She didn’t answer his question. ‘I haven’t always told the truth,’ she replied instead, more to herself than to him. ‘I’ve lied for a long time. I know sometimes it has its place.’ Sometimes it served a purpose. She felt tired from lying. She wanted to set down its heaviness. She wanted to tell the truth. She suddenly remembered where she was.

‘Thank you, Suren. I’m very grateful for the offer and for everything you did for me. I’ll miss you. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t decided yet.’

‘There’s nothing to decide. You have no choice. Don’t be a fool,’ he said loudly, startling the crow. It stretched its wings and sidled away.

Suren jumped down off the wall and took a step towards her. She shook her head and motioned to the people around them. He stopped and looked around, backing away slowly.

‘You should go, Suren; you’d make a terrible spy. You’re an excellent doctor, though; I hope you keep working in Germany or wherever you end up. You should go back to MSF, they need people like you.’ She wanted to take his hand and hold it in hers, but this was not the place.

‘I want you to think about it. Promise me that much,’ he said.

‘You should go,’ she repeated. He nodded reluctantly and shook his head at her.

‘Please, Suren. I promise, I will think about it. Poite vahngo,’ she said in Tamil. Go and come back. There was no word for goodbye in Tamil.

He looked down and walked past her.

She turned her face towards the fading light. Nala warned her about her skin getting darker, but she had never cared. She loved the feeling of the sun on her skin. It was the same sun that kissed her father’s head every morning when he went to work. It was the same sun that was beating down on hundreds of thousands of people, trapped on a narrow strip of beach in the far north-east of the island. For four months, as fighting intensified, a mass of battered people moved as one, eastward, seeking safety. They picked up their remaining children and ran towards the coast, towards the rising sun.

This was President Rajapaksa’s ‘Zero Civilian Casualty Policy’. The army inched forward relentlessly. The Tigers fell back, using the Tamil people as cover. The militants’ final play was as cruel as it was misjudged: they thought the army wouldn’t shoot through a layer of innocents. The army killed and stepped over the morass of bodies without a second thought. The Tigers used the Tamil people, wielding them to their death as they prepared themselves for their last stand. The more fighters they lost, the more fighters they stole from the cadaverous families they’d sworn to protect.