The cries of first birds with first light have passed. Dawn comes in billions of little pieces, stitches loosely sewn together, like breathing. Isn't the core of the sun iron? This sliver of iron in Radika's hand could have come from the sun, shot out of its heat through space like a bullet, embedding itself, becoming part of the earth.

From where she sits she can see the gate, and along the cadjun fence the banana trees, stately ancestors gathered together in council. Beyond the gate: more lanes and the lagoon, a soft slapping, then the green of the sea, that mothering water, huge as the goddess herself. The mesh holds: green and gold, froth and foam. Radika feels the iron shard in her palm, and she is strong enough to think the forbidden thought: their mother isn't coming back.

Though at first the idea had been unthinkable, there came a time when the thought presented itself, almost shyly, a little waif of a thought at the edge of consciousness. It was only when Radika acknowledged its presence that this orphan grew to have substantial body. Now, the seventh day, she is ready to look into its eyes.

Six days ago, when she woke and saw blood on her nightgown, she'd tried--for a moment--to pretend she hadn't. Though bleeding marked an important passage, there was a saying. If you see it first, it's a flaw, but if your mother sees it first, it's a good thing. She'd hurried to where her mother slept, touched her shoulder, told her. Her mother turned over. Like one of those hibiscus blossoms slowly unfurling, sleep opened around her and she sat up and drew Radika into her arms.

"In seven days we'll have your ceremony! Remember when we did it for Sivarani?" Her sister Sivarani of the black waterfall hair. At thirteen, she'd never cut it. It hung to her waist. She brushed it every morning and evening, as though each stroke down its strands was a prayer. Radika remembered Sivarani's excitement, how each of the six days of seclusion friends and relatives had come to offer congratulations. "You got to help serve sweets, remember? This time we'll let Maheswary help."

This blood, her mother had said, was not like the blood of bullets. It was good blood: a sign that from Radika's body could come a baby, out of almost nothing.

Later her mother had gone off to the market with her friend Praba. They'd made their purchases, and as they walked out beneath the arch, five Tiger separatists had appeared and surrounded them. The army checkpoint was only a few hundred yards away, but you couldn't see the market entrance from there. The Tigers liked to kidnap people right under the soldiers' noses. It made the army look ineffectual. Quickly, in spite of Praba's protests, they'd taken Radika's mother away.

Praba had come back to the house, carrying her mother's bag. Inside, some tomatoes, a bottle of oil.

Each day Praba goes to the Tigers' jungle headquarters, and each day the sergeant promises to release Radika's mother. Yesterday he'd promised absolutely: her mother would be back for the ceremony. But what he said, Radika thinks, is not the truth. He is like this time, which is not a good time. This is why Praba gave her the iron shard: to ward off evil. Her mother had given her the arica nutcracker to hold, but later Praba brought this iron splinter--a bit of grenade? Or is it a sliver of metal from a mine? It would work, Praba insisted, because it had The Troubles in it. You used a piece of the evil against itself.

Radika sees the way the trees are there, rooted, leaves swaying above this rootedness, like women standing, intent on some task, humming to themselves. She imagines Praba at the market arcade, her hair a mane, scolding the Tigers. Why question the good woman who collected money for their cause, a woman whose son and daughter had themselves become separatists? But the one in charge had spit in the dirt at Praba's feet. And when she faced the sergeant, asking about her friend, he'd spoken bluntly. "Possibly she has kept some of our money for herself."

Radika imagines Praba shaking her great mane of hair. "Never in a thousand years."

Say the sun's a mother and the earth her daughter. Heat begins to swell, warming the sand, the way a mother's body warms you. Later the light will be white, heat rising from the sand in waves. If Radika could see the lagoon, it would look like a mirror laid along the edge of the town. The banana trees' leaves are wide fans, fringed along the edges, this fringe murmuring. The geko on the stone step resembles a dry leaf.

