Suddenly Anil was glad to be back, the buried senses from childhood alive in her. The application she had made to the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, when a call had gone out for a forensic anthropologist to go to Sri Lanka, had originally been halfhearted. She did not expect to be chosen, because she had been born on the island, even though she now travelled with a British passport. And it seemed somewhat unlikely that human rights specialists would be allowed in at all. Over the years complaints from Amnesty International and other civil rights groups had been sent to Switzerland and resided there, glacierlike. President Katugala claimed no knowledge of organized campaigns of murder on the island. But under pressure, and to placate trading partners in the West, the government eventually made the gesture of an offer to pair local officials with outside consultants, and Anil Tissera was chosen as the Geneva organization’s forensic specialist, to be teamed with an archaeologist in Colombo. It was to be a seven-week project. Nobody at the Centre for Human Rights was very hopeful about it.

As she entered the Archaeological Offices she heard his voice.

‘So-you are the swimmer!’ A broad-chested man in his late forties was approaching her casually, with his hand out. She hoped this wasn’t Mr. Sarath Diyasena, but it was.

‘The swimming was a long time ago.’

‘Still… I may have seen you at Mount Lavinia.’

‘How?’

‘I went to school at St. Thomas ’s. Right there. Of course I’m a bit older than you are.’

‘Mr. Diyasena… let’s not mention swimming again, okay? A lot of blood under the bridge since then.’

‘Right. Right,’ he said in a drawl she would become familiar with, a precise and time-stalling mannerism in him. It was like the Asian Nod, which included in its almost circular movement the possibility of a no. Sarath Diyasena’s ‘Right,’ spoken twice, was an official and hesitant agreement for courtesy’s sake but included the suggestion that things were on hold.