Denzil's Stories

Buried today “Buried Today” is a quiet, deeply personal reflection on the day a son buries his father. Through restrained grief and memory, the writer confronts loss, family duty, and the sudden emptiness left by a man who once seemed permanent — revealing how death alters the living as profoundly as it claims the dead. Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · Just now N ot a neighbour. Not a friend whose passing one acknowledges with a muted call and then files away. My father. There is something indecent about writing the word. It feels abrupt, like the closing of a wooden lid. I had always believed — without daring to examine the belief — that he would live forever . Not immortal in any grand sense, but present. Seated in his chair. Listening. Waiting for the world to pass by and report itself to him in bulletins and static. I left him young — too young to understand the arithmetic of time. I had barely completed my apprenticeship in being a son when I decided to become a man elsewhere. In my...

Free-will no more Some things are small on the surface – a piece of clothing, a brand name, a strap peeking above a waistband. But for a boy who doesn’t belong yet, they can mean everything. This is a story about Grade 9, a new school, and the quiet, burning mission to fit in – one jockstrap at a time. Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 7 hours ago B ack in junior school, undies were not a thing. Nobody wore them. None of my mates, anyway. We ran around, played, sweated – and nobody thought twice about it. That was just how it was, where we came from. Then Grade 9 happened. And everything changed. Leaving middle school was already painful enough. But the school I was stepping into – that was another world entirely. A proper ivy college, right in the heart of Colombo. Not my sleepy suburb. Not my kind of people. I was a village boy walking into a city I didn’t know, full of city boys who had been born knowing things I hadn’t even heard of. These fellows were something else. Tall boys in lon...

The Discipline of Seeing Denzil Jayasinghe 3 min read · Just now D rawing is a way of staying. Some people raise a camera and steal a fraction of light before it alters. Others reach for words, as though language were a net cast over a restless sea. I have done both. I have come to see that each act begins in the same unease — the knowledge that what is before us will not remain. There is, however, another discipline. You do not move your hand at all. You do not reach for lens or pen. You remain still. You allow the moment to gather around you. You feel the temperature of it. You listen for its small sounds — the scrape of a chair, the breath between sentences, the faint tremor in a voice that tries to be certain. You do not interfere. You stand inside it until it accepts you. Seeing, in this sense, is not a casual glance. It is an act of consent. You allow the scene to enter you. You agree to carry it. I have been fortunate. I can draw well enough to suggest a likeness with a few deli...