Shadows of Kotahena
Shadows of Kotahena
Inthe sultry haze of Kotahena, Colombo, where the monsoon season of 1969 draped the air with salt and the weight of unspoken histories, Denzil navigated the shadowed corridors of St. Benedict’s College, a boy caught in youth’s tender contradictions. Beyond the school gates, the streets pulsed with the clang of St. Lucia’s cathedral bells, the clatter of rickshaws, and vendors’ cries under the sun’s unrelenting gaze, their wares scented with frangipani and heated tar on the street outside. Inside the peeling walls of Class 9B, the world shrank to a crucible of boyhood, where alliances shifted like clouds and every glance held a challenge.
Denzil, slight and wiry, moved with the wariness of one who treads lightly. His uniform — crisp white shirt, shorts neatly pressed — bore the faint creases of careful ironing, a quiet act of neatness. He sat in the middle row, not at the front where small-statured Paul and Gerard hunched over their books, nor at the back where the lords of mischief — Rohan Dias, Deelipa, Niran, and the irrepressible Dougie — held court. Denzil was neither fish nor fowl, a boy who once shone in middle school’s gentler light but now found himself eclipsed by Gamini Hanwella, the class’s academic star, whose effortless answers cast long shadows.
The classroom buzzed with restless energy, Mr. Daya Perera’s voice a rough tide against the boys’ inattention. His English grammar lessons, delivered in a tone worn raw by years of chalk and disappointment, barely pierced their private dramas. Through the dust-flecked windows, the harbour’s bustle whispered of distant ships, and Denzil’s gaze drifted to a horizon promising something he could not yet name. But the back row tugged at him, a gravitational force. Deelipa, broad and towering, lounged like a young king, his presence a silent dare. “Ado, been to Shalimar?” he murmured as Denzil bent to retrieve a fallen pencil, his voice probing for weakness, referencing the hotel where older boys bragged of sneaking in. Niran, dark and brooding, leaned in, his Sinhala sharp: “Mokada balanne?” What are you looking at? Denzil’s cheeks burned, but he met Niran’s gaze momentarily, muttering, “Nothing, machang,” before ducking his head, his heart a frantic bird.
Dougie, with a grin as wide as Galle Face Green, was the spark that set the room alight. His whispers rippled through the ranks, a rebellion against Mr. Perera’s fraying patience. Rohan Dias, lanky and quick, mirrored Dougie’s smirk, while Rabinda, with his Negombo swagger, and Chandra, strutting as if the world of rugger were his stage, wove their defiance. In the front, Paul and Gerard, studious and small, were islands of focus, their desks a bulwark against the chaos. The middle rows teemed with life: Irugalbandara, chewing something, smirked at a private joke; Suresh, quick with a laugh, doodled in his margins; Nimalka, quiet but sharp, watched the room with keen eyes. Jayampathi, boisterous and untamed, fidgeted, his temper a spark awaiting tinder, his desk strewn with red notebooks pilfered from others — a quirk he flaunted like a badge.
Denzil recalled the day Jayampathi was banished to the passageway for disrupting class, his shouts echoing as he vowed to confront Mr. Perera, only to quieten as the teacher’s Triumph motorbike roared off into Kotahena’s din. Merril, tall and gangly, stood out in his high shorts, while Canute arrived in a gleaming Ford Anglia, his father’s status a quiet spectacle. Kingsley’s mother, her sari a flash of dull colours, slipped into the corridor to check on her son, her visits a ritual Denzil watched with a pang, thinking of his own mother’s sacrifices. Dudley and Shirley, first cousins divided by a family feud, spoke only through intermediaries, but Shirley, the class monitor, the most flambouyant with his Beatles glasses and long tight long pants asserted his authority with a sharp glance when Dougie’s whispers grew too loud.
Denzil was no stranger to these currents but not their master. He listened, observed, his pencil sketching not Mr. Perera’s conjugations but the world around him: the curve of Dougie’s grin, the shadow of Deelipa’s gaze, the light gilding dust motes through the windows. He drew Niran’s scowl in his notebook, exaggerating the frown into a caricature, a small act of defiance that steadied his hand. He wrote of the harbour, its low hum beneath the classroom’s chaos, and the banyan tree outside, their branches heavy with crows. He wrote, too, of himself — a boy dreaming beyond Class 9B, feeling the stirrings of something larger in the salt and sweat of this moment.
His voice sometimes pierced the fray. When Gamini answered a grammar question with flawless precision, Denzil quipped, “What, Gamini, you swallowed the textbook?” earning a chuckle from Suresh and a nod from Rohan. These were fleeting victories, as fragile as the paper boats he sailed in his childhood monsoon puddles. More often, he saw the fault lines beneath the bravado: the doubt in Niran’s eyes when Gamini shone, the hunger for approval in Jayampathi’s bluster, the quiet pride in Paul’s small frame as he presented perfect homework. Denzil saw, and in seeing, understood the dance of power and vulnerability binding them all.
One afternoon, as the monsoon loomed, heavy with pre-rain heat, Mr. Perera’s patience snapped. Jayampathie’s jest — something about the teacher’s frayed cuffs — spilled into a laugh, and the room erupted. The teacher’s ruler cracked against the desk, sharp as thunder, and the boys fell silent, the air taut. “Pita, men!” Mr. Perera roared, pointing at Jayampathi, “Out!” His eyes swept the room, catching Denzil’s for a moment. Denzil froze, heart thudding, but exhaled as the wrath passed, settling on the back row. Jayampathi sauntered out, grin undimmed, and the class exhaled, the tension breaking like a wave.
In the aftermath, Denzil’s hand steadied. He wrote of the storm that held its breath, of the boys who were both tormentors and kin, of the classroom that was cage and crucible. He wrote of Kotahena, its streets alive with the pulse of a world he was beginning to grasp. In his notebook, he sketched the cathedral’s spire against the sky, threading its bells through the clamour of rickshaws and crows. And in writing, Denzil claimed a piece of himself, a quiet rebellion against the shadows seeking to define him. The harbour murmured beyond the windows, the bells tolled, and Denzil, in the humid haze of Class 9B, began to dream.
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