The Photograph

The Photograph

Denzil Jayasinghe
2 min readJust now

Itwas in my fourteenth year, during one of those long, warm afternoons when time seemed to stretch out like a sleeping cat, that I found myself at my uncle Mahappa’s house. Out on the front porch sat my grandmother, Kadayamma, presiding over her world as she always did. She kept a small boutique there — a modest wooden shelf lined with jars of boiled sweets, soap cakes, and small everyday trinkets — and spent her hours pleasantly chatting with the neighbours who dropped by to buy a copper’s worth of goods.

Seeing me standing there in the heat, she turned to her little store, reached inside, and popped open a cold bottle of Orange Barley. Without a word, she poured out a full, overflowing glass and handed it to me.

Back home, such a treat was a rare and precious thing. We children were only ever given tiny, cautious portions, usually whatever small splash was left at the bottom of a bottle after a visitor had finished their drink and taken their leave. But here, with Kadayamma, there were no such rules. I took the glass and gulped it down in one glorious, unbroken swallow, the sweet, fizzy liquid cold against my throat — a brief moment of pure, unmeasured luxury on a quiet village afternoon.

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Presently, Mahamma, my uncle’s wife, called me away into the cool shadows of their tiny house. It was a lively, crowded home, teeming with my young cousins running about. She led me to a large wooden storage box (පෙට්ටගම) that sat prominently in the family hall. Opening its heavy lid, she began rummaging through a treasury of old papers, trinkets, and forgotten family heirlooms, finally retrieving a small photograph that was slowly gathering dust.

I took the print in my hands. It was a sepia-toned window into a world just before my own: my grandfather — my father’s father — standing alongside a young Kadayamma, her elder brother looking sturdy at eighteen, and my father, who appeared to be about fourteen himself, just my age. It must have been taken barely a year before my grandfather passed away.

I looked closely at my father’s image — a young boy wearing a crisp white shirt and white shorts, his thin, bony legs sticking out underneath. Standing there in that quiet hallway, holding the dusty print, I felt a strange and gentle pull across time, realizing that long before he became the anchor of my world, he too had been just a boy with spindly legs, stepping carefully into an uncertain future.

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