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Elmo

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  Elmo There are some people who pass through our childhood without ever knowing how important they were to us. They may not have done anything extraordinary. They were simply there at the right time, when we needed them. Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · Just now E lmo was one of those people. There were days when the boarding school did not feel like a school. It felt like a place I had been sent to, and from which I had to find a way out. I missed home. Not only my mother and father. I missed the ordinary things that had seemed so unimportant when I was living among them. The noise of the house. My sister and brother. The children in the neighbourhood. The familiar voices. The smell of food coming from the kitchen. At home, life had no timetable. Nobody blew a whistle to tell me when to wake up, when to eat, when to study or when to sleep. You simply lived. I wanted that life back. Even if it was only for a weekend. The problem was that I was in a Christian brothers boarding school...
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The Year We Stopped Being Afraid

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  The Year We Stopped Being Afraid Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · Just now In 1965, I was ten years old and in Class 5A. This was St, Anthony’s College, run by Christian Brothers some seven kilometers north of Colombo, Sri Lanka, then Ceylon. Until then, our classrooms had belonged almost entirely to women. The teachers were familiar, gentle and predictable. Then came Mr Suraweera. He was a large, burly man with a short temper and a reputation that reached us before he did. Even as fourth-graders, we had begun to look towards the next year with a quiet dread. Children, however, have a remarkable ability to adjust to almost anything. We adjusted to Mr Suraweera. His punishments were swift and, to us, endless. Boys were made to stand or kneel for hours. His reprimands were often accompanied by words we had never heard from our teachers before. When his temper broke, a slap across the ear or a heavy blow on the head was not unusual. Anything within reach — a blackboard duster, a piece...
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