The mother and the farmer and the teacher and the man who drove an auto and had never missed a day of work, ran with the doctor and the mechanic and the woman who sewed dresses and secretly loved her sister’s husband. They all looked the same now: clothing torn, feet shredded, bodies covered in the red-brown dust of their village and all the pounded villages they’d marched through, the muck of the jungles, the red of fresh blood and the smelly black of old wounds. They’d often done their best and sometimes their worst, they’d lived as their parents and priests and teachers and the Gita had told them they should. And now they would die as no one had told them they would.

Scattered, terrified and wondering why them, why like this, why now, when so much of life before was suffering and so much of life ahead was unfinished.

And when the sky rained fire they wondered if the sun itself had been shelled and broken into a thousand incandescent stars that now sought the soothing waters of the lagoon they were trying to cross. They gagged on muddy water and pushed through the tangle of bodies that floated and cluttered their path. They looked up at the sun and felt it thunder down in disbelief.

‘Come with us, Dhara. This is the last chance,’ he said again.

She remembered driving to Katunayake Airport to pick up Smrithi and Priya, the window rolled down, singing a Loretta Lynn tune as she went.

She remembered the Arrivals Gate. She told Smrithi it was her favourite place in the whole world. And even though she had never seen the world she didn’t need to. She just needed that one place. Her heart ached to stand there again, waiting for her daughter to return.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

Colombo, 2009

Dhara licked the ice cream from her wrist. She could never eat it fast enough. Rivulets of vanilla dribbled down her arm. She threw the cone to a stray dog that had been watching her hopefully. She didn’t want it; she just bought it out of habit. It was an old habit. The ice cream made her look like she was meant to be there.

She sat at Galle Face Green as the last light of the sun bled into the Indian Ocean. She came here whenever she finished work on time. She liked to watch families go for walks on the promenade: children running into the ocean and shrieking away from it; young men who linked pinky fingers and walked, swinging their hands in time with the waves; even a few tourists, taking photos of the sunset she was watching now.