Denzil's Stories

  The Bathroom Roster at Two A.M. Denzil Jayasinghe 7 min read · Just now J ebel Ali. I could hardly believe it. Ajith was waiting when I pulled up in the white Pajero, gleaming under the Dubai sun. Even before I got out, I felt the eyes on us. An Asian man in a big four‑wheel drive was still a curiosity then, a small violation of the natural order the Gulf preferred: certain bodies in certain places, certain faces behind certain wheels. We hugged as soon as we saw each other. No ceremony. No awkwardness. Two young men in their folding, for a moment, back into the boys who had once shared beds and secrets and lateness in Colombo. Memory has its own arithmetic. Dance parties came back first. Then late nights. Borrowed sleeping space. That easy teenage understanding that my home was his, and his was mine, and that neither of us needed to ask. He stepped back, looked me up and down and said, “I like your haircut.” He paused, then added, “Now you are a big man.” I laughed, but the word...

Living Lewis’s Life, Eight Thousand Kilometres Away A grandson in Sydney traces the quiet echoes of his Sri Lankan grandfather’s life — duty, wandering, reinvention — and discovers he’s been living Lewis’s story all along. When I try to remember my grandfather’s face, it comes in fragments. A white tweed trouser leg stepping out of a Hillman. A matching jacket. Hair combed straight up, as if he were refusing to bow to age. Thick glasses that made his eyes seem both distant and very present. He would have been about my age now — or older — but to the boy watching from the shadows he was simply old. His style seemed fixed, as if it had walked out of the 1950s and decided to stay there. Only now, at seventy‑one, can I imagine him in his forties and fifties, wearing exactly the same uniform while the world rearranged itself around him. My own clothes, my haircut, my glasses have shifted every decade or so; his, once chosen in middle age, never seemed to move. I don’t know how he spent ...

Four kids and a Canon Learning to See: A Father Behind the Lens Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · 1 hour ago Tell us a bit about yourself — where are you from, and what did you do when you weren’t taking photos? A:   My name is Denzil Bernard Jayasinghe. I am 71, a manager by day and the family patriarch of seventeen — four kids, their partners and eight grandkids, seventeen of us including me. As of today, I live in Sydney’s north‑west and am planning to move to an apartment on the north shore in 2027. I like to keep a sense of order in my life, whether it was work or leisure. Q: How did you get into photographing your children? A:   When my father passed away nearly twenty‑five years ago, I went into shock. It had never really occurred to me that he wouldn’t be there; he had been a strong, pioneering influence on my life. In that grieving process, I realised my own time on this planet was limited, and that our time with loved ones was finite too. It struck me that my time with ...