Denzil's Stories

  A Church I No Longer Recognise Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 4 days ago It is forty-nine years since I left Dalugama, a small, drowsy village ten kilometres north of Colombo. In those days, even Colombo felt tentative — an unambitious town stretching no higher than a handful of buildings, the tallest barely seven storeys, as if the city itself was unsure how much space it was entitled to occupy. Life moved without insistence then. Days were shaped by habit, not hurry. Dalugama, despite its proximity to the capital, was unmistakably a village. The roads were narrow, some little more than gravel tracks, and traffic was sparse enough to be memorable. People cycled everywhere, though I never recall seeing a woman on a bicycle — one of those unspoken boundaries that passed unquestioned at the time. Places south of Colombo were thought refined, aspirational. Dalugama, by contrast, was considered neither urban nor particularly important. It existed quietly, without ambition. When I ret...

Walking Between Missed Connections Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read · Jan 29, 2026 1 O verseas travel brings familiar disruptions: missed connections, altered plans, routines undone. Yet it offers a freedom almost too much to handle: the permission to stop, linger without explanation, and move according to one’s own schedule. I have never found it tedious. Perhaps my mild compulsions help; walking steadies my mind and shapes thoughts that might otherwise drift. A morning walk through Independence Square in Colombo can be disorienting. The paths curve back on themselves, and walkers move in steady circuits, their purpose no longer entirely mine. Yet in their rhythms — faces set in effort, habit, quiet resolve — I catch a faint familiarity: the country I left behind fifty years ago, rehearsing its daily routines without me. I have visited Colombo six times in the past two years, a personal record. In my early years in Dubai, I travelled more frequently, returning every six months to see my p...

The Sound of Leaving What a thirty-minute cassette taught me about distance, family, and departure Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 3 days ago I am an immigrant. That fact feels settled now, almost administrative, but it did not begin that way. I left home when my mother was forty-two and my father forty-nine — ages that once seemed fixed and permanent, like furniture you assume will always remain in place. I was born in Sri Lanka at a time when the country described itself as socialist and behaved accordingly. There were queues for essentials, shortages that were explained with confidence and resolved with nothing, and an absence of anything recognisably Western. Life was orderly in theory, constrained in practice. Ideology was everywhere — spoken with conviction, endured with patience. My father believed in it, genuinely. He was a socialist and a civil servant of some standing, responsible for running the largest local government council outside Colombo. Authority was familiar to me fr...