The geko is good at waiting, Radika thinks. And I am like him. Now Maheswary carries in the tray, sets it on the bed. Her small hands flutter around the bowls of rice, of dahl. "Is this enough?" Radika kisses her sister's cheek. When Maheswary was born, Radika helped care for this baby as though she were one of its two rightful mothers. Their father had seemed to Radika merely an admiring presence, and Chilliyan and Sivarani were too old to be much interested. The baby smelled like flowers. Her softness resembled the softness of petals.

"You smell like jasmine," Radika says. She notices the fine hair on Maheswary's arms. Maheswary has never known a time without The Troubles. She's never been allowed to play outside after dark. Always there have been government soldiers on the streets and Tigers in the surrounding jungle, some of them not much older than Radika. And yet Maheswary seems not to be afraid. Her exuberance resembles heat escaping from beneath the lid of a pot.

"I have to get your sari ready," Maheswary says. She darts to the door. "Don't leave the room!"

The iron shard is warm, as though just now burst off from its explosion. Their father had explained how The Troubles began, but Radika has forgotten. What she remembers i the story a school friend told her. In the capital two sisters were walking home. Suddenly there was a crowd, men and women shouting, shouts like stones flying through the air. One man kicked the eldest girl hard, and she fell. Then a woman grabbed the younger sister's hair and yanked her down.

So many shouts, each shout another stone.

Then the gleam of a machete, two machetes.

Afterward two heads lay on the pavement.

The story had entered Radika suddenly, as though one of those shouts had hit her. She didn't know what to do with this story. She wanted to tell her mother, but it was not a good story. How could you ask about such a thing?

This land is the color of sand and dun cadjun, as heat from the sun is the color of lightning, as lagoon water is a slice of silver, too bright to look at long. The washerman's doty is white, a way of warding off heat. He comes through the gate, lays his stack of white cloths by the fence. Radika remembers when she felt safely surrounded by this fence, before three aunts and uncles moved across the strait to India. The fourth aunt, her father said, had been given, unfairly perhaps, almost all the beauty in the family. Gazing at her was like drinking a glass of water when you were very thirsty.

This aunt's husband, a doctor, had traveled to the capital for supplies. He'd been arrested by the army on suspicion of passing medicines to the Tigers. The aunt believed if she could get to the capital she could convince the brigadier to release him. It happened that the family next door was taking their son there, to send him to London to study. Radika's aunt paid bribes to get a pass, then set off on a bus with her neighbors.

When they got down at one of the checkpoints, the sentry had examined the aunt's pass, then taken her aside. He'd waved the others through, speaking in Sinhala. None of them could understand him. A jeep pulled up, and the sentry gestured toward the aunt with his rifle. She got in. He climbed in beside her, motioned the driver on.

Such a simple thing, driving away in a jeep. Radika imagined the jeep returning, bringing her aunt back. But her father, when he told them what had happened, did not say so. What he's said was, "She was too beautiful."

If you could look directly at the iron in the center of the sun, would it resemble a god's shield, burning? But if there are gods, why shields? Is destruction a threat even to a god? If iron keeps away the evil eye, you'd think fewer soldiers would die. But bullets and grenades don't protect soldiers. The government soldiers are supposed to protect people from the Tigers--not just Sinhala people but Tamils too--but these soldiers are like an occupying force. If they need to move troops, they commandeer the buses, and if they need space, they take over your house. And when the Tigers show their videos at the school, enticing boys and some girls to join them, this daring makes the soldiers furious. Then they carry out house to house searches, or arrest fishermen they suspect of aiding the Separatists. At checkpoints they riffle women's bags of rice, searching for weapons.

They do these things, and they speak in a language no one understands. At least the Tigers speak Tamil. And they're fighting for Eelam. Everyone wants Eelam, that heaven on earth. But Radika feels confused. Don't they have Eelam already? Aren't her parents, brother and sisters, their relatives and friends Eelam? If the government soldiers went away, wouldn't that be Eelam? The Tigers wouldn't have to fight then. They too would stop being soldiers.

