There are nights one remembers for a lifetime. Not because anything extraordinary happens, but because, without our knowing it, something is coming to an end.

This was one such night.

I was standing beside the old well, somewhere in the darkness of our garden in Dalugama. I had stripped off my clothes and lowered a bucket into the cool water. My arm was still aching from the nurse’s needle that afternoon. She had given me injections for malaria and typhoid, and had complained bitterly about my thin arms. I had thought her a thoroughly unpleasant woman.

Now, with the bucket in my hands, I was less concerned about her opinion of me.

I lifted the metal bucket to my lips and drank. Half its contents disappeared before I remembered that this was to be my last night at home.

My last bath at this well.

My last drink of water from this old metal bucket.

My last evening standing naked beneath the familiar shrubs, with only the darkness and the occasional night insect for company.

Tomorrow I would be thousands of kilometres away, in a country where the water would come from taps, the streets would be unfamiliar, and nobody would know me.

For fifteen years or more, this well had been part of my life. It had supplied the water that washed away the dust of the day and refreshed me before sleep. I had never thought of it as anything special. Wells, after all, were simply wells. One did not become sentimental about them.

Yet that night, I found myself remembering every detail.

As usual, I drew ten buckets of water before soaping myself with a red Lifebuoy bar. Then another ten to wash away the soap. I had always followed this ritual with military precision. Even as a boy, I had an instinct for counting things. Perhaps the project manager in me had been born much earlier than I realised.

Twenty buckets of water, and a sore arm to prove it.

I put on my freshly washed striped cotton sarong. It had been laundered by my mother, who had a particular talent for making even the most ordinary clothes feel new.

Then I walked back to the house.

My younger sister and brother were asleep. My father was making arrangements for the journey ahead, while my mother and grandaunt were in the kitchen preparing food for the following day.

I entered my bedroom.

It was a mess.

Clothes lay scattered over the wooden rack. Shoes and sandals occupied the floor. My dark blue crimplene suit, which I was to wear the next day, hung waiting for me. On the little desk were my passport, air ticket, vaccination documents, journal and rosary. In the corner stood an old blue Ford suitcase, a survivor from my boarding-school days.

I had never been so untidy in my life.

But for once I did not care.

There were more important things to attend to. I was leaving the country, and there was no time to worry about a badly arranged bedroom.

I was exhausted. The day had been spent travelling across the city in the heat, visiting the vaccination centre and the travel agency. My arm throbbed where the nurse had nearly broken her needle. I climbed into bed and stretched myself out.

Outside, a neighbour’s dog barked. I looked through the metal window grille, but there was nothing to see. The garden was swallowed by darkness. A cool breeze slipped through the open window, carrying with it the sounds and smells of home.

From the kitchen came the faint murmur of women’s voices. My mother and grandaunt were still at work. The smell of food drifted into my room.

I knew that by tomorrow evening I would no longer be able to smell it.

I switched on my little Sony transistor radio. It was a familiar companion, bought for Rupees 210 from Siedles Cineradio only three years ago, and I tuned it to a Hindi music station. Kishore Kumar was singing softly. I intended to leave the radio behind for my younger brother. He would have it now, just as he would have the room.

I looked around.

The walls were decorated with posters of Santana, David Bowie, Bay City Rollers and Elton John. I wondered whether I should take them down. Perhaps my brother would want them. Perhaps he would prefer his own heroes.

Then I began worrying about my diaries. They contained the private thoughts of a young man who had not yet learnt that paper has a habit of outliving its owner. I checked beneath the mattress, wondering whether there were any embarrassing secrets I had forgotten to remove.

There were other things to consider, too. The room had once belonged to my grandfather, Lewis Jayawardane. His initials, L.J., were cemented into the ventilation grille above the posters.

He had been a school principal when he occupied this room. Later, he had spent his final days here, cared for by my mother.

I remembered seeing him in pain when I was five. The memory was incomplete, as childhood memories often are, but it had remained somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

I looked at those initials.

The room had witnessed my grandfather’s life, his suffering and his passing. It had watched me grow from a child into a restless young man. And now I was leaving it behind.

Perhaps rooms have memories of their own.

Perhaps they keep the voices of those who once slept in them.

I wondered what memories I would leave behind.

Then the frosted glass door opened.

It was my father.

He usually came into my room after I had fallen asleep. He would switch off the radio and pull a sheet over me if my sarong had slipped during the night. It was a small ritual, one I had never thought much about.

But tonight he came in while I was awake.

I sat up.

He pulled a chair towards the bed and began talking about my departure. He said it had not come as a surprise to him. He had known for some time that I wanted to leave.

I gathered enough courage to ask him what would happen after I was gone.

He moved from the chair and sat beside me on the bed. Then he placed his hand on my bare shoulder.

“You will do well, Denzil, my son. Look after your mother, your sister and brother. Always.”

He put particular emphasis on that last word.

Always.

I was too young to understand the full weight of what he was saying. I had imagined departure as an adventure, a new country, a new job and a chance to make something of myself.

My father was talking about responsibility.

His hand was rough and firm. Mine were thin, with long fingers. I could feel the difference between us in that simple touch. My arm was still hurting from the injections and the twenty buckets of water, but I did not tell him.

I wanted him to keep his hand there.

There was something in that moment I could not explain. A strange emptiness began to form somewhere inside me. I felt the back of my eyes tightening.

I looked away.

My father had always been a man of few words. He was not one to make a ceremony of affection. But when he spoke, his words stayed.

He said that the previous week had been unreal.

He was right.

I had managed to obtain a passport in less than ten days, after negotiating a series of bureaucratic obstacles that seemed designed to discourage young people from leaving the country. I had resigned from my job, breaking an apprenticeship contract and leaving my father to face the financial penalty. I had also almost emptied the savings account he had opened for me when I was a child.

