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The soldiers came at dawn.

Malini was awakened by the noise in the town. She knew by the gunfire that soldiers had come, but she didn’t know if they were Sinhalese or Tamil. Six months had passed since her father had predicted that the LTTE forces would be overwhelmed by the government troops, and she knew that the Tamil Tigers now stood on the brink of defeat. What they might do in their desperation was something her father worried about every day.

Malini wondered if this might be the Tigers now. As she hurried to comfort her sister, there was a loud knocking at the front door.

Her father, without great haste, attended to the knocking.

Banni, sitting up in her bed, asked her sister what was happening.

‘We don’t know yet. Stay calm.’

‘I am calm. Why do you say “stay calm” when you can see that I am already?’

‘Okay, good.’

The voices at the front door carried clearly to Malini and Banni.

First, her father’s. ‘What is your business?’

And then, a stranger’s voice. ‘How many in this household?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘How many? Answer!

The stranger spoke Tamil, but not the local dialect.

‘Four,’ said her father.

‘All of you outside – now!’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because if you ask one more question, I will kill you. Get moving!’

Malini and Banni waited in silence until their father appeared at the doorway of the room. Behind him followed their mother, still dressing herself rapidly in her blue sari.

‘Kanavar,’ their mother addressed her husband, ‘who has come to our house?’

‘Tigers. We have to leave. Malini, Banni, dress yourselves as quickly as you can.’

Banni started putting on the garments she’d worn the previous day – blue jeans, a pink blouse and Nike trainers.

Malini hurried back to her bedroom, took her second-best sari from the wardrobe, pulled off the long T-shirt she wore as a nightie and began expertly to turn the silk cloth about her body. Why take the trouble when she had jeans of her own? Because she had a strong feeling that she was about to die, and was indulging a sudden urge to farewell life as a Tamil.

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Outside, the LTTE soldiers drove people into the town square with blows and curses. Those who faltered and fell were kicked where they lay until they staggered to their feet again. The soldiers seemed to be in a state of hysteria, as if they couldn’t afford to lose a second moving people from their homes into the centre of the town.

Malini thought the soldiers looked so young, some no older than ten or eleven, not yet old enough to grow a beard. The lieutenant was much older than his soldiers. He wore reflecting sunglasses so that his eyes were concealed, and a bushy moustache in imitation of the famous Tiger commander Velupillai Prabhakaran. He was standing on the bonnet of a bullet-riddled Nissan four-wheel drive, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Assemble in the square. Assemble in the square immediately!’

A man in a white linen suit and small round-rimmed spectacles being urged forward by a soldier called to the lieutenant. ‘I am a doctor. What is the meaning of this? You can see that the children are frightened. Explain yourself!’

The lieutenant said, ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

The crowd in the square grew bigger and bigger, until there were perhaps as many as half of the town’s population of 2300. Some had brought possessions with them, small things such as framed photographs and cooking pots. One woman had an electric toaster, for some reason; another, a teapot. Many of the children carried soft toys – SpongeBob, Garfield, Barney the Dinosaur. Faces everywhere in the crowd were streaming with tears. Mothers attempted to comfort their children; fathers shouted at the soldiers who were shouting at them. But the lieutenant in his sunglasses shouted louder than anyone. ‘Stand closer to each other. I want everyone in the square. Everyone! If you make trouble, I promise I will shoot you!’

Malini’s family was squeezed in along the edge of the square, against the brick wall of the Great Wonder Cinema.

Malini’s father was held in high regard in Satham, and someone in the crowd appealed to him for an explanation. ‘Honoured sir, what is the business of these barbarians, may I ask?’

By the time the Tiger commander was ready to address the crowd, the hubbub had grown so loud that he fired his rifle into the air. He called at the top of his voice, ‘Do I have to shoot someone to make you listen? Do I have to shoot all of you?’

The crowd grew quiet. Malini’s father, with one arm around his wife’s shoulders and the other around his young daughters, drew them all closer.

‘You are going for a holiday,’ shouted the lieutenant, ‘to Ankapur.’

An immediate rumble of dissent came from the crowd. Malini’s father said, not loudly, as if to himself, ‘This is bad.’ Ankapur was a small village on the coast, some thirty kilometres away. There was nothing there but a couple of fishing boats.

‘You are going to Ankapur,’ the lieutenant shouted once more. ‘All of you!’

‘What is this nonsense?’ the doctor called back. ‘Ankapur? It is the heaven of mosquitoes – we will be eaten alive!’

Malini whispered to her father. ‘What does he mean?’

‘They want us as human shields, Malini. They will crowd everyone in on the coast, hoping that the government troops won’t attack them for fear of killing civilians.’

‘Will the government troops attack?’

‘Yes, they will.’

By now, the soldiers had encircled the crowd: some standing on the roof of the Great Wonder Cinema, some on the roof of the courthouse, some on the back of the trucks that had brought them to Satham. A young soldier, a boy of no more than thirteen, stood on a low stone wall close to Malini and her family. The expression on the boy’s face was frightening – fierce and heedless, as if he might at any minute go berserk and fire his weapon into the crowd. Malini nudged her father and nodded towards the soldier.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ she whispered.

Malini’s father glanced at the soldier. ‘Drugs,’ he said. ‘The government soldiers use them, too. Don’t make eye contact with him.’

The soldier made Malini think of a boy from her school, Thiaku, who had been conscripted by the Tigers at the age of twelve. He came back to the town after two years away. He had lost a foot on the battlefield and was no longer expected to serve. Some of the boys of the town considered him a hero and would sit with him and beg for tales of the war. He never said a single word.

Malini had seen him one morning on her way back from the market, sitting on a bench outside the old courthouse built by the British a century ago. His crutch rested beside him and he was staring straight ahead. Malini sat quietly beside him. After five minutes or more of silence, she noticed that tears were forming in his eyes. She’d waited longer, then asked, ‘You have seen terrible things?’

Thiaku had glanced at Malini, then lifted his hands and held them out, staring fixedly at them. ‘Do you see?’ he’d said. Then he’d slowly hoisted himself up and taken hold of his crutch. He’d struggled away towards the part of the township beyond the courthouse, where he lived with his parents.

The next day, Thiaku had vanished from the town.

Malini, in the days that followed, thought of those three words: Do you see? Her enthusiasm for the war had faded away and never came back.

Malini’s father climbed up onto the low stone wall surrounding the cinema to report what was happening on the far side of the square. The soldiers appeared to be driving people, in groups of around fifty, onto the road to the coast. It was mayhem. Children were shrieking, adults shouting out to their family and friends as they attempted to stay together. The soldiers fired their weapons into the air again and again.

Beside Malini, an old woman sat down on the ground and dropped her head onto her chest. ‘Kill me here,’ she called out. ‘What do you want? I walk all day and then die? I will die here!’

Malini’s father, fearful of what the boy soldier might do, helped the old woman to her feet. ‘Say nothing, mother,’ he whispered to her. ‘Say nothing. Endure.’

Malini and her family, at the back of the square, were among the last to be forced onto the coast road by the soldiers. Malini heard her father whisper to his wife, ‘We are in a trap. We can’t even try to escape. If they shoot a few of us, it won’t matter to them.’

The sun was now high in the east, and father, mother and daughters shuffled onto the coast road and began a journey that Malini hoped wouldn’t end with the death of all of them.