She held on to the heavy legs of the side table. The wood was still fragrant. Sandalwood was hard and strong, but soft to the touch. It smelled like temples, the burning of incense, the sound of prayer, warm sunlight on cool stone. She pressed her face against the wood and let its smell fill her lungs. The temple was inside her, helping her breathe, helping her stand, helping her move forward.

•

The calls stopped as suddenly as they had begun. She fought with Siva, arguing once again that his involvement made it impossible for them to return to Colombo, to Dhara. He declared he would never return until their people had their own homeland.

‘Well then, I guess we are never going back,’ she said with more sadness than malice as she gathered the schoolbags. ‘I’ll see you at the surgery after the school run.’

Priya pulled over, turned off the engine and opened the car window. She leaned back in her seat. It was 9:23am. The small park was empty at this time. Her children were at school.

A majestic gum tree towered over the banksias and wattles that lined the boundary. When the wind blew, sunlight dappled and danced between the leaves, as though refracted through a crystal. The marbled white-grey trunk was muscular yet lean. Someone, a caretaker perhaps, had planted a tapestry of colour around it. Some people could make things grow.

Green fingers, the Australians called it.

Archi’s fingers, Nala called it.

Slowly the birds descended. She didn’t know if they were a flock or a family, the same birds or different ones each time. She’d never noticed birds in Sri Lanka, but here she noticed them everywhere, especially in this place where she could watch and think and be. The rainbow lorikeet. Rainbow. Lorikeet. It was a perfect name. Like Vivek or Smrithi. Their names told you exactly who they were. You could close your eyes, say their names, and see them in your mind. You could call them to you and they would come. Like Dhara.

Dhara, she called silently.

Priya saw the iridescent blue and jungle green. She saw the ruffled chest of an orange sun bleeding into a yellow sky. Wings opened and a burst of red took flight. Colour uncontained. Flight with no path foretold. She soared freely, following the rainbow and herself. She rested, breathless in the hollow of a gum. She wasn’t a daughter or a wife or a doctor or a mother. She was no one to anyone. She was nothing and she was everything. Whatever she was, it was for herself.

‘Rainbow lorikeets mate for life,’ Vivek once told her. ‘They are always in pairs. A husband and a wife,’ he said.

‘A mummy and a daddy,’ Smrithi added.

‘No, not to me,’ Priya said.

‘Then what?’ they asked, their small faces turned towards the sun, towards her. She looked up and watched the rainbow glide between the trees.