I had not given much thought to the consequences.

My mind had been fixed on getting away.

My father, as usual, had agreed to take care of the mess.

I had been rather good at making messes. He had been rather good at cleaning them up.

When he finally left the room, I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I could not sleep. The radio continued playing softly, but I was no longer listening.

I thought about my friends.

There were so many of them. Friends who had shared my adventures, my clothes, my money and occasionally my troubles. Some had slept in this very bed, using my pillow and bedsheet as though they belonged to them. Others had accompanied me on journeys across the country, to music shows, carnivals and places where young men went in search of excitement.

There had been girlfriends, too, and a few romantic encounters that seemed terribly important at the time.

Would I miss them?

Of course.

I thought about my green Lambretta scooter, its registration number 5ශ්‍රි8197. It was an unusual shade of green and had given me considerable pleasure. I consoled myself by imagining that one day I would own a shiny Volkswagen Golf.

Youth has a wonderful capacity for replacing one dream with another.

But beneath these thoughts was a question I did not want to confront.

Was I doing the right thing?

I turned on my side and closed my eyes.

Then my mother came in.

She did not say anything at first. She sat on the floor beside my pillow and placed her hand on my head.

I was too tired to sit up.

Then I realised she was crying.

This was not something I was accustomed to seeing. My mother was the strong one in our household. She was the person who kept things together, who knew where everything was, who could manage a crisis without appearing to be troubled by it.

I had never imagined that she might be so vulnerable.

Her eyes were red. Her voice trembled.

“You have always been special to me, my eldest, my firstborn. When you had whooping cough as a little boy, I was frightened you would die. I am sorry if I have been too hard on you.”

She continued stroking my hair.

I lay there, unable to respond.

She was telling me how much she loved me. Not in the usual practical ways mothers express affection, through food, money, instructions and worry, but openly, with tears.

It was the second time I had seen her cry. The first had been when my grandfather died.

I did not know what to do.

I had spent years arguing with her, disobeying her and occasionally behaving as though she were the greatest obstacle to my freedom. Now she was sitting beside me, touching my face, and I felt like a small boy again.

I wanted to say something. Anything.

But the words would not come.

She eventually left the room.

I remained still, looking into the darkness.

Something had changed.

I thought of all the times I had stayed out late, returned home the following morning, smoked with friends, drunk too much and ignored her instructions. I remembered the arguments over dinner, the untidy bedroom and the money I had borrowed whenever my pockets were empty.

My mother had been my first bank. She knew I would be broke again the following month, but she lent me money anyway.

She also stayed awake until I came home.

I had thought her anger was unreasonable. I had never quite understood the anxiety behind it. When I returned safely the next morning, I saw only her fury, not the sleepless night that had preceded it.

She had also welcomed my friends into our home, feeding them and looking after them as though they were her own children.

I had taken all of this for granted.

That night, for the first time, I began to understand the price my parents had paid for my independence.

Outside, the night remained warm and still. I left the window open. The radio continued playing, and later the station moved to the familiar sad songs of Mohammed Rafi.

I thought about my father, my mother, my sister and my brother.

Tomorrow I would leave them.

I was going away to make a life for myself, but I was also leaving behind a life that had been made for me by others.

Eventually, I fell asleep.

The following day, I left Sri Lanka.

My father was forty-nine and my mother forty-two when they let me go. My sister was seventeen and my younger brother thirteen.

I was the eldest child, and perhaps that made my departure a little harder for them.

I was not to know then how long the journey would be, or how many different homes I would occupy in the years ahead. I did not know that one day I would look back at that small bedroom and remember the initials above the posters, the red Lifebuoy soap, the metal bucket and the two people who came to see me before I left.

I thought I was going in search of a future.

I did not realise how much of my past I was carrying with me.

Many years later

Life has a curious way of returning us to places we thought we had left behind.

About twenty-five years later, my eldest daughter left home to attend university. She was going to Bathurst, only about 300 kilometres from Sydney. It was hardly an expedition to another country, and certainly not the 3,000 kilometres I had travelled when I left Sri Lanka.

Yet that night, I felt something familiar.

There was the same hollow feeling in my chest. The same reluctance to accept that the house would be different the following morning. I remembered my father’s hand on my shoulder and my mother’s tears beside my pillow.

Only now did I understand them.

I had become the parent.

Over the years, my other children left home too. One travelled to Washington DC at twenty-one. Another took a year away to backpack through South America. Others left for university, new beginnings and adventures of their own.

Each departure brought back something of that night in Dalugama.

I began to understand that parents do not raise children to keep them. They raise them to give them the courage to leave.

My parents had done that for me. They had allowed me to make mistakes, to take risks, to travel into an unfamiliar world and discover my own place in it. They had given me the freedom I had mistaken for something I had earned entirely by myself.

It had been their gift.

And when my own children left, I tried, in my own way, to give them the same gift.

I still remember that last night at home. I remember the well, the cold water, the old blue suitcase and the little transistor radio playing Kishore Kumar and Mohammed Rafi.

Most of all, I remember two visits to my bedroom.

One by my father, whose rough hand rested on my shoulder as he entrusted me with the family.

The other by my mother, whose tears told me everything she had perhaps never said aloud.

I left home thinking I was beginning my life.

Only much later did I understand that they had been preparing me for it all along.

There are quiet, forgotten corners of the world where people do not merely live alongside nature, but share the simple, daily rhythm of their lives with the trees. Mudiyansegewatta was one such sanctuary.

Nestled gently in the heart of Dalugama, just behind the weathered, sun-bleached walls of the old church, it sat quietly sandwiched between a sprawling green paddy field and the peaceful Catholic cemetery, where many of our ancestors rested beneath the shade. The air there always carried a cool, moist stillness, smelling faintly of damp earth, rain, and fallen leaves. It was a generous piece of ground, ever hospitable to a drifting seed and welcoming to eager, seeking roots.

