Dhara should have listened to Rajan when he asked her to come back, but she had loved Jaffna ever since she was a child. She had been to her family’s village with her parents, to visit her grandparents and her great-grandmother. Appa had told her stories of hide-and-seek, of building castles for Nala and vegetable patches for Archi. Later—after—she had returned with Rajan and Nala. Rajan would take the children to the Jaffna Public Library where they would read together for hours.

As a child, she pored through books about the Chola kings who conquered India. A thousand years ago they rode victoriously south to create new kingdoms and build temples all over South East Asia. They took their language and religion to an old world made new by fresh ideas. She revelled in manuscripts and maps about a Tamil Empire that was safe; where her culture was celebrated.

The Jaffna Peninsula jutted out into the Indian Ocean, flanked by the Bay of Bengal on the east and Palk Strait on the west. The strait took travellers, smugglers and later refugees to India. The Peninsula looked lonely on a map, a bent limb connected to the torso of Sri Lanka by a fistula of land, Elephant Pass. The first time she returned to Jaffna, she forced herself to stay awake in the car, expecting to see elephants walking alongside commuters, but there were none.

Jaffna was the capital of their ancestral kingdom, the citadel that young Tamil boys were swearing to protect for their people, not fully realising what payment that promise would demand. A solitary outpost, exposed to the ocean, it had no route of retreat.

She liked working in the north. It felt like home. Jaffna was the place her parents were born. They had breathed its air and walked on its blood-red soil. They had laughed here when they were whole. When she breathed, walked and laughed in Jaffna, she could feel them with her.

‘There’s a position vacant in the Infectious Diseases department here. Colombo General is a good place to complete your training,’ Rajan had urged. She wanted two specialties—emergency medicine and infectious diseases. Both would be useful. He was right about the training opportunity, but she knew he wanted her back in Colombo for other reasons.

Every month, more soldiers arrived in the Jaffna province, under the orders of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. The Tamil United Liberation Front was openly campaigning now for a separate Tamil state; Chelvanayakam’s devolution platform had inevitably hardened into a secessionist one.

Small groups of armed Tamil youths, no more than boys with stolen guns, had started to attack army and police stations in Jaffna. The government assumed these wild raids were organised by the TULF. Chelvanayakam denied it, stating he wanted a separate state by democratic, peaceful means. The rest of the country watched, holding its breath fearfully, as these different approaches to the same struggle inexorably converged.