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Cyril Ayya: The Shield of My Youth

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Cyril Ayya: The Shield of My Youth In the mid-seventies, Dalugama was a world of Afros, bell-bottoms, and reckless youth. Navigating that fragile threshold of manhood, I was green and vulnerable. But I had Cyril ayya . More than a mate, he became my shield — a protective, honourable force who stood between me and the world’s hidden dangers. Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · Just now M emory has a way of anchoring itself to specific faces, and for me, the seventies in the sleepy village of Dalugama will always look like Cyril Stanley. Dalugama was my ancestral hometown, a quiet enclave some ten kilometres from the bustling heart of Colombo. Back then, if you wanted to be noticed, you grew your hair into an Afro, flared your denim bell-bottoms, and walked with a certain rhythmic assurance. Cyril and his younger brother Edward had that down to an art. Cyril looked like a younger version of Smokey Robinson; Edward was a junior, darker Lionel Richie. They worked in the city’s only five-star e...
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The List

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The List Denzil Jayasinghe 20 hours ago The nearest thing I had to a plan was a list I made at seventeen. Not a career plan – I wouldn’t have known what to do with one of those. Just a few things I wanted, written down in no particular order. To write short stories. To speak English well – really well. To make films someday. To be an author. To be an artist. Press enter or click to view image in full size I remembered it again recently. It still makes me smile. There was no ambition in it, not really. No ladder to climb, no office to reach. Just a boy in a room somewhere, trying to put words to what he felt stirring inside him. I never did have a career. I’m not sure I missed it. Written by Denzil Jayasinghe
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Standard Chartered Days

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  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...
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