The way it is now though the Tigers act like the soldiers. They take a farmer's rice harvest, and sometimes don't pay. Once Radika watched two Tigers steal the clothes a woman had hung out to dry. Or several may appear suddenly in your doorway and demand that you cook a meal for them. If they need gas, they siphon petrol from your tank. Both the Tigers and the government levy taxes. Both sides make people passing on the road dig up mines. And both help themselves to girls. Just last week two girls left the high school as usual, and no one has seen them since.

When Radika was little, her brother Chilliyan used to wing her up against the sky, laughing. Chilliyan and his friend Vadevilu took her and Maheswary to the lagoon to skip stones and look for fish. Vadevilu had been welcome in their house, as Chilliyan had been in his. The boys were sixteen when some Tigers came to the school with videos. The videos showed boys advancing, rifles ready. One told how one cup of rice and one cup of water a day were enough, because it was for Eelam. And the Tiger girl who'd lost both arms spoke defiantly. She'd rigged her rifle so she could pull the trigger with her teeth. She stood, flanked, a girl fighter on each side, the empty sleeves of her shirt riffling in the breeze.

Both families had begged the boys not to join, but Chilliyan and Vadevilu had insisted. The evening of Chilliyan's departure, their mother wept. But her anxiousness had not persuaded him to change his mind. Afterward she'd offered to collect the Tigers' tax from the people in her ward.

"Don't try to dissuade me," she'd said to Radika's father. "It will help keep him safe."

"Maybe," he said. "But suppose you can't get as much money as they want? Or suppose someone decides to tell the soldiers what you're doing."

The washerman gets busy setting up the pantel that will shade the guests from the sun. Though it's early, Radika watches the gate. This is the gate through which their aunt walked away, the gate through which Chilliyan left them. And it was through this gate, one evening at dusk, that a band of Tigers came into the compound.

Their father had come from the telegraph office, then gone out back to bathe. He liked to shower with the hose as he watered the portulaca in his garden. Radika and Maheswary sat at the table, doing schoolwork. Their mother was setting rice to boil. She'd sent Sivarani to the market, despite her protest. Sivarani liked to be home when their father got there. Her love for him was like the equatorial weather opening thousands of water lilies. She brooded around him, bringing him little attentions, and she liked to accompany him to the temple where, in rites made puissant by repetition, he attended the goddess. It was as though Sivarani's gaze was an unbroken illumination in which she held her father up before them.

Radika's father came in wrapped in a sarong, humming a song Maheswary had taught him. He plucked a banana from the bunch, and, still humming, pulled back the peel and took a bite. Radika saw the Tigers first. One by one they stepped from the haze of dusk through the gate, each with his rifle pointed toward the doorway.

"Father," she whispered. He turned. There were nine. It seemed to Radika that her father was strangely unafraid. He held the banana before him like a taper, by the light of which those assembled might examine each other.

The Tiger boys formed a line. At their center stood Vadevilu. Later their mother would say his commander might have sent him as a test of loyalty. It was a thing soldiers did to each other. A current of air stirred the banana leaves so that their fringes rattled softly. Vadevilu stepped forward. He did not say her father's name, but he looked at him. "You have to come," he said. "It's because you operate the telegraph. The leaders think you've passed secrets."

Radika's father also stepped forward. "What secrets?" he said. "Question me. Ask."

Vadevilu shook his head. "Just come."

"Vadevilu," their mother said. She stood beside her husband in dusk light. "You know I collect the money."

Vadevilu shook his head. "This isn't to do with you. The leader wants your husband."

"What will Chilliyan think?" she said. "Look at this man: this is Chilliyan's father. Think what you do."

"Don't make trouble," Vadevilu said. He spoke as though furious at the necessity of having to speak at all. "Your husband has to come. It's an order."

