‘Don’t shush me, Rajan. Why can’t you talk normally? I’ve been waiting all day for you, and now you can’t even greet me properly.’ She hated that she sounded like a hysterical pregnant woman, but she was hurt.

‘Not now, Nala!’ He pushed her voice away with one irritated hand as his other fiddled with the knobs again. He finally found the channel he was searching for.

‘Riots,’ he said.

She stopped talking and sat down next to him. The news came crackling through, but with a clear message. There was rioting now in the east of the country, in a Tamil province. The violence had ended in Colombo and moved on to Gal Oya.

The radio presenter was saying something about a Sinhalese girl being raped by Tamils and made to walk naked in the town of Batticaloa. The local Sinhalese were retaliating with government vehicles and dynamite from the dam. The police were refusing to intervene, claiming to be outnumbered by the mob. Tamil politicians in Colombo were calling for the army to be sent in to help, but for now, Prime Minister Bandaranaike and the government wanted to ‘wait and see’.

The Gal Oya dam.

Finally she understood what Rajan was upset about. Her cousin-brother Mohan had moved to Gal Oya with his young family, shortly after her father’s death. He was a civil engineer working on the reservoir project.

Even as a child Mohan had been good at building things. He was the one who built their first fort in Archi’s back garden. He was an inspired designer for whom an empty old suitcase and travel chest held endless potential.

His parents had not been happy with his choice of wife. He had married a lower caste girl, Vani, because he loved her—and he thought the new start in Gal Oya would be good for all of them. A chance to live where no one knew them and no one asked questions. The couple had a young daughter, a few months younger than Nala’s, and she knew Mohan was thinking about the future.

Gal Oya was the future, he had said. There would be more settlements like it in the previously barren provinces of their small country. With new engineering and irrigation, anything was possible. In this case, even damming a river and clearing a jungle was possible. Mohan had worked on the dam because irrigation was his area of expertise and he was seduced by the ambition of mastering a river. Later, he was asked to turn his hand to more civil engineering projects, and it was then that he understood why his parents and so many others had resented the initiative.