A fever raged in Malini like a typhoon that roars in from the sea and turns the world upside down. She did not know where she was or who she was. She saw a house on fire, flames hurling themselves into a crimson sky. She saw a demon with a hundred heads pulling birds from the air and swallowing them whole. She saw a funeral pyre with a body on top, and the body was that of a girl, and many people stood close by and wept and sang songs of mourning.

She said, ‘It is me. I am leaving this world.’

A cup was held to her lips. Water ran down her throat. Then the water stopped and the fire returned.

She heard a voice, that of a man. He said, ‘It is the return of malaria. This can happen. She has exhausted her body, and malaria has returned.’

A long time passed, so it seemed. Malini in her fevered state said, ‘I am ready to die.’ She saw Kandan as he’d looked in life, but graver, no smile, just a sadness in his eyes.

On the funeral pyre the body caught fire and burned like a torch.

She saw a mansion of white stone. She walked a long path lined with trees and climbed fifty steps to a pool of silver water. Tall doors swung open. She walked through a hall where guests were eating from a banquet table. Someone said, ‘Her eyelids moved!’ An old man with wrinkled hands held her face. He said, ‘I bless all the gods! This child lives!’

Ten days into the fever, Malini’s appa and amma arrived at the orchard in a rusty yellow utility purchased with the American dollars Chandran Ranawana had kept hidden in the soles of his boots. Chandran was bleeding through bandages around his chest. He had been shot five times by government soldiers who had been ordered to kill Tamil men fleeing the enclaves on the coast. The soldiers had lined up more than a hundred Tamils – not only men but young women they suspected of having fought for the LTTE – and fired at them. The soldiers had left the bodies where they lay. Relatives of the murdered men, concealed in the forest, rushed to the site of the killings as soon as the soldiers departed. Malini’s mother found her kanavar badly wounded but alive. With the help of other Tamils, she carried him for two days to a Red Cross field hospital, where his life was saved. Two weeks later came the purchase of the yellow utility, and the journey by night to Ulla Alakana.

A woman with tears in her eyes was bathing Malini. She held a blue cloth. She dipped the cloth into a brass bowl and ran it over Malini’s bare arms, over her legs.

Malini said to the woman, ‘Who are you to wash my body in this way?’

The woman said, ‘Your amma, child.’

She said to the woman, ‘My amma has left the earth. Don’t tell me lies. Whoever lies to me, I will kill.’

The woman dried Malini’s body then dressed her tenderly in white cotton. Malini said to the woman, ‘Bring me my sword.’

Time was a flock of white birds gliding across a sky of blue and red. Then it was a stream. She knelt and put her hand into the stream. A blue fish with golden eyes leapt into her arms. The fish shed its tail and became a blue cloth. The woman returned and was again bathing her body. She said to the woman, ‘Bring me my sword, demon!’

The woman kissed her on her cheeks and on her forehead and at last on her lips.

A morning came when Malini woke and knew in an instant who she was and where she was. Her sister, Banni, was sleeping in an armchair beside the bed. Banni was dressed not in jeans and her pink shirt but in a blue sari. She looked so much older! On a table close to the bed sat an assortment of medicine bottles. One was half full of pink liquid. Malini could read the English script on the label: Do not employ when allergies are suspected.

Malini said, ‘Sister…’

Banni’s eyes opened slowly. She gazed at Malini.

Malini said again, ‘Sister…’

Banni sat bolt upright. She sprang from the armchair and fell to kissing Malini rapidly all over her face. ‘I bless all the gods! I bless Shiva a million times!’

Then Banni called, ‘Amma! Appa!’

A minute passed. Malini’s father hurried into the room, and her mother. Her father’s shirt was open and bandages circled his chest.

Malini lifted her arms and closed them around her father’s neck. When he raised his face and gazed at her, his eyes were glittering with tears.

He said, ‘Blessed girl, I said a thousand times you would live! A thousand times I said it. This girl will live. This girl with a lion’s heart, she will live!’

Malini’s mother sat on the other side of the bed. She held Malini’s hand against her heart. ‘You said so, Husband, a thousand times.’

Malini could see Banni over her father’s shoulder – Banni, who was so much older in her blue sari. Her face was soaked in tears. She murmured over and over, ‘Sister…Sister…Sister…’

Nanda and the boys ran into the room. Nanda took Malini’s hand. Amal and Gayan clamoured to get to her, but were held back by Nanda. Amal shouted at the top of his voice, ‘I will destroy any who stop me!’ Malini laughed for perhaps two seconds, then the laughter turned to tears. She felt that the happiness that surged through her so strongly could almost kill her with its force.