It was an old neighbourhood, dusted with the soft patina of years gone by. The land had originally belonged to an Amerasinghe — a distant branch of the family tied somewhere to the gentle tapestry of my grandmother’s line. Though time has moved on, the spirit of the place remains untouched in my mind. The people here shared a quiet, enduring friendship with the trees — a silent bond born of passing seasons, shared shade, and roots that ran far deeper than memory.

Mudiyansegewatta was low and flat. From the ponds in the paddy fields behind us, large water monitors — the kabara goya — would occasionally wander into our gardens with a slow, ancient dignity. They were peaceful, solitary creatures that meant no harm to anyone. Then there were the smaller land monitors, the thala goya, rustling about in the dry bushes. Though some of the village folk would hunt them for their meat, we never touched them; in our family, we preferred to let wild things be.

I grew up in this quiet village, living there from the time I was a four-year-old boy until the days of my youth drew to a close and I left for the wider world. My grandfather had built a small, unpretentious house here — a modest home, not a grand bungalow — for himself and his children. I was told years later that he built it as a refuge of sorts, a peaceful sanctuary to escape the dark shadows of my grandmother’s mental illness.

In those days, I needed no name of my own. Everyone knew me simply as my father’s son, or my mother’s boy, or the grandchild of the old gentleman who passed away just two short years after we made Mudiyansegewatta our home. And a few of the older folk still remembered my grandmother — that gentle soul who walked beside me to school every single morning, holding my hand until I turned eleven and thought myself old enough to face the world alone.

This quiet corner was also home to a generous patch of inherited earth — a piece of land belonging to my maternal grandmother that had been written directly to me before I even understood the value of real estate, long before I ever thought of the millions properties command today in places like Australia. It bypassed my parents completely, passing from my grandmother straight into my hands. Looking back, I am deeply grateful for that gesture. As a young fellow, I never viewed land as something to hoard or boast about; it was simply a modest appendage to be used for the betterment of the family, long before I ever gave a thought to building a life of my own. It reflected the deep trust my parents placed in me, though I must confess I was a bit of a wild boy back then, living entirely for the day.

That patch of ground was home to about fifty coconut trees, three towering jackfruit trees, forty banana trees, guava trees, two naminan trees, and a few straggling coffee bushes. This was not to mention the pineapple plantation we owned some five kilometres away in my grandfather’s ancestral village in Eldeniya, which also included a small paddy field harvested by a local family for generations.

Out on our front porch, rows of potted crotons stood in heavy cement pots, their leaves bursting in brilliant hues of yellow, red, orange, and deep green. But the real wonder lay hidden beneath them. Plump, solitary frogs — painted in vivid patterns of white, red, and green — made the damp undersides of those pots their quiet sanctuary. I would carefully lift a pot just to admire them; unlike the skinny, dark green frogs that skittered across the village, these plump creatures stayed perfectly still, undisturbed in their cool, secret shade.

Yet I grew up without dwelling on these ancestral possessions, as so many boys in Ceylon were prone to do. They were just there, part of the scenery, part of the quiet background of life. Perhaps it was because we were surrounded by simpler lives — poor relatives on both sides of the family, cousins who attended the local village schools, and my mother’s kin living in humble dwellings without electricity or running water. We were natural socialists at heart, long before any of us had a name for it; fairness and humility were woven into our very DNA.

Now, whenever I return, I travel quietly in a car — either in a hired cab or seated beside a friend’s driver — for this is, unashamedly, a pilgrimage of the heart.

My first stop is always the cemetery, to visit the graves of my paternal grandmother, my father, and my mother. They lie resting together in the very same plot of earth — and rightly so, for they are the quiet pillars of my lineage. I consider myself fortunate to have stood by and witnessed the final journeys of two of them: my grandmother first, back in 1974 when I was barely nineteen and full of youth; and my father, twenty-five years after I had set sail from Sri Lanka. My mother followed him a decade later, though I was far away and not beside her when she passed.

These days, I find myself wandering through Mudiyansegewatta like a stranger searching for a forgotten dream. The old landscape has slipped away, leaving behind only a few sturdy old homes that have stubbornly resisted change. Where there was once open ground, tall concrete walls have sprung up everywhere. Back in our day, no one bothered with walls. Only makeshift fences of sticks and overgrown hedges marked where one garden ended and another began — and even those were cheerful misdirection, completely ignored by young boys like us, who regarded the entire village as our personal playground.

My grandfather’s house is no more; time and progress have claimed it, and it has been demolished. In its place stand three new homes, some rising three storeys high. I intentionally avert my gaze from those grounds, lest they stir heavy thoughts I would rather leave undisturbed.

I do not even bring myself to look at the fourth home — the grand, modern house I had built in my mid-twenties, funded by the petrodollars I earned during those intense years in Dubai. Back then, Mudiyansegewatta had seen nothing like it. It was designed for free by Dixon De Silva, a prominent architect of the era whose sons were my dear friends, and its construction was meticulously supervised by Raymond, the premier builder in Dalugama — a man who was far from cheap, but whose absolute mantra was quality.

Everything in that house spoke a new, exotic design language born of Dubai and distant places. Its interior was infused with the elegant taste of an aunt from Delhi, Rani Ralli, while the kitchen fittings and bathroom fixtures were all air-freighted directly from Dubai — for sea freight was an unheard-of luxury in those early Gulf days. It was a proud monument of youth and ambition, but today, like much of the old land, I prefer to let it live quietly only in my memory.

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.

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.

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 dramas.

We clicked almost at once. During our midday breaks, we would wander off to local eating houses, the air thick with the aroma of hot tea, spices, and frying dough. We had little to our names, often borrowing small sums of rupees back and forth, completely untroubled by the future and simply set on enjoying the day.

