‘We’ll burn you all out,’ he rasped.

‘What?’ she heard him but didn’t know what to say.

Silence. As though words were being arranged to give voice to hatred so deep it could not be fully articulated.

Silence and then the voice.

‘We’ll burn you all. You think we only hunt tigers in the jungle? We hunt them here too. We know who you are and what you’re doing.’ The floating voice had found its rhythm and poetry now, it didn’t falter.

‘We’ll find you and we’ll skin your tiger stripes from your body. You and your family, we’re watching and we’re waiting. Tigers are not the only ones hiding in the jungle. Tell your husband we called.’

‘Guna?’ she asked.

Silence.

‘Gunatilake? Is that you?’ she asked again, her voice shaking. Guna’s family and hers had been friends in Sydney for years before the troubles started.

Until now.

The phone clicked off. All she could hear was the sound of her own short, panicked breathing. Her jaw was fused together. She wanted to open her mouth, to breathe better, to speak, to cry, but the muscles of her mouth wouldn’t work. She held the wall and lowered herself to the tiled floor. An apricot colour with undertones of fawn: autumnal, she had read about it in House & Garden.

She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the tiles.

A man in a khaki-brown uniform appeared, then another and another and another until she was surrounded.

I told you, I told you what happens when you get involved, she said to Siva.

It wasn’t her they had come for, it was him with all his stupid letters to politicians, endless petitions, protests outside the high commission and even more letters. For every letter he wrote, tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands were displaced in the north and east. Why, she asked him, why? There is nothing you can do for them.

I can’t believe that, he said, handing her a bundle. Post them please, kunju, he asked nicely. He always asked nicely.

Dhara said sometimes the men asked nicely too. Please take off your clothes. Please don’t scream. Please don’t move your legs while we insert this pipe; you see, we can thread barbed wire into it, and when we remove the pipe the wire remains, and we can pull the wire out slowly or quickly or any speed we feel like. Or any speed you feel like if you ask nicely.

Priya thought of Dhara and Siva and the places men in khaki-brown uniforms took people like them, like her to. Khaki, was that autumnal too?