At the camp, Dhara checked the names of the Maaveerer first, the martyrs list. Copies were made and sent to each camp as often as possible. It was incomplete, but it was the best they could do. She scrolled quickly for Ahilan and others she knew—and relaxed when she couldn’t find their names.

She looked around the operating tent. It was as clean as it could be: bloodied gauze kits, stolen theatre sheets, makeshift swabs, bandages and empty IV and blood packs piled in the corners. The operating table had once been a kitchen table; its orange formica laminate chipped and peeled at the edges, like skin that had been in the sun too long. It sat in the centre of the tent, a citrus fruit that had bloomed out of season.

Around it was a jumble sale of instruments: some stolen and some fashioned out of anything they could get their hands on. Tourniquets from leather shoelaces and plaited strips of silk saris. The better the quality of silk, the stronger the tourniquet. A selection of knives from farmers and wives and fishermen; disinfected and honed to give a degree of surgical precision, alongside stolen scalpels. The instruments were sterilised in alcohol or boiled whenever possible. It was not often possible.

Bullets and shrapnel were recycled; given a second life to take a second life. Blood was recycled; collected and strained through boiled saris before being transfused back into the body. Needles were recycled; most importantly so that anaesthetics could be injected. Sometimes she felt she was recycled.

The first incision needs to be confident and slow.

Blood spurted in arcs, erratic yet graceful, like a monochrome rainbow; its purple-red warm as it hit her face. She clamped the artery and scooped pooling blood out with the cup of her hand. A nurse, no more than a girl, wiped her eyes. She blinked through the haze. The texture of flesh never failed to surprise her. It was so tender. She could pull it away with her fingers. How imperfectly we are made; how fragile we are, she thought. Men, women and children—they were all the same. They all screamed, they all called for their mothers. Meat from a bone; great chunks of it lay at her feet. Sacks used to store rice and vegetables were saved, and as the ground became slathered in blood, a nurse dropped them onto the floor. Dhara stepped on re-used sacks and continued her work.

She amputated, clamped, sewed and cauterised. She lanced and helped light into infected darkness when she had finally run out of antibiotics. She tried to plug the holes. Blood beaded, it seeped, and it surged. The body became a sieve.

Bone was the hardest. It required tools she didn’t always have. She needed three men to hold down one; even children struggled and bucked and kicked with what limbs remained, begging her to stop, begging her to let them be. She came to hate bone.