Their father's back straightened, and Radika thought he was going to refuse. The banana in his hand could be a reason. If a man was eating, you didn't take him away, not then. But he turned to their mother and handed her the banana as though in doing so he gave away his last possession.

When Sivarani came through the gate and across the sand, the banana lay on the table, one bite gone.

Perhaps the sun is not a god's shield, but the blazing countenance of the goddess. Isn't that why no one can look at it directly? See how she bares her shining throat! Bow down, open your mouth, utter the white hot syllables of asking. Bring fruit, bring garlands. Bring something alive. Give it into her fiery teeth. But if she is just, why doesn't she burn the bad ones, keep the innocent from burning? She's not so simple. She is peace in the water, conflagration in the atom. The opening, the closing, and everything between.

The washerman mounts the steps and walks through the rooms, chanting, sprinkling the floors with tumeric water. It's supposed to be women from your family who perform the bathing. At Sivarani's ceremony they came like a delegation, diplomats in saris, each carrying her water jar. The washerman filled each jar with sacred water. Each woman spread a white cloth over the jar's mouth. When it was time the women rose as one body, poured this water over Sivarani. Water blessed, its lustrum a rush, lifting you into the realm of grown women.

But the aunts and their families have gone across the strait, and the grandmothers won't be here either. One grandmother died before The Troubles. The other grandmother had visited them often. Radika liked to help this grandmother wash Sivarani's hair. In the cool of early morning Sivarani would appear, holding out the soap, the towel, the comb. "Please, Grandmother. Will you help me?" Then they went out to the spigot near the banana trees. Sivarani bent forward, and Radika and her grandmother began.

Women's hair was valuable, like gold jewelry. You let it grow. Sivarani had let hers fall around her like a queen's gown. Her hair had made her feel grown, and she'd acted, as a grown woman might, to find their father. She'd sent word to a girlfriend who'd joined the Tigers, and this friend had reported that she knew the camp where they kept him. Sivarani had gone with this friend, leaving in the night while the family slept.

A month had passed, and another month. One day before the monsoon began they'd received a letter in Sivarani's handwriting. I am a revolutionary now, like Chilliyan. I know how to make a land mine. We have to, to fight for Eelam. The Leader says there is no other way.

The letter did not mention their father.

"Will Sivarani come back?" Radika asked. Her mother stood as though held by two strings pulling in opposite directions. "Maybe I shouldn't have collected money," she said. "It must have looked to Sivarani like I wanted to help them."

"She went after father," Radika said. Her mother did not speak. Mentioning their father was like the bad story. No one knew what to do with it. Radika remembers looking out into the compound, seeing the banana leaves swaying slightly. Their green resembled a slacking, water drunk down slowly, deliciously.

I have cut my hair, Sivarani wrote. All the girls do it, to show we're loyal.

Radika had never seen a Tamil woman who'd cut her hair. It wasn't done. She could see the spigot where they'd knelt so many times. The Tigers were supposed to be good Tamils. Why had they done this to the girls? How could such a thing be Eelam? Their mother had pulled Radika and Maheswary against her belly. Her hair fell around them, an airy veil.

Their grandmother had wept, and Radika and Maheswary and their mother had come around her. The four of their bodies, grieving, formed a mound. That was how you did it, and then, after a while, the grief was almost gone. But this grandmother persisted in grieving. As the weeks passed, Radika cast about for means to distract her--prayers, little love gifts, hopeful pleading. She'd lied the way adults lie to comfort children. Sivarani would return when the war was over, Sivarani's hair would grow long again.

But grief was a stone around which the old woman shrank like a drying fruit. Finally she had gone across the strait to her younger son, away from The Troubles. She lived there a while. Then one night while the others slept, she let go the thread of the world.

Father is dead, Radika thinks. Wasn't that why Sivarani hadn't written one word about him? And what but the certainty that Sivarani would never see her father again could have prompted her to pledge herself to the Leader, to cut her hair?

