Anil's Ghost
Contents
Title Page
Author’s Note
Sarath
The Grove of Ascetics
A Brother
Ananda
The Mouse
Between Heartbeats
The Life Wheel
Distance
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Michael Ondaatje
Copyright
Author’s Note
From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Sri Lanka was in a crisis that involved three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north. Both the insurgents and the separatists had declared war on the government. Eventually, in response, legal and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down the separatists and the insurgents.
Anil’s Ghost is a fictional work set during this political time and historical moment. And while there existed organizations similar to those in this story, and similar events took place, the characters and incidents in the novel are invented.
Today the war in Sri Lanka continues in a different form.
M.O.
In search of a job I came to Bogala
I went down the pits seventy-two fathoms deep
Invisible as a fly, not seen from the pit head
Only when I return to the surface
Is my life safe . . .
Blessed be the scaffolding deep down in the shaft
Blessed be the life wheel on the mine’s pit head
Blessed be the chain attached to the life wheel . . .
—Miner’s folk song, Sri Lanka
When the team reached the site at five-thirty in the morning, one or two family members would be waiting for them. And they would be present all day while Anil and the others worked, never leaving; they spelled each other so someone always stayed, as if to ensure that the evidence would not be lost again. This vigil for the dead, for these half-revealed forms.
During the night, plastic sheeting covered the site, weighted down with stones or pieces of iron. The families knew the approximate hour the scientists would arrive. They removed the sheeting and got closer to the submerged bones until they heard the whine of the four-wheel drive in the distance. One morning Anil found a naked footprint in the mud. Another day a petal.
They would boil up tea for the forensic team. In the worst hours of the Guatemalan heat they held up a serape or banana leaf to provide shade.
There was always the fear, double-edged, that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son—which meant there would be further searching. If it became clear that the body was a stranger, then, after weeks of waiting, the family would rise and leave. They would travel to other excavations in the western highlands. The possibility of their lost son was everywhere.
One day Anil and the rest of the team walked to a nearby river to cool off during their lunch break. On returning they saw a woman sitting within the grave. She was on her haunches, her legs under her as if in formal prayer, elbows in her lap, looking down at the remains of the two bodies. She had lost a husband and a brother during an abduction in this region a year earlier. Now it seemed as if the men were asleep beside each other on a mat in the afternoon. She had once been the feminine string between them, the one who brought them together. They would return from the fields and enter the hut, eat the lunch she had made and sleep for an hour. Each afternoon of the week she was part of this.
There are no words Anil knows that can describe, even for just herself, the woman’s face. But the grief of love in that shoulder she will not forget, still remembers. The woman rose to her feet when she heard them approach and moved back, offering them room to work.
Sarath
She arrived in early March, the plane landing at Katunayake airport before the dawn. They had raced it ever since coming over the west coast of India, so that now passengers stepped onto the tarmac in the dark.
By the time she was out of the terminal the sun had risen. In the West she’d read, The dawn comes up like thunder, and she knew she was the only one in the classroom to recognize the phrase physically. Though it was never abrupt thunder to her. It was first of all the noise of chickens and carts and modest morning rain or a man squeakily cleaning the windows with newspaper in another part of the house.
As soon as her passport with the light-blue UN bar was processed, a young official approached and moved alongside her. She struggled with her suitcases but he offered no help.
‘How long has it been? You were born here, no?’
‘Fifteen years.’
‘You still speak Sinhala?’
‘A little. Look, do you mind if I don’t talk in the car on the way into Colombo—I’m jet-lagged. I just want to look. Maybe drink some toddy before it gets too late. Is Gabriel’s Saloon still there for head massages?’
‘In Kollupitiya, yes. I knew his father.’
‘My father knew his father too.’
Without touching a single suitcase he organized the loading of the bags into the car. ‘Toddy!’ He laughed, continuing his conversation. ‘First thing after fifteen years. The return of the prodigal.’
‘I’m not a prodigal.’
An hour later he shook hands energetically with her at the door of the small house they had rented for her.
‘There’s a meeting tomorrow with Mr. Diyasena.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You have friends here, no?’
‘Not really.’
Anil was glad to be alone. There was a scattering of relatives in Colombo, but she had not contacted them to let them know she was returning. She unearthed a sleeping pill from her purse, turned on the fan, chose a sarong and climbed into bed. The thing she had missed most of all were the fans. After she had left Sri Lanka at eighteen, her only real connection was the new sarong her parents sent her every Christmas (which she dutifully wore), and news clippings of swim meets. Anil had been an exceptional swimmer as a teenager, and the family never got over it; the talent was locked to her for life. As far as Sri Lankan families were concerned, if you were a well-known cricketer you could breeze into a career in business on the strength of your spin bowling or one famous inning at the Royal–Thomian match. Anil at sixteen had won the two-mile swim race that was held by the Mount Lavinia Hotel.