The rest of our batch — an all-male group in their early twenties — carried themselves with a certain stiffness. Their families held grand expectations for them, and the weight of those hopes seemed to sit heavy on their shoulders. But I had no grand expectations to live up to, and I don’t suppose Thilak had any either.

Our monthly stipend was two hundred and fifty Sri Lankan rupees. To a young lad in those years, it felt like a small fortune, just enough to keep the tea flowing and the days bright. Thilak was two years older than I was, but there was an easy, welcoming quality to his eagerness for fun and his total lack of pretense. In a world full of young men trying desperately to grow up too fast, his untamed honesty was the most inviting thing I had ever found.

What has etched itself most deeply in my memory was the time Thilak invited me to spend a weekend with him down in Galle. On a Friday afternoon, the moment our lessons finished, we made our way to Colombo Fort station and boarded an express train, the coastal breeze sweeping through the open windows as we rattled south. Galle was not actually Thilak’s birthplace — that was Matara, some forty kilometers further down the coast — but having spent his school days there, he claimed Galle as his true home. When we arrived, his friend Piyasiri, whose family ran a business, was waiting to receive us. We stayed under Piyasiri’s roof for the weekend, treated like old companions.

The highlight of that trip was a morning when Thilak took me into Galle town for a cup of tea. As we sat there in the small restaurant, Mr. Dahanayake, the local Member of Parliament, casually walked in and took a seat at a table, just as ordinary and unassuming as the two of us. He was a famous figure — a former Prime Minister of our island nation — known everywhere for his eccentric, unvarnished simplicity. Folks still talked about the time he had marched into Parliament wearing only a loincloth to protest the rationing of cloth. There he sat, quietly sipping his morning tea while reading the Dinamina newspaper. When he finished, he ambled up to the cashier’s counter, paid his few cents, and walked out into the dusty street. It was a wonderful, unscripted slice of small-town life, where even statesmen lived simply among the people.

Yet, despite the warmth of that weekend, youth has a way of scattering friends to the wind. Not long after, Thilak was offered a clerk’s position at the People’s Bank. He packed up his things, left the apprentice school, and stepped into the world of banking. I was offered a bank job too, but I chose to decline it, opting to stay on and master the telegraph keys. And just like that, our shared chapter came to a gentle end.

Decades drifted by. Life had carried me across the ocean to Australia, while word reached me that Thilak had become a remarkably successful businessman back home. Curiosity got the better of me, and through the quiet magic of the internet, I tracked him down. This was in 2010. When we spoke on the phone, thirty seven years melted away in an instant. We talked with the very same easy candour of our teenage years, though I was now a father watching four grown children navigate their own twenties and late teens.

When I visited Sri Lanka around that time, Thilak insisted on sending a car to fetch me. He brought me to his office and then to his sprawling bungalow, where we shared a grand meal and reminisced about the old days. By now, Thilak had a son in his early twenties and two daughters in their teens.

I saw him again recently in 2026. Time had brought its gentle rustle of quiet.

In my mind’s eye, no matter how many years roll past, Thilak will always remain that eternal young lad from Galle — the one who offered me his untamed honesty, shared his few rupees, and showed a green young boy how to find joy in the simple unfolding of a day.

The first Indian officer sent to us from the Chartered Bank in Madras (present day Chennai) was a Mr Srinivasan. This must have been the mid-to-late seventies, when the bank had few British officers capable of dealing with the Indian traders who formed the heart of Dubai’s foreign-trade business — the bills, the letters of credit, the guarantees that kept the old dhows, and their modern successors, busy.

When I joined the bank, Srinivasan — whose first name, I confess, has escaped me — was already there. A short, dark man in his thirties, with a pleasant, unassuming manner. He wore bright, broad ties with coloured shirts and bell-bottom trousers, very much in the style of the South Indian film stars whose pictures adorned every other shop in Ceylon, where I had come from. In dress, at least, he recalled Sivaji Ganesan.

Appearances, of course, can be misleading. Beneath the colourful ties and flamboyant trousers, Srinivasan was courteous, capable, and entirely without airs.

He was a gentleman.

He would chat with me often, telling me how the bank arranged his personal effects — his and his family’s — to be shipped back to Chennai through Gray Mackenzie. A man thinks of home, I learned, in the weight of his furniture.

Just before Srinivasan departed, (now Srini to me) his replacement arrived from the bank’s office in Chennai. His name was Krishna Bhupathi. Nobody knew him by his first name. In the bank, he was Mr Bhupathi — and the way he carried the name, he might have been licensed by it.

More than his finance skills, he was a tennis player of the first order. Up to then, tennis had been the foremost domain of the British expatriates in Dubai. Bhupathi changed all that. Within months, he was the best tennis player in the emirate. By two in the afternoon he would finish his work, change into his whites — white shorts, white t-shirt, white shoes — and off he would go to some club in Jumeirah. Soon his name began appearing in the local papers. He told me he coached his son from a young age, just as he had been coached in India.

The way I remember Bhupathi is this. Back then, I had the habit of visiting my parents and kid brother in Sri Lanka every six months. Bhupathi told me his wife was from Sri Lanka, and would hand me a small parcel for his father-in-law. I agreed, as one does. The day after I arrived home, a Morris Oxford would come up our driveway — sand, in those days, not the modern concrete kind — and Bhupathi’s father-in-law would collect the parcel. I remember him in his white shirt and khaki pants, chatting with my father. Two men, standing in our verandah, conducting the quiet business of family.

After two years, Bhupathi’s posting came to an end. By then he was established in Dubai — a star outside banking circles, a man who needed no introduction on the tennis court. He resigned from the bank and joined a rival. It was, one might say, the perfect backhand.

