Denzil's Stories

About writing short stories What are your short stories about? I grew up in Sri Lanka but left the island permanently as a young lad to work in booming Dubai. From Dubai, I moved to Australia with a young family. My kids grew up in Australia, and this is their country. Some of my kids have children now. My heritage is spanning to three generations in our adopted country. My experiences growing up in the sixties and seventies in Sri Lanka were unique — also, my early experiences in Dubai as a budding youngster out to discover the world. I have a deep desire to write about my grandparents and their stories so that my children and the descendants to come will know their ancestors’ experiences and life journeys, including my own. Why are short stories your preferred format? I started writing my life story some six or seven years ago. The writing was dull because it was a historic narration rather than a compelling connected story. I wrote from the period I was born but stopped at age fifte...

A beat show and a menace In the seventies, music shows in Sri Lanka were a melting pot of fashion, live music, and a place to meet fellow youths of both sexes. As an eighteen-year-old with newfound freedom, I was besotted with music shows. They were free and were held on open grounds during village and school carnivals. Back then, record labelling was in the hands of very few. Music artists relied on open-air shows to promote their music. Many Colombo-based artists played western pop songs; the rest were into local pop music. Young music fans of both gender from the surrounding suburbs gathered at these events, enjoying a good time. Sri Lankans used the term  beat shows  for music shows back then. For the sake of the originality of this story, I will refer to music shows as beat shows. My friends and I were always on the lookout for beat shows. That weekend, there were two of them shows in greater Colombo. One at Moratuwa, a suburb twenty kilometres to the south at its local c...

About Sharjah First impressions of Sharjah How did you arrive in Sharjah? T he first time was in a shared taxi in 1977 few months after I arrived in Dubai. I paid three Dirhams for the ride from Deira, Dubai. What made you travel to Sharjah? I changed my job four months after I arrived in Dubai. My previous job provided lodging and food. In my new job in a British bank, I had to fend for myself with my accommodation. I had friends working in Emirates Telecommunication Corporation (now Etisalat) in Sharjah who invited me to share accommodation with them. My first visit was to check their place out ahead of a likely move. The first few things I noticed on the ride. S eeing the bare, arid and sandy land partly merged into pools of water. It was a shallow lake along the no-man land between Dubai and Sharjah, a vast area. Everybody raced on this desert patch. It was the local autobahn. It was free for all driving, with no speed limits and no police jurisdiction by either state of Dubai or S...