A Bridge Across the Creek
A Bridge Across the Creek
Some lives are lived in one place, in one profession, and among one familiar set of names. Mine was not. I arrived in Dubai as a young man from Colombo, expecting little more than a job and a future, and found instead a city, a bank, a handful of extraordinary people, and a life that kept widening long after I thought it had settled. This is not a story of grand design. It is a story of small decisions, long hours, lucky breaks, and the quiet force of migration, work, and memory. It begins with a telex desk, crosses creeks and continents, moves through banks and decades, and ends, for now, with the surprising realisation that I have become a bridge between worlds I never intended to connect.
Alad leaves Colombo for a telex desk in Dubai and somehow ends up a bridge between decades, banks and continents. This is the long, winding story in between.
Chapter 1 — Conscripted by the Alphabet
In every group there is someone who volunteers and someone who is gently pushed forward. I, predictably, was alphabetically shoved to the front.
Let me confess something straight away: I didn’t volunteer to go first. I was conscripted by the alphabet. My name begins with “D,” and Prakash Iyer and Ameer Ali, with the quiet authority of men who enjoy such things, put me at the front of the queue. I accepted my fate with dignity. Mostly.
So here I am. And since this is a gathering of 140 souls, nearly forty percent of whom I’ve never met, I thought I should at least make the introduction worth your while. You arrived after my time, or moved in circles that never quite intersected with mine. That’s exactly why I’ve written at such length. An introduction is wasted on people who already know you. It’s the strangers who deserve the full story.
Chapter 2 — A Boy from Colombo
Lives rarely begin with grand decisions; they begin with small misjudgements, report cards, and one stubborn boy in Colombo who thought classrooms were optional.
Dubai did something to me that no other city has managed. I arrived as a boy and left as a man. Everything in between — the friendships, the late evenings by the creek, the abra rides, the promotions, the quiet ambitions — happened in that city, and it has never quite left me. I doubt it ever will.
I was a contradictory student: I often topped the report card, yet I was entirely uninvested in the classroom. I left school after Grade 10, convinced that formal education and I had reached a natural parting of ways. At sixteen, armed with youthful boldness and a well‑placed letter from the Catholic hierarchy in Sri Lanka, I talked my way into the only private university in the country. By eighteen, I had quietly talked my way back out. That, I later admitted, was a mistake. I was too young, too restless, too sure that the world outside was more interesting than anything inside a lecture hall — which, to be fair, it was.
My father, a steadier man than I have ever been, enrolled me in a telecommunications school run by Cable and Wireless. I didn’t know it then, but that decision would shape everything that followed.
Chapter 3 — Telex and the Creek
If Dubai made me, the InterContinental’s telex room was the mould — humming machines, starched uniforms, and a creek that watched young migrants learn their place.
A year after graduating, I landed in Dubai and took a job at the InterContinental Hotel as a telex operator. I wore a suit and tie. For a young man from Colombo, this felt like arrival. The work was straightforward, and I was the youngest person in the front office. But I had one small edge over my colleagues: I could read the Baudot‑Murray code. It made me faster. It also made me, I suspect, slightly irritating to people who had spent years learning the same thing through hard experience. They were polite. They were not warm. I understood.
Within months, I was looking for a way out.
Chartered Bank found me — or rather, I found it. An English institution, run by Englishmen, with a reassuring sense of order about it. I applied. Barry Northrop, the accountant and second‑in‑command, interviewed me. It was only my second interview in my life, and somehow I walked out with a job offer.
The salary was AED 2,510 a month. I had been earning AED 750. Emboldened, perhaps foolishly, I asked for AED 3,000. Barry smiled the smile of a man who has seen this before, promised a review after probation, and sent me on my way.
There was, however, a complication.
In those days, leaving a job in Dubai wasn’t simply a matter of handing in your notice. Contracts were binding in ways that felt almost personal. My passport was held by the hotel. Breaking the contract risked deportation and a six‑month ban from re‑entry. The sensible thing would have been to wait.
