Denzil's Stories

Wings Through Time: A Journey Across Skies and Memories Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read 1958: At three years old, I took my first flight to   Gal Oya , a remote town in Ceylon, with Grandpa Lewis, my mother, and my father. The world below was a blur, but the excitement was crystal clear. We flew on Air Ceylon, and it felt like magic. 1962: I flew to   Jaffna   with my sister and father, and my father’s voice weaved Tamil tales as the plane hummed its own story. The skies felt alive with language and laughter—another journey on Air Ceylon. 1965: Father, my sister, and I flew to   Anuradhapura , the plane carrying us to ancient ruins and shared adventures. There was another flight that year, but it’s a hazy memory — a fragment of childhood wonder. Again, on Air Ceylon. 1975: My first solo flight to   Jaffna , landing in Kankasanthurai. The independence was exhilarating — the skies were mine alone to conquer. I paid for my ticket myself and flew on Air Ceylon. 1977: I...

  Storm Shadows Echoes of War in the Face of Nature’s Fury Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read 1 As Cyclone Alfred bears down on Australia’s eastern coast in early March 2025, the boundary between past and present blurs for me. My daughter’s methodical preparations in Queensland — water stored in bathtubs, emergency supplies catalogued, escape routes planned — transport me across decades to another crisis where I stood sentinel over my own young family. The years were 1990-1991. The Gulf War cast its shadow across Dubai, where I lived with my wife and three children, all under four years old. While nature threatens my daughter’s family today, mankind’s capacity for cruelty haunted us then. When Saddam Hussein’s tanks rolled into Kuwait in 1990, the comfortable expatriate bubble in the Gulf region shattered. His brazen defiance of international demands to withdraw was punctuated by chilling threats of chemical warfare — threats given terrible credibility by Iraq’s documented use of poison ...