Veronique van der Griend was born in Amsterdam in the early 1950s. These were the post-war years, when the deeply compartmentalized Netherlands was faced with a large influx of repatriates from the Dutch East Indies. As a girl, Veronique felt the pressure her foreign mother endured to resist the prevailing prejudices in their environment. By raising the bar for her large family and passing on to her children the cultural values ​​she herself had been raised with, she could later look back with pride on her achievements. But Veronique continually struggled with an imposed identity that was alien to her, until 1974, when she made her first trip to Ceylon and met her distant relatives, whom she knew only from her mother's stories. Everything fell into place. Although little of the country's colonial past remains, Veronique feels at home there and faithfully visits every year.