His replacement came from the bank in Mumbai: Arun Diaz. Tall, composed, he managed the expanding foreign-trade portfolio. But it is not Arun I remember so much as his wife, Lakshmi Narayan. Lakshmi was a liberated woman from India — in those days, an unheard-of species. She had kept her maiden name, and she was a famous journalist in her own country. She joined Arun in Dubai and became an editor of the newly established Gulf News.

Lakshmi and Arun were so liberated that they were quite public about their decision not to have children — another rare and bold announcement, in an age when such things were whispered, if said at all.

Dubai has changed, of course. The sandy roads are gone, and the dhows have successors of their own. But some things remain constant: a parcel delivered faithfully, a name carried with dignity, and the quiet courage of people who lived exactly as they chose.

And for that, Mr Bhupathi, Srini, Arun and Lakshmi — I remain, respectfully, shaken but not stirred.

Nobody, least of all me, could say what that actually meant. Being somebody. It hung over our home like the smell of my mother’s cooking — always present, never explained.

There was a quiz at the university college. Everyone had to write down what they wanted to be. Doctor. Engineer. Accountant. The room filled up with respectable ambitions.

I marked myself down as a movie maker.

I had no real idea what that would involve. I had never met a movie maker. I had seen glimpses of a movie camera when I was ten. But the words looked good on paper, and that, I suspect, was half the qualification in those days.

What I was actually studying was an accounting paper with a shipping flavour. Economics. Cost and works accounting, as it was called then. Statistics with formulas far too big for my sixteen-year-old brain.

My father paid exorbitant fees for me to attend that ivy college in the heart of Colombo. To this day, I do not know how he managed it. Those fees took up a considerable portion of his pay packet. A considerable portion. He never mentioned it, not once. He paid. He kept silent. Silence was his second language.

But let me not stray from my original storyline. That is a trap I fall into these days, the way old men fall into talking about their blood pressure.

What I really want to write about is this. Boys were raised to earn. Girls were raised to become dutiful housewives and mothers within the family home. That was the deal. It was printed nowhere, and it was signed by everyone.

On paper, I was allowed to stay up late with friends.

Or so it might seem from that sentence.

In reality, my mother and I fought constantly over my curfew, which was 9 p.m. every night. Nine o’clock, not a minute more. I negotiated like a small country at a large table, and I lost every time.

My sister, four years and nine months younger — almost five, was the crown jewel of the family. The nangi, the little queen of the house.

She took on the height of my mother, who was two inches taller than my father. So the village kept its own account of us, quite separate from the bank’s. Everyone thought I was my sister’s younger brother.

But I was the eldest, and within the family, I behaved like one.

Meanwhile, my sister was taken for home-making classes. Sewing classes. My mother escorted her to these events like a customs officer escorting declared goods.

My father’s love was kept in bank passbooks. Into my savings account, he deposited ten rupees a month. Into my sister’s, fifty.

Ten and fifty. A clear discrimination of 1:5.

I did the maths then. I do the maths now, all these decades later, and it still comes out the same. On paper, she was worth five of me.

Was I bitter? Perhaps a little. Did it ruin me? Not at all. Because here is the thing about being the eldest son in a family like ours. I was the investment. She was the treasure. And investments, unlike treasures, are expected to pay back.

Postscript

History repeats itself, though rarely in the same numbers. Decades later, in Sydney, I raised my own children under no such arithmetic. No 1:5. No crown jewels. I split everything down the middle.

My father never said a word about the fifty rupees, or the ten. He did not have to. I carry his silence in me now. It surfaces whenever I pay for a book or a toy my grandchildren like and wave away their thanks.

To my children, and to my grandchildren who may one day read this: if you ever come across an old passbook from Colombo, with ten rupees a month entered in a careful hand, know this. It was not a small love. It was every love my father could fit between his salary and the end of the month.

At school, and later among the machinery at apprentice school, there was a phrase that made the rounds: a hole in the heart. Someone would mention a boy who had one. Then another. Nobody ever explained what it actually meant, but the words carried a quiet weight. Before long, I convinced myself that I had one, too.

Whenever I walked, a slight, nagging pain would take root high on the left side of my chest. I’d slow my step, catch my breath, and think, this is it. I’m going to die soon.

At eighteen, death is a strange, distant concept. You know it exists — you’ve seen it, and you’ve heard adults speak about it in hushed, serious tones — but it feels strictly reserved for others. Not for you. At eighteen, life begins and ends with today. Tomorrow is just a vague promise, and death is somewhere far over the horizon.

So I kept walking past the church, carrying that tiny ache and the quiet suspicion that my heart was flawed.

I was dressed well — or at least, I thought I was. I had on a pair of blue jeans given to me by an Italian co-worker, a black-and-white floral shirt bought off a local smuggler, and a pair of leather sandals from Bata. Underneath it all, a pair of yellow underpants. I was always a fashionista.

I still remember those underpants. I have no idea why. Memory works in strange ways — it carefully preserves the yellow underpants while letting the important things slip away through the cracks.

I walked toward the bus stand in that eighteen-year-old body, carrying the quiet worry of a damaged heart. I didn’t know then that I would live long enough to look back on that walk. Nor did I know that, nearly fifty years later, I would still be thinking about that subtle pain on the left side of my chest.

The heart, it turns out, keeps its own records.

You begin to see how precariously a life is built. How much of it depends on decisions made in rooms you were never in, by people who were simply trying to get through their own days.

One small decision leads to another, and another, until you are standing somewhere you never imagined you would be.

And you begin to wonder.

What if?

What if Lewis, my grandfather, had never stepped up to carry the weight of his brothers and sisters? What if he had simply been allowed to live as an ordinary man, instead of becoming the pillar everyone leaned on?

What if the thyroid deficiency had not stolen my grandmother Euphracia’s mind when my mother was only eight years old?

