Standard Chartered Days
Standard Chartered Days
A Memoir
I. Arrival
Ten dollars. Hidden in my back pocket, folded small, as if the note itself knew it shouldn’t be there. Ceylon had banned taking money out altogether — not restricted, banned — and so I left with what the law allowed, which was nothing, and what a young man’s nerve allowed, which was ten dollars and the good sense to say nothing about it.
I arrived in Dubai in the seventies with that small secret and a confidence stitched together from optimism and necessity. Ceylon was behind me — socialist, a little weary, newly calling itself Sri Lanka, though the new name sat uneasily for a while, like a jacket bought a size too large. The Gulf was something else entirely. Wide and hot and strangely impersonal, the way only places full of strangers can be. But underneath all that heat and indifference, possibility hummed quietly, the way it does in places that have not yet decided what they will become.
The bank was called the Chartered Bank then. It would later become Standard Chartered. I was a clerk. Two rungs below the officers. One rung above invisibility.
Dubai in those years was not yet the city it would become. The creek still ran through the middle of things. Abras crossed it slowly. The roads were sandy and the buildings low, and in the middle of the day the heat was a physical presence, something you leaned into rather than walked through. I loved it. I was twenty‑something and the world, dusty and golden, felt like mine to discover.
II. The Telex Room
My job was to man the telex machine and the bank’s private communication network. It was a one‑boy show.
Messages flew across the world — to London, New York, Singapore, Bahrain. Currency deals, fund transfers, trade instructions. Each one had to be typed, transmitted, authenticated, and filed before the day’s end. No tomorrow for yesterday’s work.
My days began at seven. By three, if the stars aligned, I was free. More often, four or five. Then I’d hop onto an abra, cross the creek, squeeze into a shared taxi, and make my way to the youth club where a table tennis paddle awaited.
I remember one particular afternoon. I had arranged a match with Rohit, a friend who played with a ferocity that made you feel the game mattered. My fingers moved faster than usual across the keyboard that day — not from skill, but from wanting to be elsewhere. The office, the telex, the careful authentication of test codes: all of it receded behind the thought of a table, a ball, the clean geometry of the game.
I did not make it that day.
III. The Officers
The hierarchy at the bank was a living thing. You felt it in the morning.
Tea was served first to the British managers. Then the accountant. Then the young British officers — Barclay, Colin, Rod, Mark, Mike, fresh out of universities, sent on rotation through Asia and Africa and the Middle East. Then the assistant officers, always Asian. Then the clerks. Women before men, roughly by seniority. I was usually last. Sometimes forgotten until I gave a quiet reminder, receiving my cup long after ten, sometimes lukewarm by then.
Nobody said this was the order. Nobody needed to.
The officers were pleasant enough, especially in private. In public, decorum prevailed. They were Mr Butler, Mr Geddes, Mr Harrison. In the corridor, always. At their desks, always. It was only behind closed doors that they became Barclay, Colin, Mark. My parents had raised me to question such things — Sri Lanka had its own colonial scars — so I used their first names quietly, only when no one was listening. They never corrected me.
Barclay Butler was my manager. A young Brit with a sports car and a carefree grin. His father was a banker in Oman. He was born to privilege but wore it lightly, breaking rules with a wink. In a daring act of trust, he handed me the task of authenticating messages — a job meant only for covenanted officers. It was our little secret, a rebellion against the bank’s stuffy rules. I felt like a conspirator in a small adventure, though I knew it was a risk. Fraud was a shadow that loomed large, especially in far‑off African branches where test keys were sometimes stolen.
IV. The Sacred Machine
In the corner of the Accounts Department, beside a sign that read PLEASE HANDLE CAREFULLY in solemn capital letters, sat the Sharp photocopier.
It arrived on a Thursday, wheeled in on a trolley, escorted by two technicians in blue uniforms. They installed it, muttered instructions that sounded like a blessing, and disappeared into the fluorescent haze.
From that day, it was sacred. Two men were permitted near it: Hussain, the senior peon, who carried himself like a Mughal courtier; and Hamza, his soft‑spoken sidekick, who moved like a librarian guarding rare manuscripts. Together they were the brotherhood of toner and trust.
The Sharp churned out five pages a minute in black and white on a good day, its light bar gliding across the glass with the gravitas of a celestial event. Staff queued with documents like offerings. Each copy emerged slightly crooked, faintly ghosted, always warm.
I was not supposed to use it.