Almost three weeks had passed since Malini had stood at the gate and announced that she was the granddaughter of Panya Ranawana. In that time, she had twice been thought in the bower of Shiva, and twice she had moved her eyelids and restored hope to the hearts of those watching. The doctor had said, ‘The girl intends to live, so it seems.’

The doctor was guessing in part when he said that Malini’s fever was a new bout of malaria. What he did know was that Malini had been dangerously fatigued before she became ill. With the country in the state it was after the war, it was impossible to have Malini taken to a hospital in Colombo. Everything was chaotic. Tamils were being turned away from clinics and hospitals. Many thousands had died in the past month. The fighting had ended all over Sri Lanka, but murder had not.

If the idea of ‘innocent civilians’ had ever meant much in warfare, it meant even less now that the civil war was truly ending. The ‘human shields’ – Tamil civilians, held by the LTTE cadres – died in far greater numbers than LTTE soldiers when the government troops attacked the enclaves.

The news of these deaths in the thousands came through on the BBC World Service. Malini and her father, still recovering from what should have killed them, listened together for two weeks to the news, then by mutual agreement, gave up their sorrowful vigil beside the radio in Panya’s living room. Instead, they walked in the orchard for hours each day, stopping to watch the birds falling from the air onto the ripe guavas. The keepers chased them away by beating drums and shouting at the tops of their voices. ‘Ho, thieves! Fly or die, thieves!’

Malini and her father regained their strength over the next two months. With the village school shut down in this post-war period of chaos, Malini made her grandfather’s living room a classroom and taught Amal, Gayan, Banni and any children of the village who cared to attend. Her subjects were mathematics, science, geography, history, Tamil, Sinhala and English. The children sat on the floor with notebooks and pens while Malini moved from one group to another encouraging and correcting. She had a knack for teaching and before long had a school of seventeen, Tamil and Sinhalese, aged from four to thirteen. As for her own studies, she kept up with maths at an online university and read her grandfather’s English novels and poetry.

For the broken society outside the classroom, there was nothing she could do. Remaking a country is too big a task for one person, or even for a thousand. It is a task for millions. One thing that could be achieved, though, was to remember Kandan in some special way. Prayers were offered at the shrine of Shiva in the orchard each day for eight days, but it was Gayan who one morning came running into the house holding a small mango tree in a cardboard planter. It had become Gayan’s habit to help the orchard workers plant new trees in the western section of the orchard, and this morning an idea had leapt into his head.

He stood panting before Panya, holding the tree above his head with both hands. ‘Kandan!’ he said. Panya, was baffled. He thought the boy had lost his wits. He called for Nanda. When she came, Gayan said, in a state of high excitement, ‘For Kandan! This tree!’

And so it was that a mango tree was planted in the west of the orchard to commemorate Kandan’s life. Malini and Banni, Nanda, Amal, Panya, Chandran Ranawana and his wife Tamara, Varya and three orchard workers watched on as Gayan lifted the small tree from its cardboard planter and lowered it into a hole. He patted the soil flat around the base of the tree, then stood upright and tapped his hands together in his particular way. He said, ‘This is for our friend Kandan.’

Malini said, ‘For our friend Kandan.’

Then all of those watching said, ‘For Kandan.’

One morning when all the children of her school were working away in four separate groups, and Banni in her sari was bent over her maths questions with a frown of concentration on her face, a blessed moment came Malini’s way. The weather was not too hot, and the ceiling fan was purring softly. In the kitchen she could hear her father, her mother, Varya and her grandfather quietly discussing the business of the orchard, since it was agreed that Malini’s father would help with the management of the estate until it was safe to return to their village on the coast. Nanda, at last putting on a little weight, was sewing a rag doll as a present for a girl from the village, an exquisite thing with small buttons for eyes and blue wool for hair. From outside came the cries of the orchard workers as they scaled their ladders beneath the guava boughs. Malini stood still at the centre of this small, thriving world and drank in happiness, gladness and gratitude. She thought, It is something to still be here, my heart beating, everyone absorbed in tasks other than survival. It is something.

Her father walked into the living room that was now a classroom and looked across at his daughter. She looked at him, at her father, and smiled.

Each understood the happiness in the heart of the other.