‘She loves you so much, mahal. She’s very lucky to have you.’

‘I’m the lucky one,’ Dhara replied.

Madras, Tamil Nadu State, south India, 1996

The hotel restaurant was crowded as usual. Guests and locals packed in together like sticky, sweaty dodol sweets in a box. Waiters in fake five-star uniforms weaved through patrons, their trays held high, their perspiration sliding low.

Dhara pretended to read as she watched Vivek and Smrithi wolf down puri and potato curry. The puri at the hotel was legendary. When the deep-fried bread arrived, several puris balanced precariously on a silver platter, hot and inflated like balloons, the children clapped in excitement.

She corrected herself: they weren’t children anymore. They were young adults, Vivek now twenty-two and Smrithi nineteen. Dhara still liked to play with Smrithi’s hair, to tug on her earlobe or just gather her into her arms and squeeze her. And she’d been watching her applaud the arrival of puris for years.

‘Who’s that, Dhara mami?’ Smrithi asked between mouthfuls, pointing to the photograph in the magazine article.

‘You should know who that is—that’s Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE,’ she replied. ‘What’s happening to you children? This man is trying to free us. If Tamil Eelam becomes a reality, it will be because of him.’

‘He looks different. He’s put on weight and his moustache is bigger. He looks like Ravana,’ Vivek said.

She shook her head in dismay, but Smrithi agreed. ‘I think you could be right, Anna. Prabhakaran does look like Ravana. It’s the fiendish facial hair.’

‘Well, it’s not Ravana, it’s Prabhakaran.’ Dhara hadn’t meant to sound curt, but she was upset and didn’t like Prabhakaran being likened to the mythical king of Lanka. She knew the demon well, and the man not well enough.

‘Freedom fighter or brutal dictator?’ Smrithi read the article’s headline. ‘What do you think, mami?’

‘I think that no matter how depraved the Tigers become, the government has done and will do worse to the Tamil people if the Tigers did not exist at all.’

Smrithi didn’t look satisfied with that answer. Dhara wasn’t sure she was satisfied either. Disappointment was only a whisper away from disillusionment.

‘You know that families are being forced to give the Tigers everything: their money, their property and their children. I can’t understand that, mami—can you? I can’t imagine what that must feel like, for those parents or those children.’

‘I know, mahal,’ Dhara looked down. Priya reached for her hand. Her sister always knew what she was thinking, even when she didn’t want to be thinking it: children torn away from their parents; the emptiness that yearned to be filled.