No Graves, Only Rivers:

A Memoir in Three Insurrections

Denzil Jayasinghe

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5 hours ago

Ashes and Promises: Sri Lanka, 1971

Iwas a boy when the first cracks appeared — thin, almost undetectable at first. They did not announce themselves with gunfire or sirens. They entered through conversation, through posters on walls, through the removal of one picture and the quiet hanging of another.

At my cousins’ house — Sisira and Marie, children of my father’s elder brother — the transformation arrived in silence. Jesus’s portrait was taken down. In its place, Mao and Che stared out into the room with unblinking certainty. My cousins were teenagers then, not much older than I, but they spoke with an urgency that unsettled the adults. They dreamed aloud of a new Sri Lanka, of fairness, of a society without hunger or hierarchy. Their words felt borrowed — rehearsed perhaps — yet they believed them. I listened but understood very little. Their idealism sounded, to me, like a foreign language.

Then April came.

The rebellion ignited suddenly. Police stations were stormed. Power lines were cut. The roads, especially in the countryside, were barricaded with felled trees. The government responded with force — swift and absolute. Within days, schools were shuttered. Soldiers patrolled the streets. Fear became a kind of weather.

Sisira and Marie disappeared. There were no explanations, only rumours. We waited in silence until word reached us: they had been arrested, not killed. They would be sent to a rehabilitation camp. My aunt, who had not cried when they vanished, wept when she learned they were alive.

And then the waiting resumed. The city moved again, but differently. Checkpoints were everywhere. Travel was interrupted by inspections. People carried fewer belongings and looked over their shoulders more often.

That summer, when the violence had softened into vigilance, I longed to visit my best friend, Ajit Martin. We had made plans before the unrest — to spend a few days together, to escape into the familiar. My parents resisted at first. But eventually, they relented.

On the morning of my departure, my mother checked my small bag. She found my journal, the one in which I scribbled daily notes and drawings. She held it up, frowning.

“You must leave this behind,” she said. “If someone finds it…”

She didn’t explain further.

I argued. I lost. I removed the journal, folded a shirt in its place, and left.

The train to Ajit’s house passed through familiar terrain. But when we crossed the bridge over the Kelani River, I saw what I had never imagined possible. Bloated bodies floated beneath us — young men, their limbs askew, their mouths slightly open, as if trying to speak one last word.

Nobody screamed. Some passengers gasped. Others whispered. Executions, someone murmured. Central provinces. Thrown into the water. I kept my eyes on the river, unable to look away. It was the first time I knew — not as an idea but in my body — that I was not safe. None of us were.

Later, my father would tell me what the newspapers never did. More than twenty thousand young people were killed during the insurrection. Some died in battle, others in custody, many simply disappeared. The country had come undone, only to be stitched back with fear.

Sisira and Marie returned eventually. Their idealism, once blazing, had been quieted. They no longer spoke of revolution. They rarely spoke at all.

Six years later, I left Sri Lanka. I told everyone I was going to Dubai for work. But the truth is: I was leaving behind a country that had betrayed its children. I was leaving behind the boy I had been — the one who stared out the train window and saw his world, once familiar, made unrecognizable by death and silence.

⸻

Black July

InJuly of 1983, I returned to Sri Lanka from Dubai to get married.

The invitations had already gone out. The date was set — the 29th. My parents were relieved. My mother had been worrying for months that the arrangements would never fall into place. But there we were — flower orders confirmed, clothes stitched, relatives beginning to arrive. On the morning of the 25th, I took a bus to Colombo to settle the payment for the floral decorations. I remember the sunlight on the pavements, the humid breeze swaying the treetops near the Town Hall. It was a Monday like any other.

Until it wasn’t.

As I left the florist and walked toward the bus stand, I noticed something — not one thing, but many. Buses were speeding by, not stopping. People were running. Men shouted, but it was unclear what they were saying. I stood on the pavement, trying to understand what was happening. I had no radio, no newspaper, no way of knowing that Colombo was unraveling.

No buses stopped for me. No taxis slowed. A school bus, nearly full, came to a halt near where I stood. I approached the driver, asking if he might let me ride as far as my hometown — a modest distance of twelve kilometers. He hesitated, then told me to stand near the front, beside him. “Don’t sit,” he said.

The ride was slow, uneasy. There were blockades, crowds, detours. Behind me, the children were quiet. Maybe they sensed what was unfolding. Maybe they were simply exhausted.

From the window, I saw what I still cannot forget. Shops smashed. Homes burning. Crowds pulling people off buses. Some were hit, others set on fire. There were no sirens, no police. Only smoke and noise and the steady, unrelenting rhythm of violence. A group of men climbed onto our bus, shouting, scanning faces. One asked the driver if he had any petrol to spare. “None,” the driver replied quickly. They moved on.

I was still trying to believe I was safe. That somehow this was temporary. But then I saw what they did to the Tamil homes. I saw what they did to the Tamil bodies. It was not a riot. It was a hunt.

