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In the days of the floppy disk

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In the Days of the Floppy Disk The Blinking Cursor Denzil Jayasinghe 7 min read · 1 day ago In those days, when computers still hummed like small, polite generators and the screens glowed a forgiving green, a lad could reinvent himself with nothing more than a borrowed machine and a stubborn curiosity. It was not thought of as reinvention then. There was only the knowledge that a program called   Typing Tutor   — TT.COM to those who spoke the secret language of MS‑DOS — existed, and that somewhere between those blinking cursors and clattering keys, a doorway to the bank might open. It was the late eighties sliding into the early nineties, that in‑between time when the world had not yet learned to hurry as it does now. Computers were still half‑mysterious things, usually belonging to better‑off cousins, big trading companies, or that one friend whose brother worked “in the US,” a phrase repeated with a mixture of envy and awe. MS‑DOS 3.1, perhaps 4.01 — no one was certain of th...
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Dalugama, After All These Years

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Dalugama, After All These Years Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · 2 days ago T here are places that do not leave a person, even when the person has long left them. Dalugama is one of those places for me. It remains not as it is now, but as it was then — unfinished, half-lit, already slipping into memory even as it was being lived. I remember it first as a geography of crossings: the Kelani River not far away, the Kandy Road cutting through like a scar that had become habit, the church standing with a certain patient authority, as if it had decided that everything else — shops, bicycles, gossip, schoolboys, even politics — would pass, but it would remain. The mornings were not marked by time so much as by movement. Schoolboys hurried in uneven groups, shoes half-laced, uniforms already creased before the day had properly begun. There was always someone calling out from a gate, someone else returning late, and the small negotiations of friendship being made in passing, as if life itself cou...
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Roots and Kerosene

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  Roots and Kerosene Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · 4 days ago I think I had an unusual upbringing, though at the time it seemed entirely ordinary. Childhood, after all, accepts its world without question. Only later do you realise that other people grew up differently, under brighter lights perhaps, or with less silence around them. We lived deep in a village in Sri Lanka, beyond what anyone would comfortably call semi-rural. The house belonged to my maternal grandfather. It stood on a large piece of land, one of the biggest properties on the road, though “road” dignified it somewhat — it was really a gravel track disappearing into coconut trees and scrubland. Our house sat a good hundred metres away from it, withdrawn from the world, as if modesty itself had designed the place. There was no electricity then. Not in our house, nor on the street. Evenings arrived quickly. Kerosene lamps were lit. Feet were washed before bed. Water came from the well, cold and metallic against the s...
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