A little girl losing her mother to a quiet, hospital-walled darkness, forced to grow up before she had ever had the chance to be young.

And sometimes I wonder about something else.

What if Lewis had decided to leave his wife after her illness changed the life of the family?

Would my mother and her sister have grown up differently?

Would the two women who later became such powerful influences on my own life have carried different memories, different wounds, perhaps different ideas about love, duty and responsibility?

I will never know.

But I wonder.

What if my father, Thomas, had not lost his own father so early? If he had not been forced to raise himself, would he have learned to become the steady and patient father he eventually became to me?

What if Lewis had said no when my father asked for his eldest daughter’s hand — the daughter who was, by then, practically running his household?

What if my mother, Susan, had taken that teaching job after they married?

What if she had chosen the classroom, postponed having children, and followed a completely different path?

What if my father had refused when she made the sudden and, to some, reckless decision to leave his ancestral home and move to a village without electricity?

What if my aunt had not been so gentle with me?

How much of her kindness did I absorb without knowing it?

What if she had not left our house when I was eight?

Would she have gone off to become a nun, rather than building a life in which she raised three children and opened her doors to five more?

What if they had not brought my sick grandmother home from the asylum to live under our roof?

If the house had not been filled with that particular kind of grief, would I have packed my small bag at eleven and left for the Christian Brothers boarding school?

What if Brother Ignatius, my loving carer in that school, had not been transferred away by a sudden order from his province?

What if, at fourteen, I had not been sexually abused by a Christian Brother, my so called carer?

Would I have discovered the fighter inside me — the boy who learned to stand his ground, refuse to be broken, and never be afraid to change direction or change his mind?

What if Sri Lanka had not descended into the dark and senseless chaos that consumed so many of its young people while I was growing up?

What if the air had not become thick with fear and blood?

Would a generation of us have grown up differently, without having to look over our shoulders and wonder whether we had a future?

Then there were the choices that seemed, at the time, entirely mine.

What if my father had objected when I dropped out of high school to pursue an accountancy course at a private institute?

What if he had refused — or simply been unable — to pay those exorbitant fees?

What if he had not encouraged me to complete the formalities to enrol in the training school for overseas telegraphy, the early forerunner of modern telecommunications?

What if I had not been targeted and systematically discriminated against by the seniors in that training school?

Would I have ever found the resolve to pack my bags, turn my back on it all, and leave for Dubai?

And then there is another what if I sometimes remember.

What if I had been selected for the American scholarship and student exchange programme that would have taken me to Cincinnati?

America was impossibly far away to a young boy growing up in Sri Lanka.

Cincinnati was only a name, really. But behind that name was another world.

I remember the possibility of it.

A journey to America. A different education. Different people. A different way of seeing the world.

What if I had gone?

Would I have returned to Sri Lanka?

Would I have stayed in America?

Would I have studied there, found a career there, built a family there?

Would I ever have gone to Dubai?

Would I have met the people who later became important in my life?

Would my children have been the same children, born into the same family, had I taken that flight?

One selection on a piece of paper could have altered everything.

I wasn’t selected.

At the time, it was simply a disappointment.

Looking back, it seems like another one of those invisible forks in the road.

And what if my father had not stepped in yet again, offering to pay the heavy bonds, penalties and apprentice loans I owed in Sri Lanka so that I could walk away clean?

Then came my sister.

She eloped, and in doing so brought my parents to the edge of despair.

It was perhaps the greatest trouble they had ever faced.

They had lost their daughter in a way they had not expected, and they were left trying to make sense of what had happened and how they were going to live with it.

A year later, another trouble came to our door.

My father was persecuted by the government of Sri Lanka.

He and my mother were still trying to adjust to life after the loss of my sister when they found themselves having to fight the government as well.

I stepped in.

I told my father that I would pay for all the legal and administrative costs.

I asked him to fight.

“Fight them,” I told him. “I will take care of the costs.”

And he did.

For the next year or so, we fought our way through the machinery of government. There were papers, lawyers, expenses and long periods of waiting.

I paid what had to be paid, and my father refused to give up.

Eventually, he won.

It was his victory.

But I remember it as mine too.

I had stood beside my father when he needed someone to stand there.

Looking back now, I see that these things were not separate events.

At the time, they were simply what was happening.

One trouble followed another.

One decision had to be made before there was time to think about the next.

You pull on one thread, and the whole tapestry threatens to unravel.

What if my grandmother had not become ill?

What if Lewis had made a different decision?

What if my aunt had stayed?

What if Brother Ignatius had not been transferred?

What if I had not gone to boarding school?

What if the abuse had never happened?

What if Sri Lanka had remained peaceful?

What if I had stayed in the training school?

What if I had been selected for Cincinnati?

What if I had never gone to Dubai?

What if my sister had not eloped?

What if my father had not been persecuted?

And what if, at each of those moments, somebody had made a different decision?

Perhaps my life would have been easier.

Perhaps it would have been harder.

Perhaps I would have become somebody I would not recognise today.

We like to think that we make our own lives.

We speak of choices, plans and ambitions as though we are the architects of everything that happens to us.

But looking back, I am not so sure.

Much of life seems to happen around us before we have the age or the wisdom to understand what it is doing to us.

A child is sent to a boarding school.

A grandmother becomes ill.

An aunt leaves home.

A young man packs a suitcase and leaves for another country.

A scholarship is offered — and not won.

A sister leaves home.

A father loses his battle with a government — and then wins it.

At the time, none of these things seemed to belong to the same story.

Now I know they did.

Somewhere along the way, without deciding to become one, I became a rescuer of people.

Perhaps it began with my family.

Perhaps it began much earlier.

Or perhaps it was simply the way the pieces of my life fell.

I will never know.

And that is the strange thing about looking back.

You can see the road you travelled.

