People huddled together on a beach on the other side of the country from her. Hope had convulsed away. The army wouldn’t stop and the Tigers wouldn’t let them leave the war zone. The sun had already set on them.

She closed her eyes and tried to say the words of the Gayatri Manthram. It was a prayer for protection. Her father taught it to her when she was a child and they had recited it together at dawn and at sunset. She tried, but history’s fist tightened around her throat.

She looked north and saw the majestic palm trees at the top end of the beach, leaning ever closer to the earth. After thousands of years of being grazed by the wind, they were bending, in supplication to Surya, the Sun God; in defeat.

Sydney, 2009

Priya tried to control the tremor in her voice. She took a deep breath and spoke into the phone again. ‘Dhara, I’m not asking you to migrate here, just come for a holiday until Colombo is safe.’

‘Colombo and Sri Lanka will never be safe. People don’t need to fear the Tigers anymore, but they should and will fear their government,’ Dhara replied.

Priya knew she was right. In the end, the end was fast. The Sri Lankan Army had a new arsenal at its disposal. The People’s Republic stood in the shadows behind the Democratic Socialist Republic: whispering, urging, arming. Artillery, mortar fire, multi-barrel shells and cluster bombs. Words on a shopping list, numbers on a balance sheet, corpses on a crowded beach.

The Tigers died cornered, with a fragile barrier of ragged refugees in front of them and the ocean behind them. There was nowhere to go. And there was no one to see: the UN had been evacuated more than six months before. The Red Cross had limited access and the media had none.

Priya knew what cruelty man was capable of, in the darkness of a small room. Dhara had told her, many years ago, and she had spent a lifetime trying to forget.

‘Come back to me, Dhara. Leave, do it for me, for Smrithi, for our grandchildren.’

‘But what about our people, Acca? What about them?’ Dhara replied, as she always did.

‘They are dead and you will die with them, is that what you want?’ Priya felt angry tears fall down her face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I just look at that footage—the soldiers and the … the women.’

Grainy, jerky home videos haunted them all—naked prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded and kneeling on the ground. Then shot in the head. The same clip: different locations, different soldiers, different victims. The female prisoners were the most painful; desecrated in life and mutilated after death. Their glassy eyes stared at her in her sleep. She could not fathom the last thing they’d seen; the last thing they’d felt. The trophies of war.