I decided not to wait.
For one month, I worked both jobs. Eight hours at the bank, eight at the hotel. I crossed the creek by abra at odd hours, slept very little, and lived on the particular energy that comes from knowing you’re building something, even if you’re not entirely sure what. I lost a kilogram from 48kgs to 47kgs. I earned more money than I had ever seen. And somewhere in that month of exhaustion, something shifted in me permanently.
In the end, it was Barry who sorted it out. The bank’s commercial manager drove me, in a very polished Mercedes‑Benz, to Galadari’s office, spoke firmly in Arabic, and my passport was returned. With it came a feeling of independence that I’ve carried ever since.
Chapter 4 — The Bank that Built Me
Chartered Bank did not feel like destiny at the time. It felt like air‑conditioning, English accents, and the faint hope that I might amount to something.
Thus began my proper life at the bank.
I started as a telex operator, and I was good at it. There were not many Sri Lankans in those early days, though more would come. My Baudot code knowledge helped connect nearly eighty global locations more efficiently, and in my first month I managed to save the bank a tidy sum in telecommunications costs. A small thing, perhaps. But I remember it.
The real turning point came one afternoon when Adrian Turnbull tapped me on the shoulder while I was sorting cheques. “Anyone can do what you’re doing,” he said, with the cheerful bluntness of a man who considers himself helpful. “We have something better for you.” And just like that, I was pulled into the early days of computerisation — word‑processing systems, PAS, then BBS, then personal computers, which arrived on our desks like strange and slightly threatening houseguests.
The bank was changing rapidly. I was changing with it, though I didn’t always notice at the time.
Chapter 5 — Teams, Titles and a Turn
Titles arrive quietly: “Assistant Officer”, “Covenanted Officer”. You only realise later that each new name is just another way of asking, “What more can you carry?”
Promotions came: Assistant Officer, then Covenanted Officer. By 1990, I was managing a team of around thirty people. One of them, I’m pleased to report, became an ambassador. I like to think the bank had something to do with that. I like to think I did too, in some small way.
And then, true to form, I chose to change direction entirely.
Chapter 6 — Starting Again in Australia
Most people change countries with a plan. I changed countries with three children, a half‑finished sense of direction, and the old familiar itch to move on.
With three children, a career that was going rather well, and no particularly good reason to leave, I left for Australia. There was no grand plan. There rarely is with me. There was only a feeling that it was time, and I’ve learned to trust that feeling, however inconvenient its timing.
Within a month of landing, I’d signed a contract to build a house. Within three months, I had rejoined Standard Chartered, this time in Australia, with a larger territory and broader responsibilities. I travelled across Asia — Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, China. I told myself it was ambition. Looking back, I think it was simply that I’ve never been very good at sitting still.
In 1998, I left again.
Chapter 7 — A Tour of Australian Banking
Once you know how to move inside a bank, banks have a way of passing you along. AMP, Westpac, NAB, CBA — a relay race in suits and lanyards.
What followed were years at AMP, helping build internet banking across several countries, and then a long and complicated relationship with Westpac — a bank so large that it absorbed me, released me, and then absorbed me again. I worked there twice. Over those two stints, I picked up eight different roles, not simultaneously, I should stress, but one after another, because Westpac kept finding things that needed doing and I kept agreeing to do them. It’s that kind of place. I also worked at the National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank, completing what you might reasonably call a tour of the Australian financial system.
Chapter 8 — Listening for a Living
By the time the NSW government found me, I had spent decades talking. The surprise was discovering that my last proper job would be mostly about listening.
In 2019, when retirement was beginning to feel like something I might actually attempt, the New South Wales government offered me a role in customer experience — which is a modern way of saying, go and listen to people, find out what’s making their lives difficult, and try to help. Different from banking, yes. But not, I found, so very different from what the best parts of banking had always been about.
