Thilak, the boy from Galle
Thilak, the boy from Galle Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 4 days ago It was in the quiet, dust-specked days of 1973 that I first met Thilak Pathirana. I was eighteen then, the youngest lad in our batch at the apprentice school for overseas telegraphy. In those times, long before the world began rushing through invisible wires and fast internet, we were learning the gentle, deliberate art of tapping out messages to far-off places. I had come straight out of a Colombo Christian school, proper and perhaps a little too neat around the edges. Thilak was quite different. Fresh from Mahinda College down in Galle, he possessed a raw, restless energy. He spoke quickly, with a brutal, unpolished honesty that took me by surprise, his broad smile infectious and he lodged in a modest boarding house in Nugegoda. During our quiet moments, he would sit and narrate the endlessly colourful goings-on of that place, turning the ordinary routine of landladies and fellow boarders into small, lively dr...