Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  Anil would not understand this old and accepted balance. Sarath knew that for her the journey was in getting to the truth. But what would the truth bring them into? It was a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol. Sarath had seen truth broken into suitable pieces and used by the foreign press alongside irrelevant photographs. A flippant gesture towards Asia that might lead, as a result of this information, to new vengeance and slaughter. There were dangers in handing truth to an unsafe city around you. As an archaeologist Sarath believed in truth as a principle. That is, he would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use.

  And privately (Sarath would consider and weigh this before sleep), he would, he knew, also give his life for the rock carving from another century of the woman bending over her child. He remembered how they had stood before it in the flickering light, Palipana’s arm following the line of the mother’s back bowed in affection or grief. An unseen child. All the gestures of motherhood harnessed. A muffled scream in her posture.

  The country existed in a rocking, self-burying motion. The disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave. Murders in the Muthurajawela marsh.

  Ananda

  They weaved towards the inland hills.

  ‘We don’t have the equipment to do that sort of work here,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘If the artist is as good as Palipana says, he’ll improvise the tools. Have you ever been involved with this kind of thing?’

  ‘No. Never done reconstruction. I have to say we sort of scorn it. They look like historical cartoons to us. Dioramas, that sort of thing. Are you getting a cast made of the skull?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Before you give it to him—whoever this noncertified person is. I’m glad we’ve decided on a drunk, by the way.’

  ‘You can’t get a cast done without waking up all of Colombo. We’ll just give him the skull.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘And it would take weeks to arrange. This isn’t Brussels or America. Only the weapons in this country are state-of-the-art.’

  ‘Well, let’s find the guy first and see if he can even hold a paintbrush without shaking.’

  They arrived at a scattering of mud-and-wattle huts on the edge of a village. It turned out the man named Ananda Udugama was no longer living with his in-laws but in the next town, at a petrol station. They drove on, and she watched as Sarath got out and walked up and down the one street of the town, asking for him. When they located him it appeared that he had just woken from an early-evening sleep. Sarath gestured to her and she joined them.

  Sarath explained what they wanted him to do, mentioned Palipana, and that he would be paid. The man, who wore thick spectacles, said he would need certain things—erasers, the kind on the end of school pencils, small needles. And he said he needed to see the skeleton. They opened the back of the jeep. The man used their squat flashlight to study the skeleton, running it up and down the ribs, the arcs and curves. Anil felt there was little he could learn from such a viewing.

  Sarath persuaded the man to come with them. After a slight shake of the head, he went into the room he was living in and came out with his belongings in a small cardboard box.

  Two hours before Ratnapura they were stopped by a roadblock, soldiers moving languidly out of the shadows towards them from both sides of the road. They sat in silence, falsely polite, handing over their identity cards when a hand snaked into the jeep and snapped its fingers. Anil’s card seemed to give the soldiers trouble, and one of them opened her door and stood waiting. She was not aware of what was expected of her until Sarath explained under his breath; then she climbed out.

  The soldier leaned into the jeep and lifted out her shoulder bag and emptied it noisily on the hood. Everything out there in the sun, a pair of glasses and a pen sliding off onto the tarmac, where he let them remain. When she moved forward to pick them up he put his hand out. In the noon sunlight he slowly handled every object in front of him: unscrewed and sniffed a small bottle of eau de cologne, looked at the postcard with the bird, emptied her wallet, inserted a pencil into a cassette and twisted it silently. There was nothing of real value in her bag, but the slowness of his actions embarrassed and irritated her. He opened the back of her alarm clock and pulled out the battery, and when he saw the packets of batteries still sealed in plastic, he collected them too, and gave them to another soldier, who carried them to a sandbagged cave on the side of the road. Leaving the bag and its contents, the soldier walked away and signalled them on, without even looking back. ‘Don’t do anything,’ she heard Sarath say from the darkness of the jeep.

  She gathered her things into the bag and got into the passenger seat.

  ‘The batteries are essential for making homemade bombs,’ Sarath explained.

  ‘I know that,’ she snapped back. ‘I know that.’

  As they drove away she turned to see Ananda, unconcerned, twirling a pencil.

  A walawwa in Ekneligoda, the house belonging to a family named Wickramasinghe, who had lived in it for five generations. The last Wickramasinghe, an artist, had lived there during the 1960s. After his death the two-hundred-year-old house was taken over by the Archaeological Society and Historical Board. (There was a distant family member connected with archaeology.) But when the region became unsafe and rife with disappearances, the building was no longer inhabited, and like a well that has gone dry it took on a sense of absence.

  Sarath had come to this family estate for the first time as a boy, when his younger brother was expected to die. ‘Diphtheria,’ they had said. ‘Something white in the mouth,’ the doctors had whispered to his parents. So before Gamini was brought home from the hospital, Sarath, along with his favourite books, was packed into the car and driven to Ekneligoda, out of harm’s way. The Wickramasinghes were travelling in Europe, so for two months the thirteen-year-old, looked after by just an ayah, ranged into their gardens, drew maps of the mongoose paths in the thickets, created imaginary towns and neighbours. While on Greenpath Road in Colombo the family closed their doors and prepared to look after the dying younger son, ensconced like a small prince and armed with the secret of death he himself did not know about.

