At the end of each day she wiped the table down. The slurry. What was she to do with that? Cleanliness is next to Godliness, Rajan mama said. God didn’t watch over this hospital.

She looked at her hands—they felt strange after being in surgical gloves for so long—pale, as though they needed to breathe. She stretched her fingers, checking the segments and joints of each, rubbing the calluses that charted almost two decades of surgery. Someone else’s life in your hands, she remembered. The calluses made her hands look old before their time.

‘Join us, Dhara,’ the young doctor urged. ‘Leave Colombo for good. We need you here.’ He was in charge of training in the Tigers’ medical units.

‘No. I’m more useful to you at Colombo General. You know that already—how else will you access what you need?’

She could have moved closer, to Vavuniya or even Kilinochi Hospital further north. She could have disappeared forever into the false night of the dark jungle, into a training camp or a medical unit or an armed unit. She was tied to them, to the struggle.

But something deeper kept calling her back to the sun. She craved its warmth. She turned her face to the sky each morning, eyes closed, head back, palms folded. The demons were only afraid of sunlight. She wouldn’t stray too far from it, or the promise of a new day; another day with Smrithi.

‘What do you need from me this time?’ she asked the doctor.

Together they took an inventory—anaesthetics, antibiotics, blood packs, IV packs and sutures were prioritised. They made arrangements for the passage of supplies—routes, couriers and drop-off points changed constantly. Dhara never carried anything herself; just the medical bag Rajan had given her when she graduated. And in her pocket, a needle and thread.

‘I’ve scheduled a few extra operations for you this weekend, I hope that’s okay?’ the man asked. He held his clipboard, as though ready for a normal ward round.

‘That’s fine. I can stay for a week. Ask them to be scrubbed and ready at six o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s too dark now to teach properly.’

Tomorrow her family would bless Smrithi’s life as a woman.

•

Dhara remembered the first time.