The doctors were trying to make people use the latrines, but many were too weak to move. They lay in their own faeces, under canvas tents that were meant to shelter them from the sun. Those closer to death were moved to makeshift warehouses, where they slept on top of plastic sheeting. It could be rolled up and replaced.

People lay in endless orderly rows, making disorderly sounds: low moans of pain and raw cries of grief. IVs were rationed; children and mothers first. The peanut-butter-like protein paste was squeezed from its wrappers; the wrappers were torn and licked shiny clean.

The seasoned disaster-relief staff waited for the sour smell of rotting fish. They feared it more than the mighty waves that had carried them to this camp, where people lay like pustules on a corpse. The elderly didn’t speak, they had seen cholera before, and they didn’t dare say its name.

The tsunami had drowned parts of the south where the Sinhalese lived, and more of the east where the Tamils lived. Tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, more efficiently than any civil war could do.

Sewage pipes broke and burst, vomiting death into freshwater supplies and seeping insidiously into the groundwater. Men and women layered banana leaves on the floor of their shelters. The parquetry formed a flimsy barrier against the earth made soft by quiet toxins underneath.

In the south, foreign-aid rebuilt houses, hospitals and villages quickly. Little girls had schools in which to study. They had ceramic toilets and entire sanitation systems in which to defecate.

President Kumaratunga had stopped tsunami-aid to the parts of the eastern province held by the Tigers. She said she was preventing them from stealing a cut.

Dhara helped the little girl stand. Her arms and legs were shrivelled like the spindles of a murunga plant. When she breathed, a deep hollow sank in and out frantically beneath her rib cage. Her name, Jayanthi, her age, eight, and village, Mutur, had been registered. She waited now for her family to find her. Her mother and father and Anna and Ammamma and thambi. And Parameswari, her little goat. And the hundreds in her small fishing village: men who would have unfurled the canvas from their boats and pushed them out that morning, women who tended to their fires, made thosai for breakfast and said their prayers. Children, like her, who wanted to swim in the sapphire blue and find treasure on the shallow ocean floor instead of going to school. She waited and she remembered.