Each year a hundred people ran into the sea, swam out to a buoy a mile away and swam back to the same beach, the fastest male and the fastest female fêted in the sports pages for a day or so. There was a photograph of her walking out of the surf that January morning—which The Observer had used with the headline ‘Anil Wins It!’ and which her father kept in his office. It had been studied by every distant member of the family (those in Australia, Malaysia and England, as well as those on the island), not so much because of her success but for her possible good looks now and in the future. Did she look too large in the hips?
The photographer had caught Anil’s tired smile in the photograph, her right arm bent up to tear off her rubber swimming cap, some out-of-focus stragglers (she had once known who they were). The black-and-white picture had remained an icon in the family for too long.
She pushed the sheet down to the foot of the bed and lay there in the darkened room, facing the waves of air. The island no longer held her by the past. She’d spent the fifteen years since ignoring that early celebrity. Anil had read documents and news reports, full of tragedy, and she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze. But here it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. S
keletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus—In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was.
Cave 14 was once the most beautiful site in a series of Buddhist cave temples in Shanxi province. When you entered, it looked as if huge blocks of salt had been carted away. The panorama of Bodhisattvas—their twenty-four rebirths—were cut out of the walls with axes and saws, the edges red, suggesting the wound’s incision.
‘Nothing lasts,’ Palipana told them. ‘It is an old dream. Art burns, dissolves. And to be loved with the irony of history—that isn’t much.’ He said this in his first class to his archaeology students. He had been talking about books and art, about the ‘ascendancy of the idea’ being often the only survivor.
This was the place of a complete crime. Heads separated from bodies. Hands broken off. None of the bodies remained—all the statuary had been removed in the few years following its discovery by Japanese archaeologists in 1918, the Bodhisattvas quickly bought up by museums in the West. Three torsos in a museum in California. A head lost in a river south of the Sind desert, adjacent to the pilgrim routes.
The Royal Afterlife.
On her second morning they asked Anil to meet with forensic students in Kynsey Road Hospital. It wasn’t what she was here for, but she agreed to it. She had not yet met Mr. Diyasena, the archaeologist selected by the government to be teamed with her in the Human Rights investigation. There had been a message that he was out of town and that he would contact her as soon as he returned to Colombo.
The first body they brought in was very recently dead, the man killed since she had flown in. When she realized it must have happened during her early-evening walk in the Pettah market, she had to stop her hands from trembling. The two students looked at each other. She never usually translated the time of a death into personal time, but she was still working out what hour it was in London, in San Diego. Five and a half hours. Thirteen and a half hours.
‘Is this your first corpse, then?’ one of them asked.
She shook her head. ‘The bones in both arms are broken.’ Here it was, in front of her already.
She looked up at the young men. These were students who had not yet graduated, young enough to be appalled. It was the freshness of the body. It was still someone. Usually the victims of a political killing were found much later. She dipped each of the fingers in a beaker of blue solution so she could check for cuts and abrasions.
‘About twenty years old. Dead twelve hours. Do you agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
They seemed nervous, even afraid.
‘What are your names again?’
They told her.
‘The important thing is to say out loud what your first impressions are. Then rethink them. Admit you can make mistakes.’ (Should she be lecturing them?) ‘If you are wrong the first time, redraw the picture. Maybe you can catch what was overlooked. . . . How did they break the arms without damaging the fingers? It’s strange. Your hands go up to protect yourself. Usually the fingers get damaged.’
‘Maybe he was praying.’
She stopped and looked up at the student who had spoken.
The next corpse brought in had flail fractures on the rib cage. It meant he had fallen from a great height—at least five hundred feet—before hitting the water belly-down. The air knocked out of the body. It meant a helicopter.
She woke early the next morning in her rented house on Ward Place and walked into the darkness of the garden, following the sound of koha birds busy with their claims and proclamations. She stood there drinking her tea. Then walked to the main road as a light rain began. When a three-wheeler taxi stopped by her she slipped into it. The taxi fled away, squeezing itself into every narrow possibility of the dense traffic. She held on to the straps tightly, the rain at her ankles from its open sides. The bajaj was cooler than an air-conditioned car, and she liked the throaty ducklike sound of the horns.
