The House That Dreamt of Other Shores

8 min read19 hours ago

Crisis entered Denzil’s life early, not as a sudden storm but as a slow, persistent dampness, creeping into the corners of his childhood, into the very walls of the house where he grew up. It was a dampness no sun could ever quite chase away.

In the Jayasinghe house, Catholicism lived not in the heart, but deep in the bones — worn thin by generations, a habit more than a faith, stitched into the family fabric like forgotten coins sewn into the lining of an old coat. Brittle with the years, that stoic belief could sometimes turn quietly cruel. Even when Thomas, his father, was posted to a remote, lonely town, his mother remained behind to keep the house upright — a house already sagging under burdens not her choosing.

Chief among them was an old woman, her mother, whose mind had long ago wandered into places from which it could not return. Her rage moved through the house like wild weather. And Denzil, being the eldest, stood first in the path of the storm. Her words, sharp and reckless, her violence left wounds more lasting than bruises. Responsibility settled onto his small shoulders without ceremony. He was sent on errands, trusted with duties that belonged more to men than boys — collecting rents, issuing receipts, walking the mossy boundaries of ancestral properties he never truly felt were his. Ownership, like faith, was something spoken of but not deeply felt.

It was around that time, at twelve, that he asked to be sent away. Half out of desperation, half out of a child’s yearning for something simpler, cleaner, away from his crazy grandma. The Christian Brothers’ school appeared in his imagination as a sanctuary — a place where order and purpose would wipe clean the confusion of home. He believed then, with the fierce innocence of the young, that to choose was to master one’s life.

But the forming school offered darker lessons. Behind stone walls and clean rituals, there were cruelties no child should have known. At fifteen, Denzil returned home after three long years, the old faith having fallen from him like a skin outgrown.

That same year, he watched his island betray its children. Sri Lanka, then Ceylon — green, battered, endlessly beautiful — burned its young in the name of peace. Five thousand lives extinguished, many before they had even tasted adulthood. The island’s narrowness pressed against him then, more than ever. A place where privacy was a myth, where the intimate details of lives were torn apart and traded like cheap gossip over garden fences. It was a smallness that could suffocate a boy if he wasn’t careful.

Responsibility deepened, its weight familiar now. He ran errands, collected rents, and managed ancestral properties like an old retainer. He associated with everyone, from the shopkeepers who scowled over their ledgers to the old tenants who told him stories of another gentler Ceylon, now fading into dust. In the quiet, influential presence of his father, Thomas — also a stoic, who questioned the narratives others swallowed — Denzil learned something rarer: the flickering shape of a social conscience.

There were no great world wars on their streets, no soldiers clattering through their villages, but the slow violence of being different was war enough. Fair-skinned among darker faces, Catholic among the majority Buddhists, he carried his difference like an invisible scar stitched under the skin.

And yet, within that sagging house, there was grace. Thomas, a lifelong learner, never yoked his son to the tired ambitions of other fathers — medicine, engineering, the well-worn roads to safety. Instead, he gave him something more dangerous and precious: freedom. His mother, though sparing with affection, built her love into the small, relentless rhythms of homekeeping — a love expressed in order, in sacrifice, in things left unsaid.

The doors of their home stayed open. His parents’ friends from every race, every religion, poor and rich, influential and insignificant socially, found shelter under that cracked roof. Some stayed overnight. Some became family. Denzil moved among them easily, learning without instruction that the world was wider and kinder than the island sometimes allowed.

His parents shaped the tender beginnings of his world. From his father, he learned, not in grand declarations but in the steady beat of everyday life, what it meant to be loved and what it meant to be understood. In those early years, even before the burdens of adulthood crept in, he began to dream: a house filled with the laughter of six children, a life braided with the noise and sweetness of family. It was a vision he carried quietly, even in the tumult of his teenage years, like a hidden current pulling him towards a shore he had not yet seen.

His father’s stories about the wider world stayed with him. Later, when the time came, Denzil found himself at a private college — a world away from the humble, creaking house of his boyhood. He never quite understood how Thomas managed it. Money, somehow, had been conjured out of thin air. While the rich sons of Colombo’s highest families arrived in sleek, foreign limousines, Denzil took the battered public bus, his shoes dusty when he stepped onto the manicured lawns.

Among the polished and perfumed, it was there that he first understood the cruel architecture of class , not from books, but from the sneers and silences of those who had never known what it meant to need. The college, for all its promise, threatened to swallow him. He was getting waylaid in its maze of pretence and careless privilege.

