Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. Sarva flees the country, losing his way – and almost his life – in a bid for asylum. Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy.
Rohini Mohan’s searing account of three lives caught up in the devastation looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. But the next five years changed everything.
More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000. For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart.