You can see the crossroads.

You can see the roads you did not take.

But you can never know where they would have led.

Perhaps that is why we keep asking.

What if?

Not because we want to change the past.

We cannot.

Perhaps we ask because, in looking at the lives we might have lived, we begin to understand the life we actually did.

And perhaps, after all these years, that is enough.

When I look back at my life, I sometimes wonder how much of it was planned.

The honest answer is: very little.

There were decisions, of course. There were moments when I chose one road instead of another. But many of the things that changed my life came from circumstances I had not chosen.

Some were good.

Some were painful.

And some were so painful at the time that I could never have imagined they would eventually lead me somewhere else.

I think of the early seventies.

I was a young man in Sri Lanka, and the country I knew as Ceylon had changed.

The easy confidence of my childhood had gone.

There was a feeling among young people that the country was becoming smaller, more uncertain and less welcoming. Opportunities seemed to depend increasingly on who you were, what religion you were born into, what language you spoke, where you came from and, sometimes, on circumstances over which you had no control.

I was young enough to feel the unfairness of it, but not old enough to understand the politics behind it.

I only knew that I did not like what was happening.

I felt earmarked.

I felt discriminated against.

And I wanted to get away.

At that age, you don’t use sophisticated words for these things.

You simply know that you don’t belong somewhere anymore.

You want to leave.

I didn’t leave for adventure

When people hear that I went to Dubai as a young man, they sometimes imagine an adventurous young traveller looking for a better life.

It wasn’t quite like that.

I wasn’t sitting in Colombo dreaming about the desert.

I wasn’t looking for an exotic experience.

I wanted to escape the persecution and discrimination I felt around me.

Dubai became an exit.

That was all it needed to be.

I didn’t know then that an escape route could also become the beginning of a new life.

I only knew that there was a possibility of leaving.

So I took it.

And that decision changed almost everything.

The strange thing about luck

We normally think of luck as something pleasant.

Winning something.

Meeting someone.

Getting a promotion.

Finding money when you need it.

But there is another kind of luck.

Sometimes luck comes disguised as misfortune.

Sometimes you are pushed out of one place and, only years later, realise that being pushed was the best thing that could have happened to you.

If I had not been earmarked as a young man…

If I had not felt discriminated against…

If I had felt comfortable and secure about my future in Sri Lanka…

Perhaps I would never have gone to Dubai.

And if I had never gone to Dubai, the rest of my life might have been completely different.

Dubai

I arrived in Dubai at a remarkable time.

The city was changing.

There were buildings rising from what still seemed, in places, to be desert.

People were arriving from everywhere.

The old Dubai was slowly becoming something new.

And I was there.

Not because I had carefully calculated that this was the right moment to build a career.

I was there because I wanted to escape.

That distinction mattered to me.

The young man who left Sri Lanka did not know he was walking into an opportunity.

He thought he was walking away from a problem.

Sometimes you only understand the direction of your life when you have travelled far enough to turn around and look back.

The telex machine

In Dubai, I found myself working with a telex machine.

It was a strange piece of technology to become important in my life.

Messages came through with their mechanical rhythm.

Click.

Pause.

Click.

The world arriving in strips of paper.

I became fascinated by it.

Technology was beginning to change the way businesses communicated, and I happened to be standing close enough to notice.

Again, I was in the right place at the right time.

I didn’t know it.

I was simply doing my job.

But the telex machine became another door.

Then came banking.

Then computers.

Then a career that took me further into technology.

Looking back now, I can see the chain.

Sri Lanka pushed me towards Dubai.

Dubai put me near technology.

Technology led me towards banking and computing.

And one thing led to another.

It is tempting to call that a plan.

It wasn’t.

It was a series of accidents connected by hindsight.

The people who appeared

There were people along the way who changed the direction of my life.

Some were friends.

Some were colleagues.

Some said something to me in passing and probably forgot the conversation before the day was over.

I didn’t.

That is another form of luck.

Meeting the right person at the right moment.

Hearing the right sentence.

Being introduced to the right opportunity.

Being curious enough to ask one more question.

We rarely know when these moments are happening.

Australia

Years later, I would make another enormous decision.

Australia.

By then I had a family.

Leaving was no longer simply about me.

There were children to think about.

There was uncertainty.

There was the question every migrant asks before leaving one country for another:

Will we be all right?

I didn’t know.

But I went.

And Australia became home.

Once again, I had stepped into something I could not fully see.

The writer I became

Even becoming a writer happened almost by accident.

I had spent most of my life working.

Then came a time when I began looking backwards.

The memories were still there.

School.

My parents.

Friends.

Girls.

Aquinas.

Dubai.

The telex machine.

Banking.

Australia.

Family.

The things I had lost.

The people I had forgotten and then remembered.

I began writing them down.

One story became another.

Then another.

Eventually there were hundreds.

And I began to understand something.

I wasn’t really writing about the past.

I was trying to understand how I had arrived at the present.

Right place, right time

People sometimes say that success is about being in the right place at the right time.

I believe that.

But I would add something.

Sometimes you are in the right place for reasons that, at the time, feel completely wrong.

I was in Dubai because I wanted to escape Sri Lanka.

That was the truth.

I didn’t go there because I knew it would lead to a career.

I didn’t know what the future held.

I simply wanted a way out.

Yet that escape put me in the path of opportunities I could never have imagined.

And perhaps that is the strangest form of luck.

To be pushed towards a door you would never have thought to open.

Looking back

I cannot say that everything that happened to me was good.

It wasn’t.

There were disappointments.

There were difficult years.

There were people who left.

There were decisions I would make differently.

There were moments when I wondered whether I had chosen correctly.

But life is not judged one moment at a time.

You have to look at the whole thing.

And when I look back now, I see how many apparently unrelated events were connected.

The young boy in Sri Lanka.

