Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Part 2 opens with a new narrator, Saraswathi, in the northern Tamil region of Sri Lanka. Saraswathi grows up surrounded by violence and “gunfire echoes” (129) in a village of “roofless, bombed-out houses with bullet-splattered walls” (136). Children are regularly abducted from their homes to join the rebel forces, and young girls are targets for sexual assault. There are displacement camps Saraswathi’s family could escape to, but living in the family home by the lagoon is preferable to the conditions in the camps.

Saraswathi reflects that “there were seven of us before” (129), but her three brothers have all been lost to the war. Her two older brothers, recruited by Tamil Tigers who visited the village school, were inspired by promises of “a homeland where [they] would be safe from the Sinhala” (131). The deaths of these two brothers are certain, although the circumstances are unknown, and now both are considered martyrs for the Tamil Tiger cause. Saraswathi’s mother attempts to protect her youngest son by keeping him close, but he is abducted when he visits the local market, leaving only Saraswathi and her sister Luxshmi remaining with their parents in their small home by the lagoon.

Saraswathi admires her teacher and hopes to become a teacher herself one day.