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The ties that bind

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The ties that bind Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · Just now A story about growing up in a Sri Lankan village where love, duty, and gender quietly decide who you are allowed to become.​ In it, I look back at my childhood with my sister and younger brother, and at how the same family — same house, same parents, same dinner table — could produce such different lives simply because one of us was the “good girl” and one the “wayward boy.” This piece is my attempt to untangle those early scripts: the protection wrapped around daughters, the careless freedom handed to sons, and the silent bargains parents made with culture, religion, and reputation. G rowing up in our small Sri Lankan village, my sister and I always felt as if we’d been written into two very different stories that just happened to share the same cover. The title said “family,” but inside, the chapters rarely matched. We shared a house, parents, and the same heavy air scented with curry leaves and woodsmoke, yet our plots ran o...
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A House on Dharug Country

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A House on Dharug Country Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 2 hours ago He has lived here six years now. The house stands in Western Sydney, on the traditional lands of the   Dharug people   — a country of rivers and ridgelines, of open woodland and sandstone patches that catch the late light and hold it for a moment before surrendering to dusk. The land feels older than the suburb, older than the street names, older than the fences that mark ownership. It carries memory in its soil. This is where Denzil chose to begin again. ⸻ The Leaving Before this house, there was another. A large two-storey home in Kellyville — ambitious, symmetrical, almost declarative in its scale. It rose as a statement of arrival. Rooms stacked upon rooms. A staircase that suggested ascent, progress, continuation. But as the landscaping was being completed — turf laid, hedges aligned — the relationship that had framed the house came undone. The structure remained. The future did not. The house became too...
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