The boy who was abused at a Christian institute at fourteen.

The young man who felt he was being earmarked and discriminated against.

The young lad who was earmarked as a nuisance by seniors during his apprentice days in Sri Lanka.

The young man who wanted only to escape.

The fellow who arrived in Dubai.

The telex operator.

The banker.

The technologist.

The migrant.

The father.

The grandfather.

And eventually, the old man sitting down to write it all.

They are all the same person.

Me.

I used to think I was lucky because of the opportunities that came my way.

Now I think I was lucky much earlier.

I was lucky because circumstances forced me to move.

If I had been completely comfortable in Sri Lanka, I might never have left.

If I had never left, I might never have found Dubai.

If I had never found Dubai, I might never have discovered technology in the way I did.

And if those things had not happened, there would probably be a very different story to tell.

So perhaps luck is not always about getting what you want.

Sometimes it is about being denied something you thought you needed.

Sometimes it is about being pushed out of a place before you are ready.

Sometimes it is about running away.

And sometimes, without knowing it, you run straight towards the life that was waiting for you.

I did not know any of this when I left Sri Lanka.

I only knew that I wanted to escape.

Many decades later, I can finally see it differently.

I was not running towards Dubai.

I was running away from something.

And somehow, I ended up exactly where I needed to be.

Elmo was one of those people.

There were days when the boarding school did not feel like a school.

It felt like a place I had been sent to, and from which I had to find a way out.

I missed home.

Not only my mother and father. I missed the ordinary things that had seemed so unimportant when I was living among them. The noise of the house. My sister and brother. The children in the neighbourhood. The familiar voices. The smell of food coming from the kitchen.

At home, life had no timetable.

Nobody blew a whistle to tell me when to wake up, when to eat, when to study or when to sleep.

You simply lived.

I wanted that life back.

Even if it was only for a weekend.

The problem was that I was in a Christian brothers boarding school, and boys like me were not simply allowed to leave because they missed home.

So I needed someone.

That someone was Elmo.

Elmo Amerasinghe was a fellow homeboy from college. He lived only a few houses from our home. I knew his family well. His brothers and sisters were all older than us, and his father ran the Catholic bookshop in Pettah, in Colombo.

Elmo was perhaps a year or two older than me.

But none of that mattered.

What mattered was that he lived near my home.

He was my connection to the outside world.

I wrote a short letter to my father and gave it to Elmo.

There was no story in it.

I simply told my father that I wanted to come home for the weekend.

I knew he would understand.

A few days later, Elmo returned with a letter from my father.

It was addressed to Michael, the man in charge of us at the boarding school.

My father had written that his son was needed at home for a “family event.”

That was enough.

Michael read the letter, looked at me, and let me go.

That Friday afternoon, I walked out of the dreaded boarding school.

I don’t remember ever feeling so happy to leave a place.

The journey home seemed shorter than usual.

Perhaps it was because I knew where I was going.

For the next three days, I was no longer a boarding-school boy.

I was simply my mother’s son.

I played with my sister and brother. I went outside with the neighbourhood children. I heard the familiar voices again.

There was no whistle.

No timetable.

No roll call.

No Michael looking at the clock.

And there was food.

My mother and my grandmother, Kadayamma, seemed determined to make up for every meal I had endured at boarding school. They cooked the things I liked, and I ate without wondering whether I would be late for the next period.

At home, even eating was different.

It was not just food.

It was comfort.

It was belonging.

Those three days were nothing when measured against a calendar.

But to a boy who had been taken away from home, they were enormous.

Then Monday came.

And I had to go back.

I returned to the boarding school reluctantly, carrying with me the memory of the weekend.

The games.

The laughter.

My mother’s cooking.

Kadayamma’s food.

The voices outside the house.

My own bed.

I did not know then how much those things would remain with me.

And somewhere in all of it was Elmo.

He had done nothing heroic.

He had simply carried a letter.

But sometimes, when you are young and far from home, a person who carries a letter can become very important.

Elmo had become my bridge home.

And I used that bridge again.

The year was 1970.

The first escape had worked. That gave me courage.

I had begun to understand that if I wanted to come home, I had to find a way around the rules.

So I wrote another note to my father.

Again, I gave it to Elmo.

Again, my father sent a letter back through him.

Again, there was a “family event.”

And again, Michael had little choice.

I came home.

I did it twice that year.

Two weekends.

Only two.

But I remember them because, for those brief periods, the boarding school disappeared.

I was home again.

I could sit with my family. I could listen to the familiar voices. I could eat my mother’s food. I could sleep in my own bed.

And then I would have to return.

At the time, I did not think of what I was doing as rebellion.

I was simply a boy who wanted to go home.

Looking back now, I realise how little it took to make a child happy.

A weekend.

A familiar house.

A mother’s cooking.

A bed that was his own.

And a friend who was willing to carry a letter.

Elmo probably never understood what those letters meant to me.

Perhaps he thought he was merely doing a small favour for a boy who missed home.

But he was doing more than that.

He was carrying something between two worlds.

One was the boarding school where I had to live.

The other was the home I longed for.

In 1970, Elmo helped me cross between them.

Twice.

And after all these years, I remember him not for anything grand he did, but for something very small.

He carried my letters home.

Sometimes, that is enough to make someone unforgettable.

A note about the end of 1970

At the end of that year, I told my father that I wanted to come home for good. I did not want to return to the novitiate.

I knew Michael and the others might try to persuade him otherwise, so I told my father quite firmly that I had made up my mind. I wanted to come home, and this time I wanted to stay.

He came to get me.

I remember him carrying my blue Ford suitcase as we left. We took a yellow Morris Minor taxi home, and the fare was two rupees and fifty cents.

It was a small journey, but for me it was the beginning of another life.

I did not know it then. I only knew that I was going home.