I used it anyway.
I needed a liquor licence — a prized document in Dubai, requiring a salary certificate, employer approval, and a copy of one’s passport. I rarely drank. But holding a licence felt like boasting a cousin in England or a colour television. Abdullah Sayyah, the staff fixer, had offered to arrange it. All I needed was a photocopy of my passport.
I placed my blue passport on the glass. Closed the lid. Pressed the button. The machine hummed.
Arif from Accounts spotted me. He was tall, broad, with eyes sharp enough to slice paper, and he thrived on order. He stormed to Fakhruddin, pointing at me with the drama of a man reporting a stolen gold bar.
I walked over. Stood between them. Fished a dirham coin from my pocket and placed it on the desk.
“I’ll pay for the photocopy,” I said.
Silence.
Arif stared at the coin. Fakhruddin looked away. I walked back to my room.
Some victories are small. You take them anyway.
V. The Toilet
There are things you remember not because they were dramatic but because they were ordinary. The ordinary is sometimes harder to carry.
The staff toilet was divided. One side for the British officers. One side for the rest. Asian clerks, Pakistani peons, the occasional Sri Lankan — we used ours. The British used theirs. No one announced this. No sign said so. It was simply understood, the way the tea order was understood, the way the first names were reserved for private spaces.
I was young. I had been raised to question. But I also needed the job. And so I learned what most people in that building already knew: that there are battles you choose and battles you swallow, and wisdom lies in knowing which is which.
I swallowed this one.
VI. The Market
One lunchtime, instead of the tea stall and my solitary cigarette, I wandered into the market behind the bank.
Deeper into the alleys, the city’s clamour faded. An unfamiliar scent, earthy and metallic, began to fill the air. Then a sound: low, guttural, collective, like animal fear.
I rounded a corner and found the slaughterhouse.
A concrete and steel structure, its walls stained a sickly red darkened to brown. From within: the frantic bleating of sheep, the efficient clang of metal. A man nearby, noticing my expression, said simply, “That’s the slaughterhouse, bhai. Brings in paisa for Dubai people.”
Money meant nothing to me in that moment. I saw the eyes of the animals — wide, panicked, already knowing. I smelled the blood. I heard the low prayers recited as each life ended.
The image did not leave me for days. I withdrew from conversations. My appetite diminished. A quiet unease settled over everything. The life I had built — the fluorescent lights, the telex machine, the tea served in order — now seemed thin, a curtain over something I could not name.
I had come to the Gulf to make something of myself. I was still doing that. But I had seen something I could not unsee, and I understood, for the first time, that this city’s prosperity rested on arrangements I had not been asked to approve.
VII. The Doctor
The young man — let us call him me, though I was barely that yet — shuffled towards Jayne’s desk with uncharacteristic hesitance.
“Jayne,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Can I please have a letter to the doctor?”
His eyes said: please do not ask.
Jayne was the staff controller. She had a professional gift for seeing without commenting. She reached for the form without a word, typed the referral, sealed it in an envelope.
“I hope you feel better soon,” she said.
Outside, in the Dubai heat, he walked towards the Mohebi Centre and the clinic on the upper floor. A urinary tract infection — embarrassing beyond all proportion to its seriousness, as the body’s minor indignities always are when you are young and proud and far from home.
Dr Peter Varghese received him without judgment. The consultation was brief. The prescription was straightforward.
Walking back, the young man felt the particular lightness of having been seen and not shamed. In a city where you could feel invisible most of the time, it was not nothing.
VIII. The Gulf War
In 1990, Saddam Hussein’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, and the comfortable expatriate bubble in the Gulf shattered.
I was living in Dubai with my wife and three children, all under four years old. At the bank, British executives swiftly evacuated their families to the safety of the UK. Middle managers like me were quietly expected to remain. For Asian workers, sending families home was not financially possible. We faced what came, together.
Bank leadership offered reassurance: a Boeing 747 was allegedly waiting at Dubai Airport, ready to fly us to Bombay at the first sign of a chemical attack, with two thousand dollars per family upon arrival. None of us had seen this mythical plane. In times of crisis, hope becomes its own currency.
I sealed our apartment windows with masking tape. I stocked water, food, medicine. I transformed our home into a small fortress against an invisible threat that might never come. My young children played on the floor, blissfully unaware.
On television, CNN’s Peter Arnett became our lifeline. On Dubai’s streets, Kuwaiti refugees arrived in convoys, their driving reflecting their desperation.
