The sand that moulded a lad

March 28, 2024

The seventies, Sri Lanka. The air stuck to you, thick with the smell of cloves and the rumble of monsoons brewing on the horizon. Skinny kid, all knees and elbows, stood there with feet like leather from the beach. The sunbaked and warm brick wall felt alien against his blue jeans.

Kandy Road churned a muddy grey out front, mirroring the churn in his stomach.

It's not like he was an orphan or anything. He had a mother, strong as steel in the whole village, a father with a heart as big as the sky, a sister who was almost his twin, and a kid brother, a whole eight years younger. He had his family, a pack of friends closer than brothers. But chances, those were like the fat mangoes they hoarded every summer – rare on the island. Brian, his mate with skin like salt and a smile that could light up a night, had landed a shot in Dubai. This Dubai shimmered in grown-up talk like a mirage – a city of sand and buildings that scraped the clouds, they said. A place where fortunes were made on oil and dreams, a far cry from their sleepy village and the whispering breeze of home.

The trip itself was a blur – endless yakking on the Singapore-Air plane, faces he didn’t know wherever he looked, the constant hum of the jet engine a steady drum in his ears. Dubai, when it finally peeked over the horizon, was a whole other story.

Nothing like the emerald hug of Sri Lanka. Sand, the color of bleached bone, stretched out forever, broken only by the occasional bony frame of a building or mosque in the distance. This tiny island boy, dropped in a foreign desert, felt a flicker of excitement but a loneliness so deep it stole the air from his lungs.

Days burned like a furnace, nights choked by sandstorms and the howls of the desert wind, a sound nothing like the symphony back home.

His work was easy, though he pictured muscled men toiling under the relentless sun. But the lad, with his smooth English, became a bridge to this new world – asking for directions, reading signs that looked like chicken scratch and making friends on the go.

Work was a whole new game. Crammed in a room with folks from everywhere, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the lad thrived in English like a plant reaching for the sun.

Books, music, movies – all this stuff filled his head, but a part of him still yearned for the stories whispered under the old banyan tree in the schoolyard not that long ago.

Years bled into one another. The scrawny kid, eyes full of fear, grew into a young man with a shock of black hair and a grin that could charm a snake.

He aced his work, moved on, landed a bank job, his Sri Lankan accent a funny tune in the office full of all sorts of cultures. He made friends with folks from India, Iran, England, Pakistan, Egypt – all outsiders, finding a connection in their shared experience.

Dubai, this harsh city that once felt so strange, became a second skin. He weaved through the souks like a desert nomad, his senses tuned in to the heady mix of spices and the singsong calls of vendors. He learned to haggle in Urdu and Arabic, his voice rising and falling in a rhythm that seemed to belong to this place.

One night, under a sky thick with stars, he sat on the rooftop of their building. He thought of Sri Lanka, a memory softened by time. He missed the cool sand between his toes, the sweet stink of ripe mangoes, and the laughter of his family echoing through the house. But Dubai, this unforgiving city, had become his furnace. It had moulded him into someone new, someone strong like the desert wind, with ambition that glittered like gold under the Arabian sun. He was a Sri Lankan boy who became a citizen of the world, proof that even in the harshest places, the human spirit can bloom.