Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  At six in the morning she dressed, then began walking the mile to the school. A few hundred yards before she climbed the hill, the road narrowed into a bridge, a lagoon on one side, a salt river on the other. This is where Sirissa would start to see the teenagers, some with catapults hanging off their shoulders, some smoking. They would acknowledge her with their eyes but never speak to her, whereas she would always give a greeting. Later, when they saw her on the school grounds, they wouldn’t acknowledge her in any way. She would turn after she had gone five yards past them at the bridge, still moving away from them, to catch their curious watching of her. She was not that much older. And they were hungry in their search for a pose, and perhaps only one or two of them would have a knowledge already of women. They were aware of Sirissa’s silk-like hair, her litheness as she turned around to look at them, as she kept on walking—a sensual gesture they came to expect.

  It was always six-thirty a.m. when she reached the bridge. There would be a few prawn boats, a man up to his neck in the water, whose hands, out of sight, would be straightening the nets that had been dropped by his son from a boat during the night. The man moved in his quietness as she walked past him. From here Sirissa would reach the school in ten minutes, change in a cubicle, soak rags in a bucket, and begin cleaning the blackboards. Then sweep the rooms free of leaves that had slipped in through the grilled windows if there had been wind or a storm in the night. She worked in the empty school grounds until she heard the gradual arrival of the children, the teenagers, the older youths, like a gradual arrival of birds, voices deepening, as if it were a meeting called for in a jungle clearing. She would go among them and wipe clean the blackboards on the edge of the sand courtyard—used by the youngest children, who would sit on the earth in front of the teachers learning their Sinhala, their mathematics, their English: ‘The peacock is a beautiful bird. . . . It has a long tail!’

  There was a strict stillness during the morning classes. Then, at one in the afternoon, the courtyard filled with noise and bodies again, the school day completed, the students in their white uniforms scattering to three or four villages that fed the school, back into their other life. She ate her lunch at the desk in the math classroom. She opened up the leaf with the food inside, held it in her left hand and wandered beside the blackboard, collecting the food with three fingers and a thumb, not even looking down, but peering at the chalked numbers and symbols to catch and follow the path of the argument. She had been good at theorems in school. Their logic fell clearly in front of her. She could pick an edge and fold it neatly into an isosceles. She would always listen to the teachers as she worked in the flower beds or hallways. Now she washed her hands at the tap and began her walk home, a few teachers still in the hall, a few later cycling past her.

  In the evenings during the government curfews she remained indoors, with a lamp and a book in her room. Her husband would be with her in a week. She’d turn a page and find a drawing of her by Ananda on a frail piece of paper he had tucked into the later reaches of the book’s plot. Or a line drawing of a wasp she had disliked, its giant eyes. She would have preferred to walk into the streets after dinner, for she loved the closing up of stores. The streets dark, the fall of electric light out of the shops. It was her favourite time, like putting away the senses one by one, this shop of drinks, this cassette store, these vegetables packed away, and the street growing darker and darker as she walked on. And a bicycle riding off with three sacks of potatoes balanced on it into even purer darkness. Into the other life. That existence. For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered. So Sirissa loved the calm of the night streets that no longer had commerce in them, like a theatre after the performance was over. Vimalarajah’s herb shop, or his brother Vimalarajah’s silver shop with a shutter halfway down its darkness, the light slowly dwarfed till it revealed just an inch under the metal door, a line of gold varnish, and then the turning off of a switch so that horizon disappeared. The air would breeze around her dress as she imagined herself walking without curfew. The pigeons settled in among the lightbulbs spelling out the name Cargill’s. So many things happened during the feathers of night. The frantic running, the terrified, the scared, the pea-brain furious and tired professional men of death punishing another village of dissent.

  At five-thirty in the morning, Sirissa wakes and bathes herself at the well behind the house she is living in. She dresses, eats some fruit, and leaves for the school. It is the same twenty-five-minute walk she is familiar with. She knows she will turn lazily after passing the boys on the bridge. There will be the familiar birds, Brahminy kites, perhaps a flycatcher. The road narrows. A hundred yards ahead of her is the bridge. Lagoon on the left. Salt river on the right. This morning there are no fishermen and it is an empty road. She is the first to walk it, being a servant at the school. Six-thirty a.m. Nobody to whirl for, her gesture that shows she knows she is equal to them. She is about ten yards from the bridge when she sees the heads of the two students on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old . . . she doesn’t know or care. She sees two more heads on the far side of the bridge and can tell even from here that she recognizes one of them. She would shrink down into herself, go back, but she cannot. She feels something is behind her, whatever is the cause of this. She desires to become nothing at all. Mind capable of nothing. She does not even think of releasing them from this public gesture. Cannot touch anything because everything feels alive, wounded and raw but alive. She begins running forward, past their eyes, her own shut dark until she is past them. Up the hill towards the school. She keeps running forward, and then she sees more.

  Anil stood lost in the stricture of no movement, in a precise focus of thought. She had no idea how long she had been there in the courtyard, how long she had been thinking through all the possible trajectories of Sailor, but when she came out of it and moved, her neck felt as if it had an arrow in it.

  The central truism in her work was that you could not find a suspect until you found the victim. And in spite of their knowledge that Sailor had probably been killed in this district, in spite of details of age and posture, her theorizing of height and weight, in spite of the “head composition” that she had not much faith in, it seemed unlikely that they would identify him; they still knew nothing about the world Sailor had come from.

  And in any case, if they did identify him, if they did discover the details of his murder, what then? He was a victim among thousands. What would this change?

  She remembered Clyde Snow, her teacher in Oklahoma, speaking about human rights work in Kurdistan: One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. She and Sarath both knew that in all the turbulent history of the island’s recent civil wars, in all the token police investigations, not one murder charge had been made during the troubles. But this could be a clear case against the government.

