‘English is your ticket,’ Rev. Harding used to say. The other boys would laugh but Rajan understood. English was their ticket until successive governments made Sinhalese the ticket. His English had allowed him to travel, to win a fellowship in England, and to converse with all Sri Lankans, as they were now known. His English would give him one more ticket, which he would have to use very soon. They were running out of time, even if Nala refused to acknowledge it.

But Tamil was the language he loved most. He missed the way his mother spoke to him—the endearments as well as the orders she gave him. Nothing expressed love the way their language did. Nala would argue that he never expressed his love, at least not to her or even the children. She was wrong. Rajan prayed every night for his wife and children, and when he did it was in Tamil. When he was proud of his family, when he feared for them, when he was happy to see them, his heart soared in Tamil, even if his voice was silent.

He remembered going as a boy to the public library in Jaffna, with his mother. The community loved the library: they could see its value for them and their children. Families and temples started to give books and manuscripts to the library, some written on palm leaves, which had been preserved and passed down for generations. There were original documents recording the history of the Tamil people in Ceylon and India, as well as new works by Tamil writers and thinkers. There were newspapers published in Jaffna and even old photographs of the past century.

He remembered the piles of books, scattered everywhere. He liked to hide among them, reading and sometimes organising them. They comforted him. The first time in his life he had broken the rules was by staying at the library past its closing time. Sometimes he stayed deliberately, sometimes he simply lost track of time and place as he read.

He sat in the library of Colombo General Hospital, almost half a century later, thinking about Mr Kanagasabai, the curator of the Jaffna Public Library.

For over a year, he and the curator cleaned and filed the manuscripts that would form one of Asia’s greatest collections of Tamil literature. Wearing soft white gloves, he tenderly turned the yellowed pages, often stopping to read aloud to the old man. Later, Rajan moved to Colombo for university, but he returned to Jaffna whenever he could.

By 1953, the community realised its library was overflowing with knowledge that needed to be preserved and housed better, and the construction of the Jaffna Public Library began.