The Toilet Story

Denzil Jayasinghe

4 min read

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2 hours ago

Warning:

Toreaders shaped by a world more equal, more interconnected, and more self-aware, much of what follows may appear improbable, even farcical. But this was how it was – ordinary life stitched with the faded threads of Empire and its customs. Do not read with guilt; read with gratitude, for the era that allows you to look back and call such things absurd.

The time was mid seventies, roughly thirty years after the Second World War, and a few years after the British withdrew from the Trucial States, leaving the newly formed United Arab Emirates in 1971. I had joined a British bank, one of those colonial vestiges still standing tall, like an aging officer who refused to hang up his medals. There was an old saying, half in jest but more than half believed: that after the post office, it was the bank that mattered most in the Empire.

I entered the bank without knowledge of its ways – no idea of its customs, its hierarchies, the subtle rituals that marked one’s place. I was young, untrained in diplomacy, still believing that sincerity might substitute for experience. The bank’s manager and its accountant were men in their forties, grave and restrained. The Bills Department was run by a Briton in his thirties, who spoke with the deliberation of someone conscious that his voice carried authority across borders.

Then there were the younger officers – Barclay, Colin, Rod, Mark, Mike. Fresh out of British universities, sent on rotation through distant territories in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. They arrived confident and clean-shaven, bringing with them habits shaped by private schools and Sunday rituals, believing they had come to learn banking, but also to guide and refine what the locals had already built. In private, they were friendly, almost boyish. In public, decorum prevailed. First names were reserved for fellow Britons or private conversations behind closed doors. Otherwise, it was always Mr. Butler, Mr. Geddes, Mr. Harrison, Mr. Sampson, Mr. Hyde.

The support staff – the bank clerks – were mostly Indian and Pakistani, with a few Sri Lankans like myself, and the occasional Baloch or Yemeni. They moved quietly through the hallways, summoned by the clink of a spoon in a teacup or the tap of a knuckle on a desk. They addressed all British officers as “Mr.,” regardless of age or rank. The practice was so routine that even those of us on staff internalised it. I too used their surnames in public, switching to first names only with Barclay, Colin, Rod, Mark, and Mike – always in private, where it was safe and unremarkable.

My parents had raised me to question the world’s hierarchies, perhaps a rebellion against Sri Lanka’s own rigid class and colonial scars. I was taught to think freely, to see men as equals, to resist the false reverence of titles. So I called the young officers by name – Barclay, Colin, Rod, Mark, Mike – when no one was listening, a small act of defiance that felt like loyalty to my upbringing. They never corrected me. They seemed to trust me. Perhaps they appreciated the honesty. Or perhaps they saw in me a mirror of their own youth, just from a different world.

Whatever the reason, I was granted privileges rare for a junior clerk. My knack for numbers, honed in Colombo’s schoolrooms, had caught the officers’ notice, and they entrusted me with the test keys – secret codes used to verify payment instructions across branches, vital to the machinery of international finance.

Yet even with such trust, there were reminders of where I stood.

Tea, for instance, followed an unspoken hierarchy. Each morning, it was served in a pattern that felt rigid to me. First to the British managers, then the accountant, followed by the young British officers. The assistant officers – always Asian – came next, then the clerks, with women often served before men, loosely by seniority. As one of the youngest clerks, I was usually last, sometimes forgotten until I gave a quiet reminder, receiving my cup long after ten o’clock, sometimes closer to eleven.

And then, the toilets.

The British officers had their own toilet, of course. No signs marked it; the separation was simply understood. I never saw inside, but I imagined proper fittings, perhaps even a faint floral scent. The staff toilet, what we privately called the “Asian toilet,” was familiar to those from the subcontinent – squat toilets set in the ground, water pooling on the tiles, a basin by the door for wudu, the Muslim ritual washing. No urinals, none of the clean partitions you see in modern restrooms. Just wet floors, the smell of bleach, and the sound of careful steps. Nothing like the “Gora toilet” which meant white toilet.

I tell this to the young Australians I now work with – young men and women who have grown up in a very different world. When I mention that we had separate toilets, they look at me with disbelief, even a kind of horror. I assure them it wasn’t the fault of my British colleagues, and I mean it. It was simply the system into which we were born, and which we had no power to question.

By 1986, when the bank moved to a new building in Dubai’s growing financial district, the old divisions had begun to fade. Everyone shared the same toilets – modern, clean, unremarkable. For me, it was a quiet victory, a sign that the rigid lines of my early days were softening, even if the world beyond the bank still had far to go.

Not the progress of headlines or history books, but the kind that settles into the everyday, the kind that endures.