Iremember 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, young men’s attitudes and attire had changed. A few years after the Woodstock festival, they wore bell bottoms. Lads had long hair and carried shoulder bags. They wore high-heeled shoes. Being hippy was in style. Sexuality was liberated. The youth had reinvented themselves. I just followed the vogue, stepping into it, despite living in two worlds. My home was in a sleepy village in Sri Lanka, but I studied in a premium private school.
It was my great fortune to have a far-thinking father with liberal ideas. He set me up post-school in a private university, knowing that academia was not my forte. When I did not do so well in uni; (I was too young to hobnob with much older students), he guided me to get a prime telecommunication job. Through that, I learned early that I could put on a new skin any time I liked. It was a great life lesson at eighteen.
These mini-adventures at a young age showed me that reinvention is possible and necessary to survive in societies in constant motion. David Bowie and Elton John posters above my bed were a constant reminder in the face of that path I had been raised in, perhaps unconsciously by my parents. It was a great time to be alive in a permanent whiplash.
I had this mental image of my life not as a straight line but as a trajectory upwards. All of these can be terrifying. It led to much uncertainty. As I reached twenty, I wanted to go to Europe, chucking my job. Sure, it may have led to financial insecurity. It could lead to massive dispossession, away from where everything was found for me at home with my parents.
Alternatively, it could lead to unexpected remarkable experiences. That happened to me when a chance encounter turned up at my doorstep to leave for Dubai. It was an experience my grandfather or grandmother could not have imagined.
My maternal grandfather was single until quite late in the 1920s; he married at 35. He was older; his wife was 20. Some 14 years later, she became sick and was taken to a mental asylum, leaving three young kids virtually orphaned. My father’s father died when my father was only 15. Both my parents had a lot to cope with from a young age. Imagine my father growing up without his father and his mother taking up running a shop to keep the family coffers going. Meanwhile, my mother. because of her mother’s sickness denied the love of a mother. The irony of these two misfortunes is that both were issues that could have been dealt with with today’s medical advances. Her mother’s sickness at 34 was due to a misdiagnosis of a thyroid deficiency as a mental sickness. My paternal grandfather died at 42 following a minor foot injury.
My maternal grandfather had a short marriage life. It was a tough ask to raise three kids on his own and be a school principal in the 1930s and 1940s. He managed to do both, albeit with difficulty and many challenges. He also managed a generous-size property portfolio, protecting them for his children and grandchildren. Similarly, the widowed mother of my father ran her shop and helped him to study and realise his dreams of joining the civil service.
My mother became the de-facto housekeeper at the age of 8, being the eldest girl in the family. My father, at the age I was in a boarding school, was helping to run his mother’s shop in the mornings and after school. He was so poor that he walked barefoot to school and wore his shoes at the entrance to his school to save the shoes’ soles from wear and tear from the long walks.
Instead, I was living an easy life at their age, attending private schools. I was raised to lift the bar for them, although I did not realise that as a youngster.
Leaving for Dubai at such a younger age changed my life utterly. From an irresponsible carefree young lad, I learned quickly to become responsible and severely independent. I managed my finances, started saving and jumped on career opportunities as if there was no tomorrow.
I made my parents proud. I built a modern home for my parents to live in by the time I was 25. I lifted the bar for my kid brother, encouraging him to study and emigrate like me.
I did well in my career. I did not know what fear was. It led to unexpected adventures and travel to many parts of the world. I saw places and met people. I travelled from London to Tokyo in 1st class for work in my prime. I had remarkable experiences and encounters, lives my grandfather and grandmother could not have imagined. It kept me young and evolving.
Now in the twilight years of my life and career, I get chances to reinvent myself. I am refining and reaffirming who I am and what I want from the years left of me. When I reimagine and grow old to feel proud, I reinvent what life can be. Reinvention, just like it was as a youth, is becoming more of myself.
In early 2020, two years ago, the pandemic struck. It was a period of lockdowns and isolation. I evolved again, working from home full time, mixing my work and home life to a pattern that worked for me. I saw an exercise physiologist and kept fit, walking and exercising at home. I experimented with food, cooking new dishes. I started writing about a year ago, in early 2021 and am getting better at it. My confidence as a creative writer is growing. I have about 600 subscribers already.
Cyril Stanley A story of gratitude — Denzil recalls a friend who looked out for him in his budding years in Sri Lanka Denzil Jayasinghe 11 min read · Aug 27, 2022 1 Give us a bit of background on how you met Cyril. It was the seventies in the sleepy village of Dalugama , my ancestral hometown, some ten kilometres from Colombo. With their flared bell bottoms and Afro-style hair, it was easy to notice Cyril and his younger brother Edward. I’d bump into the duo in the neighbourhood as I walked home after a day at college. A casual hello greeting turned into a conversation and an evolving friendship with the duo at an age when making friends was effortless. However, it was Cyril who reached out to me first. What did the brothers look like? C yril was a younger version of Smokey Robinson and his brother, Edward, a junior Lionel Richie but darker. Both had curly hair, grown long, copying the Afro-American idols of the seventies. Smokey Robinson, Cyril Stanley lookalike Where did they
My experiences of rebellions How waves of violence in Sri Lanka broke a young man’s heart Warning — Distressing scenes described in this story. A YOUTH INSURRECTION DURING MY BOYHOOD 1971 — There was a strong student and youth socialist movement styled on the “Che Guevara” clique. Many poor, unemployed and underprivileged young people joined this movement. My two elder cousins, my father’s brother’s children, Sisira and Marie, were also in this rebel group. In their home. They replaced Jesus’s picture with that of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. Both of them, teenagers, boldly spoke about a future socialist society. A society in which everyone was equal in Sri Lanka. Young as I was, it was a bit gibberish to me. In April 1971, the movement turned violent. The insurrection began when the rebels started attacking police stations. The Sri Lankan government responded by deploying armed forces with brutal force. Rebels cut power lines and blocked roads with trees in the countryside. Schools wer
Arya Sinhala This story is about the significance of this costume in my family and its cultural relevance. My father wore shirts and pants as any English-educated Sri Lankan male did back in the day. Everybody gave their children English names. I am named Denzil Bernard. A few years after I was born, in the 1950s, Sri Lanka was trying to assert its ethnic identity, a decade after it gained independence from Great Britain. A new prime minister, espousing an ethnocentric identity, came into power. Emulating Indian leaders’ post-independence direction, he gave up his Western attire, despite his Oxford education and wore the national dress, Arya Sinhala. Arya is an ethnic and cultural designation to which the Sinhala race makes claims. The cultural transformation started in my family. My sister, born four years after me, was named Rekha Flora. She had an ethnic name and a Western name. Occasionally my father donned the national dress. My father’s elder brother ultimately gave up his West
Comments
Post a Comment