ABOUT TWENTY years ago a friend from my childhood, Skanda, gave me a photograph of a boarding school in Colombo that I had gone to at a very young age for two or three years. Skanda was a relative but only in the Sri Lankan sense, where everyone you knew was considered a relative, just as any person who visited members of your family would be referred as an “uncle” or an “auntie.” What Skanda gave me was a photograph of Winchester House. Five years older than me, he had gone to the same boarding school and created an almost heroic reputation as a trouble-maker. Even as an adult, I recalled notorious incidents he had been involved in, and later, when I became a writer, I was tempted to write about his doubleedged reputation that mocked any discipline. Then I lost touch with him. He seemed to roam in some far anonymous territory with his troublesome nature, yet somehow I felt he would always be a part of my life.
When Skanda and I met for the first time as adults, it was at a crowded dinner in Colombo. We barely spoke to each other. I assumed he was bored with the reputation he still carried of being that notorious trouble-maker in his youth. We had come from much the same background and neither of us, I suspect, really wished to go back to that other country of our childhood. When we said a brief goodnight on leaving, I did not enquire what he did, and he did not ask what I was doing, though by now I was writing novels.
So far, I had not written about Skanda, though at times I might have borrowed an aspect of him that clashed with the safe social world of Colombo. But when I began my novel , Skanda entered my world. What I needed was a doctor working in one of the peripheral hospitals in the north of Sri Lanka, behind enemy lines during the war. It was distant and dangerous work. Sometimes they worked throughout the night, then slept half the next day, unaware of daylight. I had met such doctors in the north while researching the
