The Chief
Inspector’s Daughter

A Story

A beggar recently discovered the bodies of four men and one woman in an SUV abandoned on the border of Colombo 8. The corpses’ heads and hands were missing so that the victims could not be quickly identified. Sri Lanka Daily added, disapprovingly, that the woman had been posed in a provocative way, as if the body of a headless, handless woman could lure a man to sexual misdeeds. A rumor quickly spread: the victims were Tamils executed by the Sri Lankan army. We know, though few of us admit, our soldiers do such things. But I know, this time, we are all of us wrong.