She kept her promise to Nala, and had not been back to Jaffna since 1984. But she also kept a different promise she made to herself, years before that, when she vomited a viscous saltiness from her body and invoked the sun, begging it to scorch her clean.

She paid her bill—500 rupees. Rajan would be horrified. She had to agree, it was extortionate. As she left the hotel and tried to hail an auto, she looked across the Galle Road. A white van was there, as she knew it would be.

Trincomalee, Eastern province of Sri Lanka, 2005

Dhara was in Colombo when the tsunami happened. Even there she could feel the shudder. Later, she imagined white, foamy froth, riding on the crest of a stone-coloured wall. It was an image her father had given her, a memory from his childhood that plagued hers. It came back to her now, when she thought about entire villages swallowed by an angry ocean. Families, homes, graves, memories swept away. Nothing but the heads of palm trees, lifting their chins out of the water, gasping for air. The earth bowed and stumbled under the weight of so much water.

She applied for a government permit to join the NGOs in the eastern province. Her friends at Médecins Sans Frontières were quick to offer her a job, they knew she had excellent experience, although no one had quite the right experience for this crisis. She packed a small bag, a crate of her own medical supplies, and a needle and thread.

•

‘Have a drink with me tonight,’ the man said in Sinhalese, sitting down next to her. He took his MSF tag off and put it on the table, rubbing the back of his neck. He was darker-skinned than her, his black hair shorn down to his scalp.

‘I’m far too old to have a drink with you,’ she replied in English. He was handsome in that unwashed way that only camp doctors could be.

‘How old are you?’ he replied, undeterred.

‘Is the entire Belgian Unit this forward?’

‘Only the French members. The Flemish are not as interesting,’ he shrugged his shoulders. He refused to speak in English.

She laughed. ‘You are neither, what’s your excuse?’ she asked in Sinhalese. She didn’t like the taste of it in her mouth.

‘I don’t need an excuse to flirt with you. What’s a nice doctor like you doing in a place like this?’ he asked, motioning to the dark canvas walls and simple folding beds and chairs that served as their communal mess area.

‘I could ask you the same,’ she reverted to English. ‘What is a Sinhalese doctor like you doing in a camp for displaced Tamils?’ she asked, not maliciously.