Some stories don’t begin with the business you build; they begin with the life that shaped you.
For the three of us, my brother, my sister and me, our story started on the estates long before we ever understood the weight our parents carried.
Dad began working at sixteen. He lost his own father early in life, and that loss changed the course of everything that came after. Responsibility arrived long before youth had a chance to settle, and earning became a necessity rather than a choice.
Mum grew up in Badulla, protected and cared for, almost cocooned. Marriage took her into a very different reality, one ruled by hard work, reinvention and the relentless responsibility of raising three children with more determination than resources.
When we moved to Colombo, everything changed.
Life tightened.
Cash thinned.
The world demanded more than they were prepared for.
But they found a way.
Every single time.
Dad built his life in production, shaped by discipline, necessity and the quiet strength of someone who had been carrying the world far longer than most.
Mum carved her space in beauty, with gentleness, instinct and a grace that softened the rough edges of life.
Two completely different worlds, but both rooted in grit and a quiet kind of love that shows up before sunrise and long after exhaustion settles in.
They worked late nights, early mornings and every moment in between, not to give us luxury but to give us enough. Enough to stand, enough to dream, enough to have a life that stretched wider than theirs did.
They both passed nine years ago. Mum in her early sixties, Dad in his late sixties. Cancer took them far earlier than we ever imagined. And yet, their resilience, their reinvention and their quiet courage live in each of us.
We each carried it forward in our own way.
My brother grew into a storyteller, someone who sees the world through narrative, creativity and perspective.
I stepped into technology, into data, strategy and transformation, with creative spurts woven in along the way.
And my sister, who began her journey in production like Dad, slowly found her way into beauty, echoing the gentler parts of Mum.
And that is where Zoya enters our story.
Not as a business.
Not as a salon.
But as my sister’s renewal.
After three decades of running at full speed in apparel, the deadlines, the pressure, the constant intensity, she did something most people only talk about.
She stopped.
She breathed.
And she chose to build something softer.
Zoya is her way of reclaiming a life that once belonged to noise and urgency.
It is the merging of everything she has lived. Dad’s discipline, Mum’s instinct for beauty and her own quiet courage to begin again.
For me, watching her build this place feels like watching a circle complete itself. A gentler continuation of what our parents began, but with the softness they never had time to enjoy.
Zoya is her renewed purpose.
And a reminder to every woman that it is never too late to rewrite your own story, to create a life that finally holds you instead of draining you.
Sometimes renewal does not arrive with fanfare.
Sometimes it comes as a quiet room, a new beginning, a softer chapter.
Sometimes it comes as a reminder that the story you inherited can still evolve into the story you choose.
And to Nangie, congratulations.
You have built something beautiful, intentional and deeply meaningful.
I am so proud of you, not just for creating Zoya but for choosing yourself, for beginning again and for showing all of us what quiet courage really looks like.
