Brotherless Night

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, rape, and death by suicide.

Sashi is still trying to decide if she should leave Sri Lanka. She throws herself into work in order to avoid confronting such a momentous decision. She treats Priya, a woman who was raped, and Sashi listens to the young woman’s story: Priya, too, has four brothers, though all four of her brothers have died in the war. Priya returns later because she is pregnant.

Sashi turns in her account of Priya’s story to Anjali and Varathan. She then tells them that her parents want her to leave Sri Lanka. Anjali and Varathan encourage her to leave and escape the violence; they say that Sashi has done enough to save lives and preserve the truth. Sashi decides to go, though she feels some shame in leaving others behind. She will travel to Colombo and stay with her Ammammah before leaving with a falsified passport to London, where Aran is already waiting for her.

Before Sashi’s departure, she hears a radio report: A woman has detonated a bomb strapped to her body in a government building, killing several people. She was pregnant and from a village somewhere in Jaffna; she was raped, and her brothers were killed in front of her by government soldiers.