Denzil's Stories

  Standard Chartered Days A Memoir Denzil Jayasinghe 11 min read · 1 day ago I. Arrival Ten dollars. Hidden in my back pocket, folded small, as if the note itself knew it shouldn’t be there. Ceylon had banned taking money out altogether — not restricted, banned — and so I left with what the law allowed, which was nothing, and what a young man’s nerve allowed, which was ten dollars and the good sense to say nothing about it. I arrived in Dubai in the seventies with that small secret and a confidence stitched together from optimism and necessity. Ceylon was behind me — socialist, a little weary, newly calling itself Sri Lanka, though the new name sat uneasily for a while, like a jacket bought a size too large. The Gulf was something else entirely. Wide and hot and strangely impersonal, the way only places full of strangers can be. But underneath all that heat and indifference, possibility hummed quietly, the way it does in places that have not yet decided what they will become. The b...