Posts

Trousers and Trails

Image
Trousers and Trails A Boy’s Odyssey in 1970s Ceylon Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · Just now In Ceylon of 1971, when I was a lanky sixteen-year-old, all sharp elbows and restless dreams, I longed for long trousers — the kind that spoke of manhood, leaving behind the tattered shorts of boyhood like leaves shed in a monsoon wind. My pockets were as empty as the sky before the rains, not a rupee to spare for cloth or a tailor’s craft. So, I turned to my uncle’s old trunk, pulling out a pair of his trousers — sturdy, weathered things, shaped for a man of forty with a life broader than my own. I took them to Prince Tailors, a shadowed nook in the bazaar’s pulsing heart, where the old tailor, his spectacles glinting like twin moons, handled the fabric as if it whispered tales of forgotten years. Those trousers, cut for a grown man’s frame, draped over me like a scarecrow’s cloak, flapping about my skinny legs. The tailor worked his quiet magic, but my dreams of flared bell-bottoms, bold as th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sakkili

Image
Sakkili Voices from the marsh Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 4 days ago A Memoir, Ceylon, 1965 T here was a time, not so long ago, when my afternoons in Wattala felt like entire seasons folded into an hour. In 1965, I was a schoolboy, knickered and brown-kneed, with a satchel that smelt of worn-out books and Bulto toffees. Our school stood near the edge of a marsh — the kind of place where the land wasn’t sure whether it wanted to be earth or water. After the bell rang, I would sometimes slip away. Not home — not yet—but to that narrow path beyond the rusted fence of the sports ground, where the footbridge lay half-rotten, a few planks missing as if time itself had walked across and forgotten its way back. Beyond that was a place few dared to wander, and even fewer spoke about. There, in a soft pocket of trees and tangled grass, stood a scattering of huts — patched together from tin sheets, driftwood, and castaway things. The city’s refuse had found its last breath there, reborn as she...
Post a Comment
Read more