  In his thirties Sarath would visit the house again whenever field trips brought him into the region, but he had not been back for at least a decade, and now the dishevelled vacuum of the building and grounds depressed him. Still, he knew where the old keys were hidden on the lower strut of the fence, found the same eternal path of the mongoose through the thornbush thicket in the lower garden.

  With Anil and Ananda at his side, he opened all the rooms so they could each choose a work space and bedroom, then locked the unwanted rooms once more. They would camp out in the smallest space needed, not sprawl over the property. He walked with Anil through a house that now seemed much smaller to him, and he felt himself to be in two eras. He described the paintings that had been on the walls in an earlier decade, when he had lived there for two months and evolved into a privacy he had perhaps never fully emerged from. Few survive diphtheria, it had been emphasized to him. And he had accepted with certainty the likelihood of his brother’s death, that he would soon be the only son.

  Now the whisper of Anil’s foot was beside him. Then her quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’ They’d entered a room off the courtyard, where someone had charcoalled two Sinhala words in giant script on the walls. MAKAMKRUKA. And on the wall opposite, MADANARAGA. ‘What’s that? Are those names?’ ‘No.’ He reached up so his hand could touch the brown lettering.

  ‘Not names. A makamkruka is—it’s difficult to describe—a man who is a makamkruka is a churner, an agitator. Someone who perhaps sees things more truly by turning everything upside down. He’s a devil almost, a yaksa. Though a makamkruka, strangely, guards the sacred spot in a temple ground. No one knows why this kind of person is honoured with such a responsibility.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The other
is stranger. Madanaraga means “with the speed of love,” sexual arousal. It’s the kind of word you find in ancient romances. Not in the vernacular.’

  While Ananda laboured over the head, Anil was to continue work on Sailor’s skeleton, trying to discover among other things his ‘markers of occupation.’ She had been with Sarath for more than three weeks now, and they were ‘in the field,’ not in contact with Sarath’s political networks in the city. No one in Colombo would expect them to be camped in this family estate, close to the area where Sailor had possibly been buried the first time. Perhaps Sailor was locally ‘important’ or ‘identifiable.’ Here they would be closer to the source and they would be undisturbed.

  The first morning they were there, Ananda Udugama had gone off without a word. Leaving Sarath frustrated and Anil carefully silent. She set up her workbench and temporary lab in a courtyard under a banyan’s ragged shade and brought Sailor out with her. Sarath decided to do his own research work in the grand dining room. He would occasionally have to return to Colombo for supplies and to report in. There were no telephones, except for his on-again, off-again cell phone, and they felt isolated from the rest of the country.

  Ananda had in fact, that first morning, woken early and walked to the nearby village market, bought some fresh toddy and established himself by the public well. He chatted with anyone who sat near him, shared his few cigarettes and watched the village move around him, with its distinct behaviour, its local body postures and facial characteristics. He wanted to discover what the people drank here, whether there was a specific diet that would puff up cheeks more than usual, whether lips would be fuller than in Batticaloa. Also the varieties of hairstyle, the quality of eyesight. Did they walk or cycle. Was coconut oil used in food and hair. He spent a day in the village and then went into the fields and collected mud in three sacks. He could mix the two browns and one black into a variety of shades. Then he bought several bottles of arrack in the village and returned to the walawwa.

  He would be up at dawn and would park himself in a square of sun and move as it moved, the way a cat would. He may have looked at the skull now and then, but that was all. He would go to the village and return with kite papers in several colours, suet, food dyes and one day two old turntables and a random selection of 78s.

  Of all the possible spaces in the large house Ananda had chosen the room the artist had worked in. He knew nothing about the history of the place but liked the light within this room, where the two words MAKAMKRUKA and MADANARAGA were written. The courtyard where Anil worked was just outside. The morning he actually began to work on the skull she heard music coming from his room. A tenor burst into song, sang with energy for a few moments, then slowed before the song ended. Curious, she went in, to see Ananda winding the gramophone. Beside it was another turntable, where he was moulding a clay base, on which the skull rested. His free hand could spin it to the left or right like a potter’s wheel. He was already working on the throat. She stepped back and out.

  She recognized the technique of face construction. He had marked several pins with red paint to represent the various thicknesses of the flesh over the bone, and then placed a thin layer of plasticine on the skull, thinning or thickening it according to the marks on the pins. Eventually he would press finer layers of rubber eraser onto the clay to build the face. Collaged this way with various household objects it would look like a five-and-dime monster.

