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The Red Line

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The Red Line Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read · Just now On the 138 — that long, asthmatic contraption that objected audibly to every incline — it took nearly an hour to reach Duke Street. The bus did not so much travel as negotiate with the road. An hour is ample time for dread to mature properly. I would sit by the window and watch Colombo assembling itself for commerce — shutters lifting, tea kettles steaming, bicycles wobbling into purpose — while imagining the Instruments Room already awake and alert, its supervisors poised like minor deities awaiting sacrifice. My shifts began at 8 a.m., 2 p.m., or — with moral offence — 8 p.m. The 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift I avoided with quiet determination. I was not built for sanctity. I preferred being home early, sitting cross-legged with friends, discussing matters of enormous irrelevance before adulthood imposed its disciplines. Some men pursued rank. I pursued conversation. Most mornings I arrived precisely on time. Occasionally — catastrophical...
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Neither of Us Yielded

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  Neither of Us Yielded My Mother’s Independence Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 10 hours ago W hen my eldest turned sixteen, my father died. The two events remain fastened together in my memory — one life edging towards its own assertions, the other receding, almost apologetically, from the world. With my father’s passing, my mother was left alone in the old house — a house already thirty years lived in, its walls seasoned with routine and memory. She would not leave it. Independence, for her, was not merely temperament; it was identity. As the eldest, the obligation came to me without ceremony. There was no family conference, no formal entrustment. Such duties, in our families, are not negotiated. They descend — quietly, but with weight. And so began what I can only call a stealth existence. My days were claimed by work in Sydney; my evenings by four children whose lives were gathering pace — examinations, illnesses, ambitions, small crises magnified by youth. And threaded through...
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The Desert Road

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  The Desert Road Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read · 1 day ago F rom Dubai, the approach to Abu Dhabi never stirred the imagination. Even now, when I close my eyes, I see only sand — dunes rising and collapsing upon themselves like a tired sea turned to stone. For long stretches there was nothing to interrupt the eye, nothing by which to measure progress. One began to doubt distance itself. The stretch was said to be about one hundred miles — one hundred and sixty or seventy kilometres — but the figure meant little. In those years there was no grand highway sweeping across the Emirates with confidence. The road was narrow, exposed, almost tentative in its claim upon the desert. A ribbon of bitumen laid down with hope rather than certainty. The journey took two hours, sometimes more, depending on the temperament of the driver and the mood of the sand. I travelled in a shared taxi, a cream-coloured Peugeot 504 wagon whose paint had faded unevenly under the sun. It had the weary look of a...
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