The words jolted Nala. Priya. She didn’t want her to suffer that pain. Of course Priya agreed with Dhara. She always agreed with Dhara, with Rajan, with what was right. She would agree, but she would never admit she wished it were otherwise.

Her daughter loved that child in the confused, irrefutable, unbreakable mess of love that exists between a mother and a child and sometimes between siblings; between these siblings.

Priya would never keep what was Dhara’s, no matter what it cost her.

But Nala would. She cautioned Dhara; she convinced her.

‘If Smrithi knows, she will come back to Ceylon. Think about your work, mahal. Can you give it up? Can you stop it?’ she asked. ‘Smrithi will want to be with you and help you. She worships you already. She will want to be like you. I worry …’

She didn’t need to say more. She hadn’t lied. And she never told Priya or Rajan about the conversations.

Perhaps she was right. If Smrithi knew, she would have followed Dhara and she would have died with her.

Or perhaps Dhara would have given up her work, her faith in a homeland, and moved to Australia.

A dam deep inside her collapsed.

Guilt rose like bile from her gut, bitter and burning from the inside.

•

A pyramid of boxes arrived at Smrithi’s house by courier. Each contained countless letters from Dhara to Priya, that all began: ‘My dearest Acca, I hope this letter finds you well. How is our darling girl?’

She recounted the events of her life in Sri Lanka and the people around her. In a letter from 1996 she wrote:

‘They found Krishanthy Kumaraswamy finally. And her mother, brother and a family friend too. They worked out what happened. It’s unusual for them to bother, but there’s something about the photographs of Krishanthy in her pressed white school uniform. She always wore her hair in two long plaits, looped under each ear and tied with big shiny ribbons. There was nothing unusual about her. She looks like every schoolgirl in Sri Lanka. Maybe that’s why people noticed this time. It’s harder to ignore when it could be your child.

‘She was going home from school and stopped at Kaithady Army checkpoint in Jaffna. She was taken by six soldiers and never seen alive again.

‘Her mother, sixteen-year-old brother and the other man went to report her missing. Her mother would have guessed what had happened to her when she didn’t return. But she went to the army base anyway.

‘It’s been almost two months now, and they were all found there at the base. Her mother and the friend were bound and strangled. Krishanthy and her brother were cut into pieces before they were buried. Amnesty International is working hard to have the soldiers arrested. It’s an incredible campaign, the first one of its kind here for a victim, but I’m not hopeful.