Chandana Thanthrige
Chandana Thanthrige
A note from the writer: I am Denzil Jayasinghe. In the early nineties, I was the hiring manager for Chandana Thanthrige at Standard Chartered Bank in Dubai. This is his story – and mine, a little. It was triggered by us meeting again in Sydney, on Sunday the 19th of April 2026.
There are people you meet early in life who stay with you, not because of anything dramatic, but because of the quality of their smile. Chandana Thanthrige had that kind of smile. Permanent, unhurried, as though he had decided long ago that the world was, on the whole, a reasonable place.
He came to Standard Chartered Dubai in the early nineties, fresh from Trinity College in Kandy – a school the hills of Ceylon have always been proud of, particularly for the cricketers it sends into the world. Chandana had played for his college in his younger years, though he had not come to Dubai with a bat. He had come with something quieter and more useful: no visible fear. Raw talent is a gift, but raw talent without anxiety is something rarer still. I was his hiring manager, and I remember thinking exactly that. Linda Simon in what we then called HR handled the paperwork. I handled the good fortune of saying yes.
He left Standard Chartered Dubai in 1998 for ABN Amro, still in Dubai. Then came Singapore, a city-state with a way of holding on to people who arrive with ambition and an open mind. From there it was RBS, and now Bank of America, where he has risen to Managing Director, quietly moving money across the world for major clients and managing relationships with the financial institutions that are themselves the bank’s clients. Two decades in Singapore have passed; he is a citizen now. The city has claimed him entirely — and he has let it.
Along the way he married Nadeesha, a professional from Singapore, and they have two daughters – one in UK, another in Sydney, which is where I now live. The world has grown smaller in the ways that matter.
I visited them in Singapore in 2023 and stayed in their home. There is something quietly moving about sitting at the table of a man you once hired as a young fellow with everything still ahead of him, watching him pour the tea with the same unhurried calm he always had.
And then, in April 2026, Chandana came to Sydney for work. We met again. He still had the smile.
I thought of Kandy, and Dubai, and the long years in between. Some circles, when they close, close gently.
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