Denzil's Stories

Reinvention As I get older, I have become the person I was always meant to be. When I look into the mirror in the morning, I secretly wish I was young again. My long curly hair has disappeared. My youthful looks have faded into nothingness. Our relevance to society reduces as we age. Yet within my brotherhood, I find friendships in the most unlikely places. We are no longer rivals — we nourish each other. We lean on each other. We share our anxieties and experiences openly. Perspective puts a different lens to help to be open. I learned to breathe through the pain of my separations. It eased the anxiety and the uncertainty. Taking one day at a time helped me to step into the next moment. Life took care of itself, moment by moment. I moved on. These dynamic changes propelled me to take a quantum leap, leaving a lifelong industry and moving to a new undiscovered industry. I got into a job that I had not done before. I reinvented myself, learning the ropes of content design and bringing m...

  Becoming you Reinvention, becoming more of myself I remember my grandmother and grandfather when I was a child. My paternal grandfather's attire was Tweed white pants, a jacket, a hat and round spectacles. My maternal grandmother wore a white jacket and coloured kebaya. They were a little older than I am now. They seemed old because I was young, but also because of their appearance. Their styles remained the same. They were people of habit. I remember more of my paternal grandmother,  Kadayamma . She lived with us from when I was born until she passed away when I was nineteen. My memories of my  grandfather  are limited. He passed away when I was six. Back in the day, everyone believed life was a linear affair. Birth, school, job, marry, kids, job-for-life, educate kids, marry off kids, retire, live with your children, and finally pass away. Nobody has it exactly like that today. But that was society’s norm then. By the time I finished school in the early seventies...

  Ace mother and a morning ritual I picture my mother in a smoky kitchen, cooking, boiling, straining, mashing, cutting, and graining, sitting on the ground on a stool and standing. My mother was a product of a time, born in the 1930s, raising children in the sixties and the seventies. My mother’s assigned role was the carer, housekeeper, and domestic chief, all combined. The mornings were the busiest in the kitchen. My mother got up early to cook lunch for her family. A packed lunch meal for her three kids in school and her husband, who would leave home for work by seven in the morning. Denzil’s mother, Mary Susan Jayawardane My mother’s kitchen back in the day was simple. The utensils were basic. Spices were roasted and hand-ground for curry blends. Rice and curries were cooked in earthen pots fresh in a smoking kitchen. It was a time-consuming and tiring affair. It took hours for my mother to get lunch ready and packed. My mother cooked potatoes, green beans, carrots, pumpkin, f...

Fitting in About learning diversity early on W hen I was fifteen, I thought I had the world in my palm. I wanted to disappear and come back as a different person. Like most young people at that age, I struggled with who I was, who I wanted to be, and my place in the world. I looked around, everything around me seems interesting, but it seems impossible to figure them out. That transitionary phase of youth is the most challenging to navigate. The road to adventure loomed large in my head. It is possible this was a result of being a teenager in the seventies. Perhaps every teenager feels like that in every generation, even today. I had a couple of scars in my life by then. The first was living with my mentally ill grandmother in our family home. That was a hard call for a boy too young and without the mental capacity to cope. The second was dealing with abuse at a Christian boarding school where I was boarded. It was as if I was in a plane crash at fourteen. I was formed by these things ...

  The budding writer R eading was a natural habit that I developed from a young age.  Reading  helped me to become a storyteller. I have now morphed into writing, but it took me a long time to come to this stage as a writer. The hardest thing in writing is stepping forward. It is also an act of resistance, resistance to yourself. I now lay bare to the rest of the world. It is also an act of courage. Writing opens the door to self-discovery. It gets me to think progressively. By writing about my experiences, I re-discovered myself. It is a journey of self-actualisation and, more than anything, being honest with myself. I am a historian, writing stories of my youth, parents, and grandparents. I have so much respect for the generations before me, particularly my parents and what they have done to make me who I am today. In turn, they helped me to make my children who they are. So, writing was part historical and part homage to my ancestry. It is also part therapeutic and par...