How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?