After dinner, the children had history classes followed by bedtime. They followed a strict timetable without complaint, and during the day they embraced the discipline and commitment that was expected of them. Dhara heard crying at night in the dormitory tents, but she was not allowed to enter or talk to any of the children. Some of them had nightmares, like her.

The bell sounded for dinner and he jumped up from the ground.

‘Niri, Niri—before you go—I wanted to ask you something.’ She hesitated, making sure no one was listening. ‘Are you happy here, darling?’

‘Happy?’ he looked at her and at the mess hall where all of his friends were gathering. He never spoke about his parents or siblings or life before the LTTE camp.

‘Yes, of course I’m happy! Tendulkar just scored a century!’ he said as he ran off with his bat, hitting an imaginary six after six, bowled by an imaginary bowler before him.

•

Happiness. She wondered how people could feel happiness at the death of others. She didn’t feel it. She had tried. She imagined men in the police station, she saw them dismembered by her own hand. It was too much. She re-imagined it, using the hand of another. Something glacial stirred but it wasn’t happiness.

She imagined men with their scythes, their iron bars, their toddy-glazed eyes and their yellow teeth. She had never seen the men who came for her father and crushed his skull and let his brain slip through his beautiful curls into the dirt. But she imagined them dead, and something ancient stirred, but again, it wasn’t happiness.

The human body has so many pieces. That was her first thought when she saw the photographs of Rajiv Gandhi, blown apart by a Tamil Tiger in south India. So many bloody pieces.

And so much jubilation. Men, usually serious, often morose in combat fatigues, ran around the camp smiling and hugging instead. A great day, they said clapping each other on the back, a great day for the struggle. Gandhi; handsome, elegant, patrician, Western-educated and Eastern-garbed. You can’t win the electorate if you don’t look a little like the electorate.

Now he doesn’t look like the voters or his grandfather; the insides of a Gandhi look just like the insides of all the others he’s killed, they said. The men hugged each other once more.

He won’t be coming back here again, they said, laughing.

No, Dhara thought, and we won’t be going back there again.

Tamil Nadu, the southern state, would no longer hide the Tigers, take their refugees, or provide them with supplies. They couldn’t win this war without India. The Tigers had assassinated the grandson of the country’s founding prime minister. India would never forgive.

‘You don’t look happy, Acca, are you all right?’ Niri asked.

‘I’m just thinking, Niri, that’s all.’

‘About Rajiv Gandhi?’