I remember sitting by the window late one night, the children asleep, my wife quiet beside me, and thinking: we are still here. That meant something, though I wasn’t sure yet what.
IX. Steve McCarthy
Most people at the bank never really knew Steve McCarthy. He was a distant figure — a name, an accent, a reputation that preceded him through every corridor. He had come from SCB Kowloon. He was there to transform retail banking. He did not smile during office hours.
His first act was to look at the furniture.
“These grey chairs look dead,” he said.
The next morning, he was on the phone. The following day, samples arrived. He chose the bloodiest shade of red without hesitation. No interior designers. No consultants. Just Steve.
What followed was a metamorphosis. Clerks in white shirts and red ties. Female staff in red lipstick. Suave retail banking officers hired from competitors. Automated systems. Branches gutted and rebuilt — Deira, Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Sharjah. Money was not a factor.
I was his techie. I moved computers and networking equipment from branch to branch, coordinated with Etisalat and IBM and Laing O’Rourke, watched British supervisors receive instructions at machine‑gun pace and tried not to feel too much sympathy. My job, by comparison, was straightforward.
Steve was difficult. Demanding. Exhausting. He was also loyal, in his way.
When a senior clerk died suddenly of a heart attack, the family’s visa situation dissolved with the sponsorship. The elder son was in America. The younger was sixteen. In Dubai, the rules were impersonal. Without a sponsor, the family was expected to leave quietly.
Steve intervened. He offered both brothers employment.
It was, by one reading, nepotism. By another, it was simply: two young men in freefall, and someone catching them.
The younger joined Consumer Finance. The elder came into retail banking, though the desk life did not suit him and he eventually followed a different path. But the foundation had been laid. They had been given a chance when the rules said they had none.
That was Steve. Red chairs and rigid standards. And this.
X. Return
In 1996, I came back to Dubai after three years in Sydney.
From the back seat of a Toyota taxi — upholstery cracked with heat — I watched the skyline rise as we crossed the Al Maktoum Bridge. The driver, a Pakistani man in a salwar kameez, spoke no English. We exchanged Urdu words and gestures. He navigated the city’s arteries with the familiarity of someone who had driven them ten thousand times.
The skyline was fuller now. More metallic. More vertical.
What caught my eye was the old Inter‑Continental Hotel. In the seventies, I had worked there — as a young man newly arrived with little more than ten dollars and ambition. That evening, I would be checking in as a guest. As an Australian.
A few years in Sydney had changed me. I had come back not just older but altered. A father of four. A holder of a first‑world passport. No visa queue. No questions.
The taxi stopped. Not at the entrance. Across a wide, busy road. The driver pointed. I was to cross on foot. No signal. No crossing. Just heat, horns, and the indifference of traffic.
I stood at the roadside, luggage in hand, watching the cars stream past.
What once had felt normal — routine, even — now felt jagged. Sydney had changed the way I moved through the world. It had changed what I expected from it. And so the city that had made me felt, for the first time, foreign.
I stood there a moment longer than necessary. Then I crossed.
Coda (Epilogue)
There is a WhatsApp group now, 140 of us, former Standard Chartered Dubai staff from four decades. Messages arrive at odd hours — photographs, news of old colleagues, jokes that only make sense if you were there. Someone will post a picture of the old banking hall. Someone else will remember a name. A birthday will be wished. A death will be announced quietly, with a few words and a long pause before the next message arrives.
We were clerks and managers, British and Asian, Sri Lankan and Indian and Pakistani and Emirati, separated by hierarchy and united by having been, together, in a particular place at a particular time, doing work that no longer exists in the form we knew it.
The telex machine is gone. The grey chairs are gone, replaced by red ones, which are themselves gone now. The Sharp photocopier is gone. The tea order has been rearranged, with self‑serve.
What remains is harder to name. A shared grammar. An instinct for the specific gravity of things — the weight of a dirham coin placed on a desk, the sound of a machine authenticating a payment at seven in the morning, the particular quality of Dubai light through a glass partition, the smell of carbon paper and coffee and the Gulf through an open window.
I was young there. I learned there. I was shaped, in ways I am still discovering, by the ordinary life of an institution that was itself being shaped by a world in motion.
These are the stories I carried out.
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Denzil Jayasinghe was born in Ceylon and worked at Standard Chartered Bank in Dubai from the late 1970s through the 1990s and in Australia. He lives in Sydney.
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