on purpose. Somewhere back in my line was an ancestor who administered seventy-two villages stretching from Kotte to Rambukkana. There was a Catholic branch of the family tree once, until my grandfather converted to Buddhism after marrying my grandmother. And there was my grandfather himself — a man who held a patent for a gear transmission design, later bought by someone in the United States. He was, by every account I grew up hearing, an extraordinary man.
He was also, by every account, rich in the way that doesn't last. Plenty of cars in the household — one or many for each child, and for himself. Motorbikes too. My father became a motocross racer; one of his brothers raced in MotoGP. It was a house full of engines and speed and the confidence that comes from never having had to ask whether you could afford something.
Then it wasn't there anymore.
My father's generation had the memory of that wealth but not the education to rebuild it, and not, it turned out, the discipline to hold onto what was left. By the time I was a child, the cars were gone. My father told me once, almost in passing, that he'd had his own car at thirteen. I didn't get a motorbike until I was an adult. We took the bus. We took whatever came.
There were days without food. Days I went to school without the money for books. And underneath all of it, still, this inherited pride — the sense that we were supposed to be more than what our daily life looked like, that the name meant something even when the bank account didn't.
My father went to work in the Middle East when I was young, chasing the story he told himself and told us: that he couldn't save money in Sri Lanka, that going abroad was the only way to give us something better. I believed that story for a long time. I don't fully believe it anymore — money went to his friends, his close people, and, I'd later understand, to a life I wasn't supposed to know about. But somewhere in the middle of all that mismanagement, he planted one thing in me that never got spent: the idea that I should study outside Sri Lanka. He told me this when I was eleven. I don't think I ever put it down again.
I stopped orienting myself around Sri Lankan universities. I wasn't rebelling against them — I just genuinely couldn't see myself there. My whole compass pointed outward, even when I had no way of knowing whether the needle was right.
When I finished school, my father told me plainly: he didn't have the money to send me abroad. It was the same promise, broken the same way it had always been broken. But the dream didn't die with the money. It just went quiet for a while.
From nineteen to twenty-nine, I worked. Insurance sales, teaching, tutoring, software engineering, odd jobs helping run exhibitions — whatever paid. Eventually the tutoring work found its footing. I got lucky with a run of good clients, prestigious ones, and I started saving in a way my family never had. I bought the first vehicle anyone in my immediate family had owned. And starting at twenty-five, I began applying to Germany, USA, Canada, Japan. Then Australia. Then Germany again. Rejection, mostly, for years.
It was my childhood best friend — who'd already made the move himself — who finally told me exactly how to do it, step by step, the way only someone who's already walked the path can. I applied the way he told me to. And I got in, to Saarland University.
Ten years after I finished high school, the dream my father planted at eleven — the one he could never actually afford to fund — became real anyway. Not because of the family name, and not because of the wealth that had already disappeared before I was old enough to spend a rupee of it, but because I kept working toward something that had stopped being his promise a long time ago and had become mine.
That's the honest answer to "why did you migrate to Germany." It was never really about Germany. It was about finally closing a distance that had opened up in my family two generations before I was born — between what we told ourselves we were, and what we'd actually managed to hold onto. I couldn't inherit the wealth. I could inherit the will to go get something on my own.
The cost had to be paid with my health for extremely working hard, but I don’t regret a bit of it.
When my friends asked me what is my dream, I said I’m already living in it. Studying abroad was the biggest dream I always had. I feel happy and content I made it my own.
The path was not easy but it was really worth it.
Dream big!