  For the three days of the week when Sarath was away in Colombo, there was little communication between her and Ananda, the eye-painter turned drunk gem-pit worker turned head-restorer. They shuffled about each other, rattling around the house, basic courtesies having dropped away after the first day. She continued to see this project as Sarath’s folly.

  In the evenings she carried whatever equipment might be damaged by rain into the granary. By then Ananda would be drinking. It hadn’t become serious until he began working on the head. Now he was easily annoyed if his food had been moved around in the kitchen or if he cut himself with the X-acto, as he was always doing. Once, he shouldered his way into the afternoon sunlight and found her taking some bone measurements, and as he passed her his sarong brushed the table. She barked at him, so he turned in a fury and yelled back at her. This was followed by a silent and even subtler fury. He stalked to his room and she half expected the head to come rolling out.

  She went looking for him that night, walking out of the house with a lamp. She was relieved he had not shown up for dinner (they cooked their own meals but ate together, silently). By ten-thirty he was still not back, and before she locked up the house—something he usually did—she felt she should make a brief gesture of searching for him, so with the lamp she walked out into the darkness. And he was there on a low wall, passed out, wearing just his sarong. She pulled him to his feet and staggered back with his weight and arms all over her.

  Anil wasn’t fond of drunks. She found nothing humorous or romantic about them. In the hallway, where she had steered him, he fell to the floor and was soon asleep. There was no way of waking him and getting him to move. She went to her room and returned with her Walkman and a tape. A little vengeance. She put the earphones on his head, switched the Walkman on. Tom Waits singing ‘Dig, Dig, Dig’ from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs channeled itself into his inner brain, and he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him, and finally ripped off the wires attached to his head.

  She sat on the courtyard steps. The release of the moon so it stared down on what had been once the Wickramasinghe home. She buzzed the tape forward to Steve Earle’s ‘Fearless Heart,’ with its intricate swagger. No one but Steve Earle for her in the worst times. There was a thump in her blood, a sexual hip in her movement, when she heard any of his songs of furious loss. So she moved half-dancing into the courtyard, past the skeleton of Sailor. It was a clear night and she could leave him there.

  But undressing in her room she thought of him under the claustrophobia of plastic and went out and unpinned the sheets. So the wind and all the night were in Sailor. After the burnings and the burials, he was on a wooden table washed by the moon. She walked back to her room, the glory of the music now gone.

  There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be the long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck. Or she sat above him and watched him come into her fast hand movements. The precise and inarticulate sounds of each witnessed by the other.

  Ananda drifted in front of her—the emaciated body of a serious drinker, still shirtless. He rubbed his arms and bony chest with his hands, peering around the courtyard unaware that she was in one of its dark corners.

  At her worktable he carefully put his hands behind him so as to be sure not to disturb anything, and bent over, looking through those thick spectacles at her calipers, the weight charts, as if he were within the hush of a museum. He bent down further and sniffed at the objects. A mind of science, she thought. Yesterday she had noticed how delicate his fingers were, dyed ochre as the result of his work.

  Now Ananda picked up the skeleton and carried it in his arms.

  She was in no way appalled by what he was doing. There had been hours when, locked in her investigations and too focussed by hours of intricacy, she too would need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightning of politics raised his hands at the last minute, so they were broken. Ananda held Sailor and walked slowly with him and placed him back on the table, and it was then he saw Anil. She
nodded imperceptibly to show there was no anger in her. Slowly rose and walked over to him. A small yellow leaf floated down and slipped into the skeleton’s ribs and pulsed there.

  She saw the two moons caught in the mirror of Ananda’s glasses. It was a ramshackle pair—the lenses knitted onto the frame with wire and the stems wrapped in old cloth, rag really, so he could wipe or dry his fingers on them. Anil wished she could trade information with him, but she had long forgotten the subtleties of the language they once shared. She would have told him what Sailor’s bone measurements meant in terms of posture and size. And he—God knows what insights he had.

  In the afternoons when Ananda could go no further with the skull’s reconstruction, he took it all apart, breaking up the clay. Strangely. It seemed a waste of time to her. But early the next morning he would know the precise thickness and texture to return to and could re-create the previous day’s work in twenty minutes. Then he thought and composed the face a further step. It was as if he needed the warm-up of the past work to rush over so he could move with more confidence into the uncertainty that lay ahead. Thus there was nothing to see if she entered his room when he was not working. After just ten days, the room was more like a nest—rags and padding, mud and clay, colours daubed everywhere, the large letters above him on the wall.

  Still, on this night, without words, there seemed to be a pact. The way he had respected the order of her tools, touching nothing, the way he raised Sailor into his arms. She saw the sadness in Ananda’s face below what might appear a drunk’s easy sentiments. The hollows that seemed gnawed at. Anil put out her hand and touched his forearm, and then left him alone in the courtyard. For the next few days they went back to their mutual silences. It was possible he had been very drunk that night and remembered nothing about it. Two or three times a day he would put on one of the old 78s and stand in his doorway, looking out at whatever was going on in her life in that courtyard.