Those first days in Colombo it seemed she always found herself alone when the weather broke. The touch of rain on her shirt, the smell of dust in the wetness. Clouds would suddenly unlock and the city would turn into an intimate village full of people acknowledging the rain and yelling to one another. Or there would be an uncertain acceptance of the rain in case it was only a brief shower.
Years before her parents had given a dinner party. They had set up the long table in their parched and dry garden. It was the end of May but the drought had gone on and on and still there was no monsoon. Then, towards the end of the meal, the rains began. Anil woke in her bedroom to the change in the air, ran to her window and looked out. The guests were scurrying under the thickness of the downpour, carrying antique chairs into the house. But her father and the woman he was beside continued to sit at the table, celebrating the break in seasons, as earth turned to mud around them. Five minutes, ten minutes, they sat and talked, she thought, just to make sure it was not a passing shower, to make sure the rain would keep coming down.
Ducklike horns.
The rain swept across Colombo as her bajaj proceeded via a shortcut, towards the Archaeological Offices. Lights were coming on here and there in the small shops. She leaned forward. ‘Some cigarettes, please.’ They swerved to a halt against the pavement and the driver yelled towards a shop. A man came into the rain with three different kinds of cigarettes and she picked out the Gold Leaf package and paid him. They took off again.
Suddenly Anil was glad to be back, the buried senses from childhood alive in her. The application she had made to the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, when a call had gone out for a forensic anthropologist to go to Sri Lanka, had originally been halfhearted. She did not expect to be chosen, because she had been born on the island, even though she now travelled with a British passport. And it seemed somewhat unlikely that human rights specialists would be allowed in at all. Over the years complaints from Amnesty International and other civil rights groups had been sent to Switzerland and resided there, glacierlike. President Katugala claimed no knowledge of organized campaigns of murder on the island. But under pressure, and to placate trading partners in the West, the government eventually made the gesture of an offer to pair local officials with outside consultants, and Anil Tissera was chosen as the Geneva organization’s forensic specialist, to be teamed with an archaeologist in Colombo. It was to be a seven-week project. Nobody at the Centre for Human Rights was very hopeful about it.
As she entered the Archaeological Offices she heard his voice.
‘So—you are the swimmer!’ A broad-chested man in his late forties was approaching her casually, with his hand out. She hoped this wasn’t Mr. Sarath Diyasena, but it was.
‘The swimming was a long time ago.’
‘Still . . . I may have seen you at Mount Lavinia.’
‘How?’
‘I went to school at St. Thomas’s. Right there. Of course I’m a bit older than you are.’
‘Mr. Diyasena . . . let’s not mention swimming again, okay? A lot of blood under the bridge since then.’
‘Right. Right,’ he said in a drawl she would become familiar with, a precise and time-stalling mannerism in him. It was like the Asian Nod, which included in its almost circular movement the possibility of a no. Sarath Diyasena’s ‘Right,’ spoken twice, was an official and hesitant agreement for courtesy’s sake but included the suggestion that things were on hold.
She smiled at him, wanting to get over the fact that they had managed to clash in their first few sentences. ‘A true pleasure to meet you. I’ve read several of your papers.’
‘Of course I’m in the wrong era for you. But I know most of the locations at least. . . .’
‘Do you think we can get a breakfast?’ she asked as they walked towards his car.
‘Are you married? Got a family?’
‘Not married. Not a swimmer.’
‘Right.’
‘The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies—one in the north, two in the south—using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are. I am just an archaeologist. This pairing by your commission and the government was not my idea—a forensic pathologist, an archaeologist, odd pairing, if you want my opinion. What we’ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerrilla separatists. Murders committed by all sides.’
‘I couldn’t tell who was worst. The reports are terrible.’
He ordered another tea and looked at the food that had arrived. She had specifically asked for curd and jaggery. When they were finished he said, ‘Come. I’ll take you to the ship. Let me show you where we will work. . . .’
The Oronsay, a passenger liner in the old days of the Orient Line, had been gutted of all valuable machinery and luxury furnishings. It had once travelled between Asia and England—from Colombo to Port Said, sliding through the narrow-gauge waters of the Suez Canal and journeying on to Tilbury Docks. By the 1970s it made just local trips. The rooms of tourist class were broken apart to become a cargo hold. Tea, fresh water, rubber products and rice replaced difficult passengers, save for a few souls, such as nephews of shareholders of the shipping line looking for work and adventure. It remained a ship of the Orient, a vessel that could survive the heat of Asia, that still contained the smells of salt water, rust and oil, and the waft of tea in cargo.