Thomas, sharp-eyed as ever, saw it before Denzil himself could. Before his son turned eighteen, Thomas quietly filled out an application for an apprenticeship — a solid, respectable placement in the Overseas Department of the island’s only telecommunication authority, a fortress of state bureaucracy. Denzil took the apprenticeship and learned quickly — not just the official work, but the hidden rules: how senior employees turned cruelty into a ritual, how supervisors carved up the young and the eager. He saw how small power, in small hands, could become a brutal thing.

His escape lay in western pop, in Hindi songs, in books, and in the easy company of friends. So when a job opportunity came from Dubai — a post in an international hotel, far beyond the island’s reach — he did not hesitate. This was several years later, in the mid-seventies, after a period of working and feeling increasingly stifled by the island’s constraints. He was the first to quit, stepping out of the maze without a glance back.

His parents, true to form, did not hold him back. Thomas even offered to pay the bond — a penalty demanded for breaking faith with the state — a sum so large in the Ceylon of the mid-seventies that it could have bought a piece of land.

It was in Dubai, under that strange foreign sun, that Denzil truly began to grow. It was there, in a hotel where languages and fortunes collided daily, that he shaved for the first time in a mirror that was his alone. There, he earned more money in a month than he had ever held in his life — money that no longer melted away before the month’s end, no longer tied him to the quiet debts he owed his mother.

In that far-off city, Denzil stepped fully into his own life — a life that began, as so many lives do, with a single step away from the place that first tried to define him. Armed with curiosity and a certain fearlessness stitched into his being, Denzil found himself working at an international bank barely four months after stepping off the plane in Dubai.

The global bank where he found employment (now in his third job and employer) marked the onset of his professional journey. This unflinching courage drew the eye of a figure at a prestigious global bank, barely four months after he had set foot on foreign soil.

Denzil lived without borders. When an Indian family from New Delhi welcomed him, they became his adopted parents and siblings. His friendship with their son became the bedrock of his youth — racing cars, dancing at disco parties, chasing every thrill, living each day as if it were his last.

It was the most decisive break of his life, the sharpest bend in his career. In time, Denzil built a home for his parents and younger brother — a house that rose from the earth like a small, defiant promise. He filled it with modern comforts, strange and wondrous things carried back from Dubai: polished fixtures, humming machines, small luxuries that his younger self could scarcely have imagined. It was a house touched by the wide world beyond the island’s shores, a house where, for once, the dampness of old griefs could not reach.

And when the island’s bitter politics turned its teeth on Thomas — when the ruling party, in its petty cruelty, stripped him of the work that had once given him dignity — it was Denzil who stood firm. Without hesitation, he fought to restore what had been taken. He backed his father without question, a loyalty built not of obligation but of something older, more profound — the simple, unbreakable memory of all that had been given to him.

In a few short years, he had fallen in love, learned to drive properly — a thing that, back in Sri Lanka, had always been a half-secret affair on a battered Lambretta scooter, license be damned. Back in Sri Lanka, he had once weaved through the dusty lanes on that scooter, feeling free. In Dubai, the roads had rules, and he embraced them.

It was during a visit home, in the early eighties, when he saw the state machinery turn on its own — the Tamil people brutalised in a frenzy of sanctioned violence. The horror of it marked him. In the smoky aftermath of those days, he made a vow, quiet and firm, never again to live out his days in that fractured land.

Back in Dubai, the bank had tapped him to join a small team tasked with dragging its operations into the computer age. He took to the work with the same appetite that had carried him across oceans. Soon, he was leading teams, managing people, and building something out of nothing. By turning thirty, he had thirty souls under his guidance. In his early thirties, he was a father of three. He was making a life in a city of glass and heat.

But the future he imagined for his children lay elsewhere. Australia promised a different kind of life — quieter, more certain. Within months of arriving in sunny Australia, he had bought a patch of land and built a home from the red soil up.

Now a serious man in technology, trusted and steady, Denzil found work again in banking and financial systems that flew him across borders and time zones. He moved from bank to bank, six in total, steady as a tradesman with his tools, ensuring that all four of his children found their way into universities. His youngest was born in Sydney.

There was a divorce, and in its long wake, other relationships — each leaving behind their own faint, indelible marks. Once gathered close, the children grew into separate lives, scattering like seeds carried by an unseen wind. Over five decades, he built six homes, each a testament to a different chapter. Now, in the slow-turning twilight of his years, he finds himself dreaming of a seventh.

Today, Denzil is a grandfather to six — each a new story and world carried on in the blood. And in the long, amber afternoons of his seventieth year, sitting under the vast Australian sky, he can still smell the dampness of those early days, still feel the small mercies that shaped the man he became.