James Dunk

and the ways in which they definitely don't fit.

So Shashila, in fact, she meets a young man called Zor, and it's the first Burmese person she says she's actually seen.

And that's when he kind of intrudes into her school, which is an Indian-only school.

And they have these really quite interesting and sweet moments of meeting and encounter, you know, with language difficulties and trying to understand each other just in these stolen moments.

But that leads to this kind of real clarity where actually they're punished for their encounters.

They're punished for having any kind of communion at all.

There's a sense that these communities, the Burmese and the Indians, are to be kept apart.

And that boundary is policed by the British administrators.

That's right.

That tension really mounts and mounts, and it leads to a series of riots in which the Burmese kind of reject the Indian presence in a really violent way.

And that's in 1938.

It's kind of a historical moment, which is known about, but it's kind of angled up too obliquely in the novel.

I mean, it's not announced as part of a wider movement.

It's announced, they come at it through the awareness of this quite young

girl.

The Burmese throw off the British presence over the course of several years with the assistance of the Japanese in World War II, the Japanese occupy, and they use that, the Burmese join with the Japanese to liberate themselves.

For the family, that really spells bad things.

They stay on thinking that the British will protect them, that they're safe in this kind of imperial structure that they have lived in for some decades, I think it is.

But they're not at all safe.

And that leads to a really quite harrowing march overland for Sushila and her family through the back areas of Burma and then across into Assam in northern India.