Sivarani won't come today because she doesn't know about Radika's ceremony. Their grandmother won't come either, nor will the aunts, uncles, cousins. Her mother had explained this on that first morning. Travel is too dangerous now, and everyone has less money.

The sun is neither gleaming shield nor goddess' countenance, but the mound of a woman's belly, that round, red heat where flesh comes to fruition. Green, gold, sliver, leaves, heat, water. The gate of the body, the gate beneath the trees. They tell you you'll be happy with a husband, you will make your husband happy, and your strong body will make a good baby. What they don't tell you is the banana lying on the table, one bite gone. Nor do they tell you the lamentation of hair, slashed off, flung on the ground.

Now the washerman lays a white cloth across the ceremonial board: how bright, this slab of light where she will kneel. It occurs to her to wonder: should she keep holding the iron shard through the ceremony?

"Look, Radika, red!" Maheswary says, dancing in with the sari. Red, the color of the hot cries of parrots. The color of women's heat. Radika tucks in one end of the sari, then twirls, turning into Maheswary's winding. "Look! They're coming!" Maheswary points. Their mother's friends, by twos and threes, come through the gate, each woman with her jar. And here, across the sand, comes Praba. Maheswary's energy is a flock of tiny birds. "A red sari, Radika! And Mother's gold necklace, all for you!"

Because Maheswary reaches up to fasten the clasp of the necklace, Radika sees the lorry first. The driver, a girl about Sivarani's age, halts, keeps the motor running. Beside her a boy in uniform, with a rifle.

Another boy with a rifle leans out from the back.

Maheswary runs out of the room, flies across the sand to the gate. She and the girl speak. Then Maheswary hurries toward the back of the lorry. The banana trees suggest a graceful calm. The boy at the back bends down. Later Radika will remember Praba, turning toward the lorry, had lifted her water jar onto her shoulder, as though ready to pour. She will also remember the sound that goes up from the women, the rush of air from a flock of birds beginning to rise, then falling back.

There in the dirt a rolled up blanket, a blanket with holes in it.

From the blanket's rolled edge a single foot protrudes.

The boy holds his rifle and looks down at Maheswary with the curious interest of someone engaged in a novel experiment who now observes the outcome.

Maheswary looks back at him. Then she looks down. Their mother was a small woman with long feet that seemed to connect her securely to the earth. Radika remembers feeling safe walking beside her, observing how solidly those feet fit the sand. She sees Maheswary reach out, stroke this foot as though to sooth it.

It is all still there: the green, the gold, the light, the heat, the sand an esplanade all the way to the gate, and, beyond the compound, the lagoon and the sea, benedictions of water spilling into the world. The lorry pulls away. Radika walks out onto the stone step. The geko is gone. The space between her and the gate has taken on the aspect of terrain difficult to negotiate. She passes the washerman where he squats, a dumb tool. The women have collapsed against each other like jars thrown down, one or two cracked, broken. Radika hears the barely audible ticking of the heat, the sound time makes, the sound of waiting and not knowing, of knowing but not knowing who, of knowing who but not knowing when, of knowing when but not how.

The truth is the sun is a burning star, and there are no favorites. Its gaze illumines soldier and civilian, enemy and friend, man and woman. The young and the old. The living and the dead.

Did their mother keep some of the money she'd collected for the Tigers?

She might have kept a little. Anyone might have. Enough to buy tomatoes, and some oil.

Maheswary's gaze rests on Radika, as though she imagines it was this sister's belly she slid from, as though, if she could, she would climb back inside. There may have been a time when iron kept evil away, Radika thinks, but that time is gone. Iron splinters and breaks apart: here's a bit of it, in her hand. She lets it fall onto the sand. The nature of iron has been changed by the violence with which men hurl it through the air. Now iron draws death toward you. Already a similar bit of iron may have sped toward Chilliyan and found him. Or toward Sivarani. There are many, many bits of iron flying through the air. It could have happened easily to both of them. Is the messenger even now hurrying toward them with the news?