At home, life had been quietly arranging itself into its own patterns.
Chapter 9 — Children, Careers and Circles
You don’t plan a family like a chart. Children arrive, choose their own roads, and one day you look up and realise half of them have wandered back into banking.
My eldest daughter married the son of a former colleague of Dubai, Stewart Keuneman, making their little boy, in my private accounting, a genuine StanChart baby. She is a philanthropist now, raising him alongside Wendell, a venture capitalist who deals in a different kind of future. My second daughter is a senior partner in People and Culture; her partner builds things — actual buildings, with actual roofs over actual people. My third child is a Business Development Manager at Westpac, his partner also a BDM at St George Bank, and they have, it seems, brought the banking habit home. My youngest is in marketing at a university, married to a man who is a graphic artist by day and cattle farmer when the sun is kinder and the land calls him.
I’m still working. I keep saying this will be the last year. I have left organisations thirteen times now, a number I recount with equal parts pride and mild embarrassment. Somewhere in this group, I believe only Raj has me beaten on that particular scoreboard. I’m content with second place.
Chapter 10 — Giving Back Quietly
There comes a point when the only sensible thing to do with your good fortune is to see who else you can quietly pull forward with you.
In the quieter hours, I spend time with young people who are finding their way — First Nations interns, transgender youth — moving through a world that is not always kind to those who don’t fit neatly into it. I try to listen more than I speak. I’m improving.
Our small family charity works on climate change and girls’ education. Not long ago, we built a modest school in central Sri Lanka for seventy‑five marginalised girls, in honour of the housemaid who looked after my children during the Dubai years. She will be the chief guest when it opens. To me, it feels like a circle that has taken a very long time to close, and has closed well.
Chapter 11 — Quiet Outcomes
Now and then, a name comes back to you from a different life, wearing a new title. You remember only the skinny boy, not the partner on his business card.
One more thing, since we’re among friends. Years ago, I tried to help an orphaned boy. He became a partner at PwC in Dubai. The world doesn’t always announce these outcomes. It simply delivers them quietly, and waits for you to notice.
Chapter 12 — A Bridge Between Decades
I thought I was simply doing my job, then simply moving on. Only later did it occur to me that I had become a kind of bridge, spanning years I still don’t quite believe I’ve lived.
I joined this bank in the seventies, when Dubai was still becoming itself — a city building its future in plain sight, and pulling the rest of us along with it. I worked through the eighties, when everything accelerated. I left in the early nineties, just as the boom was finding its full voice. It is a small irony of my life that I tend to leave precisely when things are getting interesting.
And yet here we are, gathered under the same digital roof, connected by the same institution, the same city, the same particular years.
I have become, it seems, a bridge between the decades.
Some of you ping me — people I’ve never met — after reading the stories I’ve posted over the years. You write to say a name rang a bell, or a detail brought something back, or simply that an old evening returned to you for a moment. I didn’t plan for this. I’m not sure one plans for such things. But I find it, quietly and genuinely, one of the more satisfying developments of my later years. A story, it turns out, can travel further than the person who told it.
Some of you will remember Stewart Keuneman, Adrian Turnbull, Paul Rivers, David Gardiner, Barclay Butler, Eugene Ellis, Frederick Ferdinands, Barry Northrop, Ken Gibson, Mike Hyde, Tom Dunton, David Manson, and Charles Gregory. For a long time, they were simply the names on office doors and department lists. But they’ve become something else with time — milestones, familiar and fond, turning up in memory the way they used to turn up in other countries, further along the same road.
That’s the thing about this bank, and this city, and this group. The road bends back on itself. The people you thought you’d left behind are simply waiting a little further on.
I’ve stayed to tell this because, when I sit still and listen to my own memories, the whole unlikely journey feels, quietly and stubbornly, worth setting down. Especially for the forty percent of you I’ve never met. Consider this my handshake across the decades.
Comments
Post a Comment