‘I think about her a lot. I don’t know her at all, and yet I feel I know her well. She must have been so happy walking home from school that day. Her exams were over, and she might have applied to university. She would have been so frightened. I wish I could have told her the pain won’t last forever. There is an end to it, one way or another. She was nineteen years old, Acca, the same age as Smrithi.

‘Thank you for looking after our daughter. Keep her safe and far away from all this.’

Smrithi closed her eyes for a moment and saw the schoolgirl. She shook the image from her mind and tried to replace it with another: her mami sitting with her on Primrose Hill, laughing as they did handstands with Ahalya under a pink London sky. Tears fell onto the paper.

The letters all finished the same way: ‘Not yet. All my love, Dhara.’ Smrithi didn’t understand the ending, but she understood the beginning and the middle and that was something.

•

Smrithi remembered a moment. She was sleeping. Someone opened her small hand and placed something inside it. It was smooth. She woke up.

‘Amma,’ she whispered, sleep still upon her. Her words caught in her sticky mouth.

‘Shh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I had to see you.’

‘You’re back,’ Smrithi said, opening her eyes more fully. ‘What did you bring me?’

Priya laughed. ‘Open your hand and have a look.’

It was a carved elephant.

‘Smell it,’ she said, pushing the hair back from Smrithi’s face. It smelled delicious and familiar, like the smokiness of their shrine.

‘It’s made of sandalwood.’ Amma bent down and nuzzled her. ‘You smell good too.’ She tickled Smrithi’s neck with her nose. Smrithi moved over, making space for her in the bed.

‘Is it a baby elephant, like me?’ Smrithi asked.

‘No, it’s a mummy elephant, like me,’ she replied, holding her close. Amma smelled like sandalwood too.

•

Smrithi sat patiently as her children piled sand around her. A human sandcastle, Mummy, they said, laughing as they accidentally put a handful down her swimmers. She ran her fingers through Pearl Beach’s soft, white sand. Its warmth was comforting. Children on a beach were comforting.

Watching them play, she couldn’t get other images out of her mind. Twenty, maybe forty, maybe seventy, some reports were now suggesting one hundred thousand dead; killed in the final months of the war. Mothers on a beach, digging bunkers in the sand. Sand is so hard to dig: rebelliously returning to its place when dry; hard and heavy to move when wet. Mothers hiding their children, using their own bodies as sandbags, as shells rained down. Mothers will do anything.

Smrithi caught Ahalya by the waist and wrestled her onto her lap.

‘Mummy, Mummy!’ Ahalya shrieked, wriggling as Smrithi tickled her.