Karna’s life moved relentlessly towards tragedy. On the eve of the great war, Indra, King of the demigods, and Arjuna’s father, interceded to protect his son. He asked Karna to give him the breastplate which would protect Karna’s life during the battle. The armour was fused to Karna’s body, and he bled as he cut it from his flesh, knowing that his death in the war was now inevitable.

It was hard not to cry during the film. The final song that Lord Krishna sang as Karna lay dying was beautiful. It expressed grief and glorified Karna as the hero that he was. The film’s Lord Krishna sang of the tragedy that grandfathers would tell their grandchildren, and grandchildren would tell their grandchildren. It could only be expressed in Tamil. There was something about their language; its poetry and its pain.

Their language. Sinhala Only. The Tamils no longer had a language with which to communicate with the State—and the State would no longer listen to them. Chelvanayakam, the Tamil politician, kept saying in English that they were voiceless now. In Tamil he would then ask: ‘How long do you think it will be before we are nation-less too?’

In the north, Tamil people refused to comply. They did business in Tamil, they stuck Tamil number plates on their cars over the Sinhalese ones, and they issued their own Tamil postage stamps in their own post offices. The State feared the beginnings of a separate state, and so it sent the army into the homeland of the Tamil people in the Jaffna province. The army did as the army pleased, and the Tamil people could no longer take refuge there, as they had once done.

Rajan had chosen a path for his family. They had not left Ceylon—it had been years since he’d tried. Nala’s brothers had migrated to Canada. Kamini and her family had stayed.

And now they would need to stick to this path, like Karna had. The final scenes of the film began. Arjuna would be remembered forever as the greatest warrior of the Mahabharata. It was to him that Lord Krishna gave the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, the Lord’s path to liberation. But it was Karna that Hindus would love. It was the actor Sivaji Ganesan’s Karna that Tamils would remember—chubby yet handsome, righteous yet flawed, heroic yet human.

As Arjuna shot the final arrow into a dying Sivaji, Rajan’s heart broke and Nala cried openly, clutching her husband’s hand.

CHAPTER 7

Colombo, 1966

Nala scowled at her husband. He could be so stubborn sometimes. Since his mother’s death last year, he was getting worse.

‘You spoil him too much, Nala. You should be forcing him to study instead of letting him play cricket in the street all the time. He doesn’t have the discipline for medicine.’ He was lecturing her about Nandan again.