After the last attack, some of the government doctors had agreed to leave. Suren was the only Sinhalese among them. The Ministry of Health had ordered everyone back to Colombo months ago but they had refused.

‘Come with us, Dhara. This is the last chance. There is only one way this ends.’

The end.

She had been there at the end for so many people. They looked at her with wild panic and desperation; very occasionally resignation, or worse, relief. She never knew what to say. ‘Paravaile mahal, padango.’ It doesn’t matter, daughter, sleep, she would murmur, holding their broken bodies.

Smrithi was excellent at words. Dhara was better at numbers. There were over one hundred and fifty thousand refugees in the No Fire Zone. The entire population depended on the UN to eat. Farming and fishing had long since ended. The monthly UN food ration for April was enough for sixty thousand people for two days. April had thirty days. Dhara was hungry. Around her, people starved and shrivelled.

Everything ends. She had felt the end so many times. In the black ants of Gal Oya, the metallic darkness of a police station, the blood-soaked floor of the jungle camp, and now here.

Here, where children knew when and how to jump into bunkers at the first trilling of missiles the army said it wasn’t using. They saw the earth shudder and list like the small fishing boats of their fathers, tossed by a careless ocean; heard the burst of sound that deafened for a moment, a beautiful, silent moment, followed by screaming. Some children, the younger ones, tried to clamber out, reaching for their parents if they had any or those who’d carried them this far who were not their parents but someone to hold on to when they’d lost everyone else who’d ever held them before. The older children knew better, they stayed in the bunker and waited, stacked on top of each other like crumbled, dry tea biscuits shoved back in a box.

Here, where they lined the children in lifeless rows and could not cover them because they needed the tarpaulins for shelter and the sheets for stretchers and the clothes for bandages. So the flies covered them and sometimes the mothers sat with them and wailed over them and beat their bodies in pain and anger and loss and more pain. They pushed the flies away but the flies came back. They were hungry too.