The cancer had moved with stealth. It feasted and grew without remorse. Nala held her father’s frail hand. She could see the pain etched into his handsome face. It had replaced his smile lines with harsher, deeper ones. He was not an old man yet, but he had the frailty of a newborn.

‘Don’t cry, mahal, it’s all right,’ Appa whispered. ‘Promise me you will look after your brothers and sister. If you swim, swim together. If you sink, sink together.’

‘Don’t worry, Appa,’ Rajan reassured her father. ‘Nala and I will stay here. We’ll take care of them. You have nothing to worry about.’

Appa’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You’re a good boy, mahan. I knew from the beginning.’

He was breathless. He nodded at Rajan, who rolled Appa’s sleeve up to the wasted muscle of his shoulder. Collapsed blue veins sat with resignation.

Appa craved death, even more than the morphine Rajan had been giving him quietly over the last few months. Nala begged, with words, then tears and then screams.

‘Let him go,’ she cried. ‘Help him, if you care for me at all, you will help him.’

Finally, Rajan relented. He put the cap back on the syringe. She rolled Appa’s sleeve down again and placed his hands gently onto his sunken chest. Its rise and fall settled into a steady rhythm, and then slowed and slowed.

•

After Appa’s death, Nala and Rajan offered to remain in her parents’ home. Rajan had taken over the household expenses for her father during his illness and he continued to look after these. She didn’t feel like the mistress of the house though. She still found herself deferring to her mother on domestic matters. She desperately wanted her own home but didn’t know how to approach Rajan about it. Certainly she couldn’t leave Amma and her siblings just yet; they needed her. Her father still needed her.

Nala stopped outside the Kathirgamam temple and breathed in the chaos. She was surrounded by thousands of pilgrims. Many of them had come on foot from all over to this remote southern corner of the island. Pilgrims even came from South India to see where Lord Murugan had met his divine consort Valli. The land was sacred and loved by worshippers from all religions. She had promised her father before he died that she would honour his last wishes and donate a bell to the temple.

It was the largest bell the priest had ever received. Nala had commissioned it a few weeks earlier, through her friend Rita Matthews. Rita was one of the Cinnamon Gardens Matthews, but they knew each other from Holy Family Convent, the Colombo school for girls they had both attended. Rita knew how to get things done; even as a child she had connections.