Before Sathyan led Ellie through the heavy doors, he took a caramel from his pocket and gave it to her.
‘It helps with the smell,’ he said.
When he called to suggest a holiday north together, she hadn’t hesitated or asked questions. Now she wished she had. She moved the caramel around her mouth, soft remnants sticking to her teeth, as astringent chemical vapours hit the back of her throat.
‘This is my favourite place in the whole world,’ Sathyan told her.
‘Your favourite place in the whole world?’ she clarified.
‘Yes.’
‘You need to get out more. We’re in a prosthetics factory,’ she said. ‘Let me guess, you love the smell of bleach, resin and polyethylene in the morning?’
‘I love the smell of egg hoppers in the morning, but this will do. I’ll show you why.’
She followed him out of the warehouse, passing people working on different parts of the process. Women in protective jumpsuits at a production line, guiding overhead vats across a series of moulds. Men sorting arms, legs, hands and feet. Old women sitting on the floor, checking legs against diagrams pinned to clipboards. One anointed a prosthetic leg with holy ash. She prayed to it, reached for her scalpel and began to carve. Her callused hands worked quickly and confidently, creating smooth brown grooves, planes and tendons, the angles of bone and the softness of human tissue. Something sinewy and real. Something that could be strapped to a mutilated body for support, but also for beauty.
Ellie had not expected that.
‘She’s our head sculptor. She used to make clay statues of the gods for the village temples that are now being bombed.’ Sathyan turned to face her. ‘I wanted you to see there is beauty and hope, even in the debris.’
•
Inside the school hut, Sathyan and Ellie sat down with a boy, Sathyan speaking rapidly in Tamil. Ellie recognised a lot of the words. The boy was nine years old and he liked cricket. But she also missed a lot of words. The Tamil spoken in the north was a purer, faster version than what she had studied at the Agency and picked up through work, and she struggled to keep up.
The boy looked from Sathyan to Ellie to his leg, then nodded. He placed his feet on a chair, rolling up the edges of his shorts to show her the socket of the prosthetic where the flesh of his actual leg sat in the plastic.
‘The mine took off most of the leg to here, exposing the femoral artery,’ Sathyan explained, motioning to what remained of the child’s thigh. ‘He nearly bled to death, but he was lucky.’
‘And strong.’
‘Mostly lucky,’ he replied. ‘Not all children are lucky.’ His eyes shone with pain. The boy reached up and patted him on the arm.
‘He’s doing really well,’ she said. She had seen the impact of the mines in other conflict zones, where she’d been tracking Semtex sellers. But in this prosthetics factory and refuge for survivors, the damage was more real. The failures of her work were more painful, the successes more urgent.
She repeated herself to the child, haltingly pulling the Tamil words for ‘well’ and ‘strong’ from the recesses of her mind.
The boy hooted at her colloquial vocabulary and then nodded shyly.
‘My Hindi is better,’ she said to Sathyan, embarrassed.
‘That’s very useful if the subtitles for a Bollywood film fail,’ he deadpanned. He helped the boy down from the desk. ‘For many amputees, when the arm or leg is taken from them, they still feel like it’s there for years afterwards. The older they are, the harder it is to understand that the limb is actually gone. They reach for things with hands that are not there, take steps with legs that are missing. The mind doesn’t believe what the eyes are seeing.’ They watched the boy hobble away. ‘The mind looks down and feels pain in a limb that has gone. It functions as if what was taken from it, what was stolen from it, is still there.’
‘The phantom limb,’ she replied. She wanted to ask Sathyan what was stolen from him, but she had learned to wait.
•
She had forgotten that the male form could be so beautiful.
Sathyan sat up in the bed and pulled the sheet back across the lower half of his lean and muscular body. Sweat lingered on the contours of his dark skin and caught in his hair. ‘I read your op-ed for The Washington Post.’
Damn the internet. ‘And?’ She braced herself. Her article was about how the Iraq war had been the brave choice for the US, a necessary intervention.
‘You know that more people died last year from gun violence in the US than in 9/11? You don’t see emergency sessions of Congress being called for that, do you?’
‘9/11 was different.’ She probably needed to put some clothes on for this ambush.
‘9/11 happens all around the world, all the time. It’s just that it finally happened to you, and in your own minds, you are very important.’
‘Thank you for minimising the pain of thousands of American families, Sathyan.’ She sat up and dragged the sheet back to her.
‘That pain will once again make you respond with disproportionate violence, setting more heathen feet on Muslim land and creating the threat of eternal occupation.’
‘Seriously, this again? You seduced me in order to give me the rest of your presentation?’
‘I seduced you?’
She smiled, relieved to have distracted him. ‘We seduced each other. I own my choices.’
‘More people should,’ he replied. ‘But that doesn’t change the point of my presentation. You give the fundamentalists exactly what they want—a reason to hate you and a way to radicalise hundreds of thousands of Muslims who would otherwise have wanted to live peaceful lives.’
‘You think it’s as simple as that? That we’re playing into their hands?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do. Because while the jihadists have no playbook, you do. American foreign policy has been ticking boxes on the same playbook since 1945, and the jihadists have read it. Even though you don’t give them credit for historical literacy.’
‘Well, the history of those conflicts is hindsight, and you know what they say about hindsight.’ Ellie dropped the sheet and pulled herself onto his lap, holding the headboard on either side of his head. They had one hour before his next meeting at the factory.
•
They lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling fan.
‘This is unexpected,’ Sathyan said.
‘What, this?’ She motioned between the two of them.
‘No, this was entirely expected. Planned actually. I moved my afternoon meeting.’
‘Are you saying I’m easy?’ Ellie quipped.
‘I’m saying you were right.’ He rolled over and ran his hand down her side.
‘Then what’s unexpected? That you want to do it again, immediately?’ She hoped his hand would keep going.
His hand stopped at hers, locking fingers with her, surprising her. ‘It’s unexpected how … comfortable you are here, in Sri Lanka, in the north. You were born and raised in the West. You look like us but you’re not us. And yet, here you are, surrounded by the muck of war. Refugees, widows, orphans. People whose bodies and families and souls have been maimed beyond repair.’
She turned to face him and waited. She could see the story in him, wanting to be told, waiting for the right person to tell it to.
He began, slowly at first, and then the words tumbled out. ‘My father was a teacher at St John’s College, the boys’ high school in Jaffna town. He taught history and geography. He loved the past and he loved the world. He said the two should always be taught together. He said you could understand the way the world was divided in the present if you understood the past. Understanding how it was divided helped you understand how to put it back together.’
She drew their entwined hands to her heart, kissed them, and waited again.
‘We have family in London and Toronto. They begged us to join them, but he wouldn’t leave. He loved this place. He said, “This is our viidu, our home.” He refused to join the movement, but he also refused to relinquish his home.’
He paused, letting the final memory surface. ‘The police had raided the school before, accusing the staff of teaching the children propaganda. Accusing the school of recruiting children for the Tigers. The principal tried to tell them. They would never allow the boys to fight. They wanted them to study and to leave the country, to leave the violence. One night, police came to the principal’s home and took him away.’
‘And then?’ she whispered, even though she already knew.
‘And then, a month later, they came and took Appa away. My younger sister, too.’
She pulled him into her arms and held him until he slept.