another group of children jumped in and out of the waves. From this distance they looked like small birds darting about, waving their arms in the air, free. Janake was still nowhere in sight. She watched the boys for a moment longer, hearing their faint laughter. Until this moment childhood had held no threat for her. But as she stood watching the scene below, for the second time that day, the idea that things had in some irreversible way altered began to take shape in her mind. The sun reappeared with renewed force from behind a cloud. She longed to be down on the white sand, laughing at nothing and getting soaked. She longed to see Janake and have him tease her. Standing beside the open window, recalling her grandfather from earlier in the morning, she emulated what he had done moments before he had seen her. Raising her arms up, letting her body descend slowly to the ground, curiously, she tried to imagine how he must have felt. Such was her absorption that she did not hear the gate bang shut or the footsteps on the gravel. Esther’s face looking up at the window startled her.
‘What are you doing, Alice?’
‘Nothing,’ she said crossly, frowning, standing up. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We heard the news,’ Esther said. She sounded shocked, unsure of herself. ‘Amma sent me to ask if you would like to come over to our house.’
Alice was puzzled. Esther sounded unusually friendly.
‘What’s done is done,’ Alice told her, unconsciously echoing her grandfather’s words.
Esther stared back at her. In the bright paintbox-coloured daylight her dress looked strangely tawdry, the traces of lipstick on her lips, drab.
All afternoon Bee sat helplessly beside his eldest daughter while she slept a drug-induced sleep. Then the doctor who had delivered the baby came in. Together they had watched Sita. Her womb had ripped, her uterus would need stitching, and when she finally began to remember she would have to bear a different kind of pain.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor had said.
Bee noticed how dark his eyes were, just like pools of rainwater.
‘She’ll recover,’ the doctor had told him, ‘physically, anyway. There will be no more children, but she’ll recover. The stitches will heal, the scars will be hidden, outwardly everything will be in order. I’ve made sure of that.’
He shook his head. Then he told Bee he had decided to leave the island. He was no longer able to stay silent about all those things he was witnessing, he said.
‘I became a doctor so I could alleviate suffering, not add to it. But this place—’ he had lifted his hands in a gesture of incomprehension—’is turning me into a coward. I fear for my wife, my family. I am no longer able to do my duty as I should.’
Bee listened without comment.
‘I’m going to Australia,’ the doctor had continued.
Outside the room the noise of the ward drifted towards them. Bedpans clattering, newborn babies mewling, laughter, even.
‘Yes,’ Bee agreed finally, expressionlessly ‘My daughter will be leaving too. They want a better life for my granddaughter.’
That had been all they had said. The doctor placed his hand lightly on Bee’s shoulder. Then he nodded briefly and left. His face had been full of a grave pity. It had almost been the undoing of Bee.
At dinner that night Esther and Dias came round again and the talk turned on the events of the day. They were all in shock. Looking around at his family, Bee said very little. He still felt numb from this terrible day. Darkness was encroaching. The servant came in silently and switched on the light. Instantly two large orange-spotted moths flitted in and began to circle around the bulb. Alice and Esther finished eating and went quietly on to the verandah, seeming to be swallowed up by the dark garden. They too were quiet. Bee waited until he was certain they were out of earshot.
‘First let them bury their dead,’ he said, turning back into the room.
I am accepting the inevitable, he thought in silent pain.
‘We must let them go in peace to the UK,’ he told Kamala.
‘Something more should be done,’ May said, angrily. ‘Someone should be told, for God’s sake! He should be struck off, Amma. How can we stand by like this and do nothing?’
May was crying again, but this time she was angry as well.
Later, when the visitors had left and Kamala had coaxed her, Alice went without fuss to bed. But she could not sleep. A full moon shone in through her window and once or twice she sat up and looked out at the sea. She could hear the grown-ups out on the verandah now and she could smell tobacco from Bee’s pipe. The low hum of their voices blended with the drone of the insects.
‘How can you?’ Aunt May was asking.
‘We can’t afford the lawyer,’ Kamala said in a low, sad voice.
She sounded as though she too was crying.
Then Alice heard her grandfather tap his pipe against his chair. Until now he had been mostly silent.
‘It isn’t a question of money,’ he said hesitantly, and Alice strained her ears to catch his words. ‘Even if we found the money for the lawyers, and even if the nurse could be called on to testify, who would believe this was done simply because she has a Tamil name? Would anyone believe us? We would be taking on the government doctors. I can’t think of a single lawyer in this country who would want to do that.’
The sound of his voice, quiet and incomprehensible, comforted Alice, so that closing her eyes, finally, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.
The funeral took place early on the following Thursday. May stayed with her sister in the hospital. Only Stanley and Bee were present. They paid the gravedigger and Stanley carried the tiny white coffin himself. The scent of orange blossom marked the moment, fixing it in Bee’s mind. Murderers, he thought, as the first fistful of soil hit wood. Then, when all that remained was a fresh mound of earth, they turned without a word and headed for Colombo. The sun was beginning its climb in the sky. The city was wide awake and filled already with the bustle of rickshaws and horns and the sounds of a thousand indifferent lives. Bee glanced at his son-in-law. He had never been close to Stanley; this was, he saw, their closest moment. Driving home along the coast road, in an afternoon of unbroken heat, his mind brimming with images of his daughter’s exhausted face, Bee felt the light, unbearable and savage, scythe across him. Then with its sour, stale smell of seaweed and other rotting vegetation, the day disintegrated slowly before his eyes.
While the funeral was taking place in Colombo, Kamala gave alms to the Buddhist monks. Dias had come to help, bringing her cook with her to the Fonsekas’ house. The priests were praying for the life that had passed briefly by, blowing out like a candle. All morning they had sat cross-legged, head bowed, their tonal chants filling the house as they blessed the white cotton thread. Their voices rose and fell, sometimes flatly, sometimes softly, always with a deep vibration. They were dressed in traditional saffron robes, so starkly bright that even the familiar sitting room with its ebony and satinwood furniture, its old sepia photographs and plants, took on a dreary air by comparison. The heat in the room, in spite of the doors and windows having been thrown wide open, was oppressive and unusually cloying. Janake, back from his aunt’s house, was present with his mother.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Esther whispered. ‘How
