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The Circle of Friends: A Ceylon Boyhood

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The Circle of Friends: A Ceylon Boyhood Stories from a Time of Simple Joys Denzil Jayasinghe 13 min read · Just now Rohan and the Day of Humiliation T here are moments in childhood that seal friendships forever. Mine with Rohan was sealed on a terrible day when we were both thirteen years old, sitting in Brother Felix’s classroom. Rohan and I had grown up together from the age of five — same school, same class, same teachers. We’d received our first holy communion together, kneeling side by side in our white shirts and pressed shorts. We’d played in the same dusty schoolyards, shared the same dreams, faced the same fears. Rohan had a reputation as the brave one. Nobody dared pick on any boy in our class, knowing that fearless Rohan would come to their defence. He stood against injustice with a passion that sometimes got him into trouble. He believed in fairness above all else — it didn’t matter if you were big or small, rich or poor, smart or struggling. Rohan treated everyone the same...
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Between Shores: A Youth Remembered

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Between Shores: A Youth Remembered A Memoir in the Spirit of Memory Denzil Jayasinghe 11 min read · Just now T he past, I have learned, is not a place we can revisit with any certainty. It is rather like those old photographs that fade with time, the edges curling inward, the faces becoming softer, less distinct, until we can no longer be sure whether we remember the moment itself or merely the photograph of it. And yet, there are some memories that refuse to fade, that insist upon their presence like the smell of smoke from charcoal irons on a humid afternoon in Dalugama. The Laundry by Lal’s Well I was just a boy then, what everyone called simply “Boy,” as if that were name enough for a child in 1967 Ceylon. The country itself was still finding its name, still deciding whether it was Ceylon or Lanka, still adjusting to the weight of independence like a new set of clothes that hadn’t quite been broken in yet. Past Lal’s water well, where we children gathered in the afternoons — not so...
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