‘I am no dog and I have no master.’

The room erupted in cheers that were quickly hushed down by others. Dhara wondered where they were.

‘The time for peaceful protest has passed. The time for a political solution has passed. Now is the time for war.’

The boys jumped to their feet, but he held up his hands, urging them to sit.

‘There are other groups—you have heard of them—TELO, PLOTE, EROS—some of them were started by people I know. These people were my friends. I do not believe in friends anymore.

‘There is only one group that will fight for Eelam, for a separate Tamil state, and there is only one group that will win that separate state.

‘I do not believe in God—God, like my old friends, has forsaken us. I believe in the Tamil Tigers and I believe in Eelam.’

The young people went crazy, and this time the man allowed them to cheer. Ahilan let go of Dhara’s hand and cheered with them.

•

Rajan liked the library of Colombo General Hospital. On the way home from his ward rounds, he would stop there to read and sometimes to think. Sometimes he just looked at the books, his old friends. They knew each other well. He was happy there, surrounded by words, with no pressure to speak.

Colombo General was a teaching hospital and its library was outstanding. It contained everything he needed: texts and journals on every specialty and even a sub-section on infectious diseases, which he had set up for the hospital when he was a younger, more ambitious doctor.

Nala teased him about the seriousness of his preferred reading material. There was nothing wrong with the Encyclopedia Britannica, just because she didn’t like it. There was only perfection in its leather binding, gold edging, and wafer-thin paper. There was the smell and the weight of it in his hands, and the sound it made when he opened it up. The cracking that told him this volume had never been read by anyone before. He was the first.

He loved the precision of medical words. They were descriptive without being trite. They homed in on a meaning and a message, and stopped there. Medical words didn’t meander aimlessly. They didn’t say one thing and mean another. They spoke truthfully and then ceased, comfortably silent.

Language was everything to him, even though he was frequently accused of not using it enough. He had been educated in English like most Tamils. However, the earth of the north was too hard—it would not yield enough food or wealth—so the Tamils knew they had to study to aspire to more. The American missionary schools in the northern and the eastern provinces had given many generations perfect English, which they used to access universities and jobs in the civil service.