James Dunk

Yeah, I mean, in interesting ways, there are also these kind of legacies of colonialism.

You know, Malaysia has its own colonial history, which we don't need to go into now.

But the ways that they shape her life are in these quite violent politics being produced by the National Malaysian Party and this kind of disagreement at the highest levels of government between the prime minister and his deputy.

So she gets taken up, even though she's actually an Indian person and is very aware of that.

She gets caught up in these student protests and they become quite violent.

And her experience there is, yeah, I mean, it's interesting ways, again, she parallels it with her own grandmother's experience of being an outsider, being drawn into fights, conflict, which is not her own, but which has a really strong bearing on her life.

Yeah, there's a really nice element of discovery.

I mean, they discovered these very old, very deep tensions between ethnic groups and religious groups, these cultural tensions.

They kind of stumble into these tensions.

They're not things that are explained to them as children, although I think Sandia is much more aware of her position in society.

It's a nice...

line that Aya uses where she says she always existed at an angle to the society around her.

But the structure is what really helps with this.

It would take hundreds and hundreds of pages to describe these great sweeping themes, these tensions.

But by cutting in, as you say, between the 30s and the 90s and then back and forth, but also the gradual revelation of actually what did happen in those 30s moments, this violence

the trauma that was kind of created and then really suppressed by that family.

That helps.

It's actually gradually revealed as Sushila tells more of her stories.

And Sandhya kind of discovers more through searching.

She's actually gone and done some studies, some historical research to lay hands on the files of the British officers who were there in charge in Rangoon during those riots.