‘The same thing as you. I’m trying to help. I heard the need was greater here. I’ve been stationed in West Africa for the last few years with MSF but after … what happened, it didn’t make sense to me anymore. My family still lives in Colombo. I just wanted to be useful here. My name is Suren, by the way, in case you were at all interested.’ He held out a hand to her.

‘I hope you washed your hands?’ she hesitated, half mocking, half serious.

‘Twice, like I was scrubbing for surgery. And you?’

She too knew the need was greater here. When she arrived at the MSF camp, she wondered if God hated them. After everything she’d seen with the Tigers, all the bodies of young men and women, boys and girls really, that she’d sewn back together or whose pieces she’d thrown away, she wondered whether God felt that carnage was not fast enough and a simpler solution was required. He brought a dam wall down and allowed a cleansing such as they had never seen before. She wondered what they had done to be so forsaken, so wiped from the face of their small island. She wondered how they could be worth less; how they could be loved less than others.

She shook her head, at no one in particular, at herself, at God perhaps. Suren was looking at her, studying her face brazenly, waiting for an answer.

‘I always wash my hands,’ she replied, laughing again.

‘You are beautiful when you laugh, you should do it more often.’

‘There is little reason to laugh,’ she replied, standing up. Her shift had started.

•

Dhara held the child over the latrine. Her legs were braced on either side of the narrow pit. She gripped her under the arms, suspending her above the wooden seat. The girl was still too weak to squat on her own, and Dhara didn’t want her to touch anything inside the makeshift hut.

‘There, good girl,’ she said, holding the child against her when she’d finished. The stench in the hut was oppressive. She would never get used to it; or the blood and mucus that laced the diarrhoea, like oil in a river.

‘Lean on me. Now what do we do?’

‘We wash our hands,’ the little girl replied softly.

Yes, Dhara thought, we wash our hands with contaminated water.

‘Remember, chutie, when you wash your hands ask for the sari-water.’ Dhara pointed to the sign above the pump. It showed water dripping from a filtration bag made from an old sari. Nala used to have hundreds of saris.