Day 101 of Our Winter: While we were away in Thailand something rather special happened at the house in Minuwangoda. It was something that took decades.
This house has been sitting here since Jay sent money to have it built when he was working in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s. It was part of the land that Jay's dad got when the family moved to an older bungalow on the property in 1971. Of course, the land existed here before that.
Previously, we referred to the name of the house itself when writing the address. Sukitha was what Jay's dad called this replacement house. Prior to his land purchase, the old name, as it was owned by Christians, was known as Joseph's Villa. We have always written the nearest road in the address plus the house's individual name on government documents, even as recently as our online ETA visas for this trip.
However, we arrived back to a house that sits on a road that has a name! The road became concrete decades ago, although it can still look like dirt because it gets, well, dirty. And there surely are a lot more houses in the area which was mostly jungle when I first visited.
Suddenly, in 2026, the municipality managed to provide a proper name. Google Maps simply lists the house as being on "Unnamed Road". Apparently the new name has been taken from very old deeds in the area. Today. I'm sitting along Delgahalanda Mawatha. That translates to Breadfruit Tree Grove Ave.
The name predates the house by at least a century. Delgahalanda (Breadfruit Tree Grove) is a traditional land-parcel designation—a landa—likely established in the late 19th or early 20th century when the region was partitioned into smallholdings.
The legal anchor for such names was the Registration of Deeds Ordinance of 1927. The name would have been codified on the parchment in British Ceylon long before Jayantha sent those first Saudi riyals home to fund the build in 1985.
From that 1985 deed to the February 2026 signpost, it took exactly 41 years for the municipal bureaucracy to acknowledge the reality on the ground.
In Sri Lanka, the "Mawatha" (Avenue) suffix is the modern administrative layer, but Delgahalanda is the ancient botanical DNA of the plot. It is the transition from a topographical description to a formal coordinate.
The "legacy" was patient; the signpost was merely late.
