Bala didn’t want to leave Sri Lanka but he knew he had to. His younger brother Kumar had his own children and grandchildren. He had begged his brother to leave with him. His granddaughters were the right age for the army to take and his grandsons were the right age for the Tigers to take. Humanity had long been replaced by something hideous and incomprehensible.

Countries had opened their arms and borders to the Tamils, and Bala left in 1990. He brought Kumar’s two youngest sons and their children with him to Sydney. He carried a small bag and his education. He had no other possessions or papers, but he had been allowed refuge.

News of the atrocities reached Sydney. Rajan grieved for the tens of thousands dead; the countless disappeared, buried in unmarked graves with no certainty for the families left behind—just the endless torture of hope. There were no bodies, no records, and no remorse. He did what others like him were doing. He helped his friends. When Bala arrived in Sydney, Rajan found him a job at Siva’s hospital. He looked at Bala’s face and asked no questions.

Two decades later, Bala was there with a request for a loan. Rajan would give him the money. But he wanted to make sure Bala knew the consequences of what he was doing. Money went into Ceylon all the time, often to the wrong places. During the war, Tamils thought they were funding orphanages and later found they were arming children instead.

‘Are you sure this is safe?’ Rajan asked. It was another stupid question he regretted.

Nothing was safe for the Tamils. In the final stages of the war, people died in hospitals and schools where they had taken refuge. Rajan had read the recent Amnesty International Report. The Tigers had used their own people as a shield. But the army, knowing the molecular composition of that shield, had still attacked it, breaking down men, women and children to finish the Tigers. War crimes, the report called it. War was always criminal.

‘Safe? No. I’m not sure at all. The boats are dangerous, but staying is hopeless. It’s not like it was just after the war ended; it’s not better, it’s different. There is reconstruction of the country but no reconciliation. It took less than forty years from independence for war to begin and another thirty years for it to end. Without reconciliation, conflict is inevitable.

‘My brother Kumar and the children who stayed are all gone. It’s only his grandchildren who are left there. I want to do this for my family before I—I’m not getting any younger, Rajan. When we die, the only thing we leave behind is our family.’