Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

When I challenged him, he said, "Suicide bomb vest"—in other words, they invented the concealed bomb.

Not really. Just such a sinister device is described in Joseph Conrad's novel of London bombers, The Secret Agent

(1907), in which a suicide bomb is worn by a cynical pest known as the Professor, who boasts that he can blow himself up whenever he feels like it. He regards it as a liberating contraption. He has a habit of "keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the India rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom"—a hard squeeze and the bomb explodes and Paradise Now. As one of his terrorist colleagues says later in the novel, "You carry in your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people into eternity."

But (so I was told) the Tamil Tigers—or rather the Black Tiger Suicide Squad, its subgroup of zealots, wearers of the self-destructing vest—hold the world record for suicide bombings. The official figure is 1,680 in the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, far more than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. One of the better-known Tiger victims was Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was blown up in Chennai in 1991 by a young Black Tiger woman, one of many Tigers who objected to Indian soldiers' joining the Sri Lankan army in ridding Sri Lanka of this ethnic violence.

The Tigers were tenacious and disinclined to bargain; when their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was described as "ruthless and elusive," I took this to mean stupid and stubborn, the sort of qualities that fuel the village fanatic's monomania. He was a grade school dropout with a fifth-grade education, famously unreasonable, impervious to logic, unmoved by sending children to their death. A more literate or imaginative man would have given up or compromised long ago. He almost never showed his face. He had emerged in 1972, when he was just eighteen, energized the Tigers, and committed his first murder in 1975—shooting a Tamil political leader for being too moderate. In the rare photographs of him, Prabhakaran was a tubby, mustached little man in too tight, too clean khaki fatigues who looked indistinguishable from any toothy bristling stallholder in the dry-goods section of the Chennai bazaar. All that was known of him was that he suffered from hypertension and high blood pressure, that he lived in an underground bunker in the north, and that he had never been to Colombo in his life.

"What are his beliefs?"

"Just Tamil, Tamil, Tamil," my friend said.

Prabakharan had no political philosophy, no economic ideas, and he stood for nothing except Tamil sovereignty and secession. The Tigers were well armed and well funded. The largest Tamil community outside India can be found in Toronto, and Canadian Tamils (and American and Australian Tamils too) are assessed a "liberation tax" by collectors from the old country. Some are coerced, with threats to their families, but most pay happily, in the same spirit that the Irish in America gave money to Noraid, to pay for the bombs that blew up women and children in Ulster in the 1970s and '80s.

The Tamil convulsion, and all the deaths, had occurred after I had last visited, and because the violence had retarded Sri Lanka, I instantly recognized the place. It had hardly changed. Colombo was a forgotten city with little foreign investment and a failing economy, so while it was visibly faltering, it was not cursed with meretricious modernity. Because of the indifference of the money men and the speculators, Colombo's colonial buildings remained intact. No one could afford to pull them down or replace them. The sculpted stone on the shop fronts and emporiums of timeworn Victorian and Edwardian Colombo still stood, the wooden floors inside still creaked, the dust-coated ceiling fans still turned. The city was pretty much the one I'd seen three decades ago, and I spent my days before meeting Arthur C. Clarke walking its streets and browsing its arcades and applying for onward visas.

I called Sir Arthur's secretary the following morning, as I'd been directed to.

"Sir Arthur will see you."

I easily found his house. I'd been near it the day before, looking for a visa to Myanmar—the Myanmar embassy was down a nearby lane, and Sir Arthur's neighbors were the Iraqi embassy and a Sai Baba ashram. This quiet district was distinguished by its high walls and well-patrolled gates and security cameras and the occasional splash of someone diving into a pool I could not see.