Dhara laughed a little. She tore her last puri in half and gave a piece to each of the children. ‘Yes, Ravana was good and evil. We all wrestle with the Ravana inside us, I suppose.’

Priya shook her head at her daughter, motioning to her to stop talking. It was time to change the subject. She took the magazine away from Smrithi and gave it back to her sister, saying, ‘I don’t care if he’s the leader of the Tamil Tigers or a Demon King. His wife needs to take better care of him. If he doesn’t lose weight and start eating better or exercising, he’s going to look like a heart attack before he turns forty-five.’

Colombo, 1998

Dhara wiped the tears from her eyes. Priya made her laugh until she cried. In this week’s call, she was doing an impersonation of Nala. It wasn’t unkind, but it was uncannily accurate and Nala wouldn’t have liked it.

‘Stop it, Acca, you are terrible,’ she laughed into the phone.

‘I know, I know, but she makes me so mad, Dhara,’ Priya laughed back. ‘Listen, Siva wants to talk to you about the latest news. Do you have time?’

‘Of course, although he’s more supportive than me,’ she replied. Her own politics were changing; a stealthy subversion creeping into the cracks of her Tamil nationalism, creating larger fissures that longed to be filled with peace.

‘You know what they say: absence makes the heart grow more rabid,’ Priya said, calling Siva to the phone.

‘How are you, Dhara?’ he asked politely.

‘I’m well thank you, Anna,’ she replied. ‘How are you?’

‘They’re going to be outlawed,’ he said abruptly.

‘I’m surprised they weren’t outlawed earlier,’ she replied. What was there to say? The Tigers were becoming braver and more brazen in their civilian bombings. ‘Anna, the international community has no option but to respond to the attack.’

‘They could ignore the civilian bombings, the way they ignored the civilian bombings in the north,’ he said, referring to the recent bombing of St Peter’s at Navali. ‘It was a church, Dhara, almost a hundred Tamils died seeking refuge there,’ he said, as if he had to remind her.

‘I know it was,’ she replied. ‘And now the Tigers have bombed the Temple of the Tooth, one of the holiest Buddhist shrines in the world. The army has captured Jaffna and the Tigers have bombed Kandy. It just keeps going.’

For what? she thought.

‘If the Tigers are outlawed by other countries it will be harder for the diaspora to help them and the refugees.’ Siva was worried.

She was just tired.

There were hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees living in camps, in poverty, and in fear. They were called Internally Displaced People—IDPs: horror sanitised with an acronym.

‘The Norwegians are willing to help us, they want to mediate and broker a peace deal,’ he said.