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The Sound of Leaving

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The Sound of Leaving What a thirty-minute cassette taught me about distance, family, and departure Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 15 hours ago I am an immigrant. That fact feels settled now, almost administrative, but it did not begin that way. I left home when my mother was forty-two and my father forty-nine — ages that once seemed fixed and permanent, like furniture you assume will always remain in place. I was born in Sri Lanka at a time when the country described itself as socialist and behaved accordingly. There were queues for essentials, shortages that were explained with confidence and resolved with nothing, and an absence of anything recognisably Western. Life was orderly in theory, constrained in practice. Ideology was everywhere — spoken with conviction, endured with patience. My father believed in it, genuinely. He was a socialist and a civil servant of some standing, responsible for running the largest local government council outside Colombo. Authority was familiar to me ...
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Between Still Water and Running Water

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Between Still Water and Running Water Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · 10 hours ago T he light lingered that afternoon. A pale wash of grey hovered on the western rim of the sky, as though the day had not quite decided to go. Leo, the waterman, stood on top of the tank and looked around him, taking in the familiar shapes of the world below. He wore a white striped sarong, folded neatly to his knees, and a white vest that had grown soft with years of sun and soap. He lowered himself onto the rounded edge of the tank and leaned forward, peering into its dark, watery mouth. The tank was old and dependable. Leo knew it the way one knows a long-standing companion — by its silences, its faint echoes, and the way the water stirred when disturbed. It spoke to him, if one listened carefully. Below, the council houses lay quiet in the grip of the afternoon heat. Doors were shut, windows drawn halfway, and even the dogs had abandoned their barking. It was one of those hours when the world seemed to...
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Rupees, Dirhams, and Growing Up

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Rupees, Dirhams, and Growing Up From Borrowing to Becoming Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 17 hours ago W hichever way I looked at it, my salary refused to behave itself. By the last two weeks of every month, it would shrink into nothingness, leaving me wandering — somewhat sheepishly — into my mother’s room. She never asked unnecessary questions; she simply opened her purse and handed me a fifty rupees, sometimes two. In those years, she was my permanent bank, my monthly lender of hope. And she lent with the amused certainty of someone who knew I would be back again in a fortnight, pockets empty, promises well-rehearsed. It had all begun rather innocently with small borrowings of ten rupees. But like so many habits picked up in youth, the amounts grew with alarming ease. By month’s end, I would owe her one or two hundred, and be left with perhaps a hundred and fifty to carry on with my worldly ambitions. Then, when I turned eighteen, my father handed me a savings passbook. Seven hundre...
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