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The Photograph

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The Photograph Denzil Jayasinghe 2 min read · Just now It was in my fourteenth year, during one of those long, warm afternoons when time seemed to stretch out like a sleeping cat, that I found myself at my uncle Mahappa’s house. Out on the front porch sat my grandmother, Kadayamma, presiding over her world as she always did. She kept a small boutique there — a modest wooden shelf lined with jars of boiled sweets, soap cakes, and small everyday trinkets — and spent her hours pleasantly chatting with the neighbours who dropped by to buy a copper’s worth of goods. Seeing me standing there in the heat, she turned to her little store, reached inside, and popped open a cold bottle of Orange Barley. Without a word, she poured out a full, overflowing glass and handed it to me. Back home, such a treat was a rare and precious thing. We children were only ever given tiny, cautious portions, usually whatever small splash was left at the bottom of a bottle after a visitor had finished their drink a...
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Thilak, the boy from Galle

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  Thilak, the boy from Galle Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 4 days ago It was in the quiet, dust-specked days of 1973 that I first met Thilak Pathirana. I was eighteen then, the youngest lad in our batch at the apprentice school for overseas telegraphy. In those times, long before the world began rushing through invisible wires and fast internet, we were learning the gentle, deliberate art of tapping out messages to far-off places. I had come straight out of a Colombo Christian school, proper and perhaps a little too neat around the edges. Thilak was quite different. Fresh from Mahinda College down in Galle, he possessed a raw, restless energy. He spoke quickly, with a brutal, unpolished honesty that took me by surprise, his broad smile infectious and he lodged in a modest boarding house in Nugegoda. During our quiet moments, he would sit and narrate the endlessly colourful goings-on of that place, turning the ordinary routine of landladies and fellow boarders into small, lively dr...
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The Name’s Bhupathi — Mr Bhupathi

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The Name’s Bhupathi — Mr Bhupathi Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read · 8 hours ago T he other day, Abdul Lathief wrote a short note about Bhupathi and Arun Diaz, both of whom had served at the Chartered Bank in Dubai in the late seventies and early eighties. It brought back memories of my own younger days there — days when Dubai was still a quiet trading town, and the bank occupied a corner of my life as permanent as the sea. The first Indian officer sent to us from the Chartered Bank in Madras was a Mr Srinivasan. This must have been the mid-to-late seventies, when the bank had few British officers capable of dealing with the Indian traders who formed the heart of Dubai’s foreign-trade business — the bills, the letters of credit, the guarantees that kept the old dhows, and their modern successors, busy. When I joined the bank, Srinivasan — whose first name, I confess, has escaped me — was already there. A short, dark man in his thirties, with a pleasant, unassuming manner. He wore bright, b...
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