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What if?

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  What if? Denzil Jayasinghe 7 min read · 1 day ago 1 T The years stack up, and you start looking back at the scaffolding. You begin to see how precariously a life is built. How much of it depends on decisions made in rooms you were never in, by people who were simply trying to get through their own days. One small decision leads to another, and another, until you are standing somewhere you never imagined you would be. And you begin to wonder. What if? What if Lewis, my grandfather, had never stepped up to carry the weight of his brothers and sisters? What if he had simply been allowed to live as an ordinary man, instead of becoming the pillar everyone leaned on? What if the thyroid deficiency had not stolen my grandmother Euphracia’s mind when my mother was only eight years old? A little girl losing her mother to a quiet, hospital-walled darkness, forced to grow up before she had ever had the chance to be young. And sometimes I wonder about something else. What if Lewis had decide...
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The Luck I Didn’t Recognise

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  The Luck I Didn’t Recognise Sometimes the thing that changes your life is the thing you most want to escape. Denzil Jayasinghe 6 min read · Just now W hen I look back at my life, I sometimes wonder how much of it was planned. The honest answer is: very little. There were decisions, of course. There were moments when I chose one road instead of another. But many of the things that changed my life came from circumstances I had not chosen. Some were good. Some were painful. And some were so painful at the time that I could never have imagined they would eventually lead me somewhere else. I think of the early seventies. I was a young man in Sri Lanka, and the country I knew as Ceylon had changed. The easy confidence of my childhood had gone. There was a feeling among young people that the country was becoming smaller, more uncertain and less welcoming. Opportunities seemed to depend increasingly on who you were, what religion you were born into, what language you spoke, where you cam...
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