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From Bioscope to Cinema

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From Bioscope to Cinema Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · Just now T here was a time — in my boyhood of the sixties — when films did not trouble themselves with realism. They existed elsewhere, in a dimension faintly superior to our own, and we entered the cinema as one might enter a shrine: subdued, expectant, prepared to be altered. The theatre was part of the enchantment. Fluorescent bulbs trembled in their sockets, unsure of their allegiance to light or darkness. A dusty shaft from the projector travelled across the hall and struck the lime-washed wall, its cracks and blisters briefly dignified, as though they marked territories on some ancient chart. We watched the beam as much as the screen; it was proof that something invisible had been set in motion. Before the main picture, a disembodied voice would rise — clipped, colonial, faintly paternal — recounting British football tournaments. It was an inheritance we had not chosen. The players, pale and grainy, ran across distant fields ...
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The Red Line

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The Red Line Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read · Just now On the 138 — that long, asthmatic contraption that objected audibly to every incline — it took nearly an hour to reach Duke Street. The bus did not so much travel as negotiate with the road. An hour is ample time for dread to mature properly. I would sit by the window and watch Colombo assembling itself for commerce — shutters lifting, tea kettles steaming, bicycles wobbling into purpose — while imagining the Instruments Room already awake and alert, its supervisors poised like minor deities awaiting sacrifice. My shifts began at 8 a.m., 2 p.m., or — with moral offence — 8 p.m. The 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift I avoided with quiet determination. I was not built for sanctity. I preferred being home early, sitting cross-legged with friends, discussing matters of enormous irrelevance before adulthood imposed its disciplines. Some men pursued rank. I pursued conversation. Most mornings I arrived precisely on time. Occasionally — catastrophical...
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Neither of Us Yielded

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  Neither of Us Yielded My Mother’s Independence Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 10 hours ago W hen my eldest turned sixteen, my father died. The two events remain fastened together in my memory — one life edging towards its own assertions, the other receding, almost apologetically, from the world. With my father’s passing, my mother was left alone in the old house — a house already thirty years lived in, its walls seasoned with routine and memory. She would not leave it. Independence, for her, was not merely temperament; it was identity. As the eldest, the obligation came to me without ceremony. There was no family conference, no formal entrustment. Such duties, in our families, are not negotiated. They descend — quietly, but with weight. And so began what I can only call a stealth existence. My days were claimed by work in Sydney; my evenings by four children whose lives were gathering pace — examinations, illnesses, ambitions, small crises magnified by youth. And threaded through...
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