The worst of it came near the end of my journey, just outside my village. A crowd had gathered near the church — about a hundred men. They had surrounded a young man. He was naked, bleeding, his face so bruised it had lost all definition. They struck him, over and over — with fists, sticks, anything they had. I watched, frozen. I wanted to say something, to scream, to intervene. But I did not. I couldn’t. The fear had already settled inside me. If I had opened my mouth, they would have turned on me, too.

When I reached home, I was trembling. My mother pulled me into her arms, relieved. I said nothing. My shirt smelled of smoke. I kept seeing the man near the church. That night, I barely slept.

I did not get married on the 29th. The city was still burning.

Weeks later, we held a quiet ceremony. No fanfare. No celebrations. And soon after, I left Sri Lanka once again, this time knowing I would not — could not — stay.

The war went on for another twenty-six years. More than 150,000 people would die. And yet some still argue over who won.

But I know what I lost that day.

I lost any hope I had for the country where I was born. I lost the version of myself who thought it might still be possible to live there, to raise children there. That promise I made quietly, to myself, on the evening of July 25th — I kept it. My children would never see what I had seen. I carried that vow like a scar.

Sri Lanka, to me, became a place I once belonged to. And then didn’t.

— —

The Insurrection

In1987, I was in my thirties.

Four years had passed since Black July, but Sri Lanka had once again descended into violence. This time, the anger came not from ethnic fault lines, but from within the majority. Sinhala youth — disillusioned, angry, politicised — rose up in rebellion against a government that no longer resembled a democracy. Structural changes had been forced into law, distant decrees handed down without consensus. The country responded with silence at first, and then, with blood.

The arrests came suddenly. Without warrants, without cause. Young men were taken in daylight, from roadsides, dormitories, tea stalls. Some returned; most did not. Their bodies surfaced days later — headless, burned, mutilated beyond recognition. The state blamed insurgents. The insurgents blamed the state. But the truth was that the violence belonged to both.

The media, complicit, turned its face away. It reported little. The phrases were vague: “unrest,” “disruption,” “student involvement.” But those of us who had lived through the past already understood what was happening.

I feared for my younger brother. He was at university — tall, studious, quiet. He asked no one for trouble, but in those days, that hardly mattered. The juntas that prowled the south — government-backed, poorly trained, hungry for power — viewed every student as a threat. There were whispers of torture chambers and anonymous white vans. Of corpses displayed along village roads, left as a warning to others.

In 1988, I returned for a visit.

I remember walking by a river I had known since childhood — still and brown, familiar. And then seeing it again — that same slow horror from my youth: bodies floating downstream. Youths. Children. There was no dignity left in their deaths, just a sense of the inevitable. I thought of the past, of 1971, of the bodies that had once lined that same stretch of water. I felt I was watching the same tragedy on repeat, only now the actors had changed.

A friend of mine lost his son — a schoolboy, barely seventeen. He was taken one afternoon by plainclothes men. The boy’s body was discovered the next morning, burned and abandoned, bearing signs of torture. His father could not speak. I sat beside him and did not speak either. His grief was unbearable. It remains the most unholy silence I have ever known.

My country, I realised, had not learned anything. Or perhaps it had learned to live with this violence — to fold it into daily life as one does an inconvenient truth. Between 1987 and 1990, war raged on two fronts — Marxists in the south, Tamil separatists in the north. The Indian Army came and left. The rivers flowed red. No side claimed victory, but all claimed lives.

It was during this time that my brother left — a scholarship to Canada, a PhD. He would never live in Sri Lanka again. His children, too, would grow up elsewhere. Far from the ash and the blood and the slogans painted on walls.

By the end, nearly 100,000 had died — most of them young, many of them schoolboys from poor villages who barely understood what they were dying for.

⸻

Three Insurrections

Ihave lived through three uprisings in Sri Lanka — in the north and south, in my teens, my twenties, and my thirties. The toll was staggering: nearly 400,000 lives lost. A million people fled, many of them in rickety boats. The rest stayed, surviving between curfews and checkpoints.

Sri Lanka is still recovering, though I sometimes wonder if recovery is even possible. Today, decades since independence, it remains fragmented — by race, by religion, by region. It is a country that mistrusts its own children, a place whose history is written not in ink, but in fire. Its wounds are not healed, only hidden.

I carry many images from that time — bodies in rivers, fires by the roadside, silence in the face of horror. But the one I cannot forget is the boy outside the church in 1983. The one the mob beat to death while I stood frozen. I never knew his name. But I knew, from that moment, that Sri Lanka could never be my home again.

I left, professionally, for Australia. But I did not leave as a migrant. I left as a refugee of memory. A refugee of silence. A refugee of disappointment.

My parents, dignified and kind, paid the price of that departure. They stayed behind while we — my brother and I — built lives elsewhere. They never complained. They never asked us to return. “Be safe,” my mother once said to me on the phone. “That’s enough.”

And it was a sacrifice. The greatest one.

Even now, all these years later, I wonder why our country kept bleeding out its children. Why it still does.