Vani had prepared a simple dinner for Dhara: puttu, omelette and coconut chilli sambal. They had lived together in the small apartment attached to Nala’s house for almost ten years, which was longer than they had lived together when Dhara was a child. At first, both of them were uncertain. They weren’t strangers at all to each other, but it was strange waking up every day in the same house, sharing a kitchen, a bathroom, observing and accommodating each other’s routines and habits. Vani learned to look forward to mealtimes when she could prepare her daughter’s favourite food. Dhara learned to look forward to mealtimes too, when she could talk to her mother.

She was excited. She took the book out of its plastic bag and showed it to her. Vani laughed.

‘Don’t you already have that translation, mahal?’ she asked.

‘I do, but this one is a first edition. It was published in 1965—I bought it for Smrithi.’ Dhara walked over to one of her bookshelves and pulled down a copy of the Mahabharata. It was by the same author, Kamala Subramaniam, but her edition was published in 1977, the year Smrithi was born.

On family holidays, she enjoyed explaining the war to Vivek and Smrithi, who were captivated by its drama. It was full of the richness and depravity of human nature. The five Pandava brothers were good and their cousins, the one hundred Kaurava brothers, were bad. The goodies and the baddies, as Smrithi liked to call them. That was the version that was taught to all Hindu children.

It was only much later that she re-read the epic and noticed the many shades between good and bad.

The Tigers took the war to the villages and the cities, their terror widespread, their violence as unrelenting as it was indiscriminate. They cleansed, and in doing so they sullied themselves. They killed all who disagreed with them, even their own. They used their young as weapons; tearing families apart as easily as limbs; as easily as peace accords.

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna rebelled in the south. Bodies were found with heads impaled; charred remains wreathed in garlands of burning tyres; young men gutted and left to die, all in public places. The government reacted with equal brutality. No one knew exactly how many Sinhalese died because so many bodies were never found, but an estimated seventy thousand of its own people were killed so that the JVP understood the message.

Dhara read the Mahabharata and finally understood its message. The heroes were flawed; they were human and therefore they failed. The villains were capable of goodness and greatness.