Frames from a Wandering Life
Frames from a Wandering Life
Every move you make, every step you take, there is some part of me, Denzil, standing quietly at the corner, watching, the way a boy watches a favourite scene in an old film, knowing every frame and yet surprised each time it appears.
I have been a movie buff for as long as I can remember. Most days I watch a film, or at least half of one. Series, I avoid; they are greedy things, always asking for “one more episode”, and I have learnt that it is wiser not to make a habit of addiction, however charming its face.
My mind has always worked like a small, private cinema. I carry bright reels of my school days, my early youth in Sri Lanka, and those first Dubai years. I see them in colour, the blue of a classroom window, the yellow dust of a road, the neon glow on a Deira street at midnight. Faces and names come later; they hang themselves on these pictures like signboards on familiar houses. Perhaps some doctor would call it a mild shade of ADHD; I only know that my head is crowded with images that refuse to fade.
There is, however, another side to this gift. While I remember the scenery very well, I sometimes miss the expression on the fellow traveller’s face. I do not always catch, in the moment, how someone is feeling, and so my replies arrive slightly out of tune. I did not notice this in myself, but my children did. They are in their thirties now, parents and professionals, and they have gently informed me that, for all my sharp eyes, I can be a little short‑sighted when it comes to other people’s reactions.
Once, walking through a busy street in Seoul with some of my team from Hong Kong, one of them remarked on a tiny detail I had pointed out, a shop sign, a child’s game on the pavement, some small thing that most people would step past. At the time I laughed it off. Only later did I realise that not everyone is watching the world the way I do, always collecting, always storing away.
In my twenties, I lived in inner‑city Sharjah, wedged into a neighbourhood where every doorway held a different story. I shared rooms and meals with older men, married men, fathers, uncles in all but name, who might easily have been my father’s age; and at the same time I made friends with boys my own age, and a few still in school, their homework smelling of fresh ink and ambition. It was a strange balancing act: one foot in the world of weary breadwinners counting dirhams, the other in the world of eager youngsters counting examination marks.
Some of the older men were always wrestling with money, trying to stretch it over too many needs. A few looked at my steadier salary with the hungry eyes of someone who sees a solution, temporary and two‑legged. The younger ones, on the other hand, discovered that I was good at mathematics and came with their exercise books, hoping I would solve for x and, while I was at it, solve a little of life for them too.
Looking back, I am surprised at how easily I moved between these age groups, without any apps, podcasts or self‑help manuals to advise me. When you are young, you simply feel your way through the crowd, using whatever emotional intelligence God packed into you at birth. You learn when to speak, when to keep quiet, when to joke, and when to retreat with dignity.
Not everyone, of course, was easy to manage. There was one older man who behaved as though my life came under his personal lease. He tried to direct my comings and goings, my friends, even my evenings off. It annoyed me in a way I could not fully express then. For all my outward brashness and fierce independence, I did not yet know how to push back without breaking something important.
Perhaps that is why I keep replaying those years, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Sharjah, Seoul, as if they were favourite films. Each time I watch them I discover some new detail: a gesture I missed, a line of dialogue that now makes sense. And there I am, somewhere in the background of my own story, watching every move and every step, trying to understand the boy I was and the man I became.
Comments
Post a Comment