  However, without identifying Sailor, they had no victim yet.

  Anil had worked with teachers who could take a seven-hundred-year-old skeleton and discover through evidence of physical stress or trauma in those bones what the person’s profession had been. Lawrence Angel, her mentor at the Smithsonian, could, from just the curvature of a spine to the right, recognize a stonemason from Pisa, and from thumb fractures among dead Texans tell that they had spent long evenings gripping the saddle on mechanical barroom bulls. Kenneth Kennedy at Cornell University remembered Angel identifying a trumpet player from the scattered remains in a bus crash. And Kennedy himself, studying a first-millennium mummy of Thebes, discovered marked lines on the flexor ligaments of the phalanges and theorized the man was a scribe, the marks attributed to his constantly holding a stylus.

  Ramazzini in his treatise on the diseases of tradesmen had begun it all, talking of metal poisoning among painters. Later the Englishman Thackrah spoke of pelvic deformations among weavers who sat for hours at their looms. (‘Weaver’s bo
ttom,’ Kennedy noted, may have led to Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Comparisons were made because of similar anatomical ailments between javelin throwers among Neolithic Saharans of the Niger and modern golf professionals.

  These were the markers of occupation. . . .

  The night before, Anil had leafed through Kennedy’s charts in Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton, one of her constant travelling companions. On Sailor’s bones she could find no precise marker of occupational stress. As she stood utterly still in the courtyard, she realized there were two possible versions of a life that she could deduce from the skeleton in front of her. And the two aspects of the skeleton did not logically fit together. The first, from her reading of the bones, suggested ‘activity’ above the height of the shoulder. He had worked with his arms stretched out, reaching up or forward. A man who painted walls perhaps, or chiselled. But it appeared to be a harder activity than painting. And the arm joints showed a symmetrical use, so both arms had been active. His pelvis, trunk and legs also gave the suggestion of agility, something like the swivel of a man on a trampoline. Acrobat? Circus performer? Trapeze, because of the arms? But how many circuses were around in the Southern Province during the emergency? She remembered there had been many roaming ones in her childhood. And she remembered once seeing a children’s book on extinct animals where one of the extinct creatures was an acrobat.

  The other version of him was different. The left leg had been broken badly, in two places. (These wounds were not a part of his murder. She could tell the breaks had occurred about three years before his death.) And the heel bones—the heel bones suggested an alternate profile completely, a man static and sedentary.

  Anil looked around the courtyard. Sarath was barely visible, sitting in the darkness of the house, while Ananda squatted comfortably in front of the head on the turntable, a lit beedi in his mouth. She could imagine the squint of his eyes behind his spectacles. She passed him as she walked to the granary cupboards. Then moved back.

  ‘Sarath,’ she said quietly, and he came out. He sensed the edge to her voice.

  ‘I— Can you tell Ananda not to move. To stay as he is. That I’m going to have to touch him, okay?’

  Sarath’s glasses were on his nose. He looked at her.

  ‘Do you understand me?’

  ‘Not really. You want to touch him?’

  ‘Just tell him not to move, okay?’

  As soon as Sarath entered his work space, Ananda threw a cloth over the head. There was a brief conversation, then hesitant monosyllabic agreement repeated after each of Sarath’s phrases. She walked in slowly and kneeled beside Ananda, but as soon as she touched him he jumped up.

  She turned away in frustration.

  ‘Ne, ne!’ Sarath tried to explain once more. It took a while for them to arrange Ananda into exactly the same position he had been in.

  ‘Get him to keep it taut, as if he was working.’

  Anil took hold of Ananda’s ankle in both hands. She pressed her thumbs into the muscle and cartilege, moved them up a few inches above his ankle bone. There was a dry laugh from Ananda. Then down to the heel again. ‘Ask him why he works like this.’ She was told by Sarath that he was comfortable.

  ‘It’s not comfortable,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the foot is relaxed. There’s stress. The ligament is being stretched against the bone. There will be a permanent bruise to it. Ask him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ask him why he works this way.’

  ‘He’s a carver. That’s how he works.’

  ‘But does he usually squat like this?’

  Sarath asked the question and the two men rattled back and forth.

  ‘He said he got used to squatting in the gem mines. The height down there is only about four feet. He was in them for a couple of years.’

  ‘Thank you. Please, will you thank him. . . .’

  She was excited.

  ‘Sailor worked in a mine too. Come here, look at the strictures on the ankle bones of the skeleton—this is what Ananda has under his flesh. I know this. This was my professor’s area of specialty. See this sediment on the bone, the buildup. I think Sailor worked in one of the mines. We need to get a chart of the mines in this area.’

  ‘Are you talking about gem mines?’

  ‘It could be anything. Also, this is just one aspect of his life, the rest is very different. He must have done something more active before he broke his leg. So we have a story about him, you see. A man who was active, an acrobat almost, then he was injured and had to work in a mine. What other mines do they have around here?’

  There followed two days of storms when they had to stay indoors. As soon as the bad weather ended, Anil borrowed Sarath’s cell phone, found an umbrella and went into a light rain. She clambered down a slope away from the trees and stalked across to the far edge of the paddy field, to where Sarath had told her there was the clearest reception.

  She needed communication with the outside world. There was too much solitude in her head. Too much Sarath. Too much Ananda.

  Dr. Perera at Kynsey Road Hospital answered the phone. It took a while for him to remember who she was, and he was startled to be told that she was speaking to him from a paddy field. What did she want?

  She had wanted to talk to him about her father, knew she had been skirting the memory of him since her arrival on the island. She apologized for not calling and meeting him before she left Colombo. But on the phone Perera seemed muted and wary.

  ‘You sound sick, sir. You should take a lot of liquids. A viral flu comes like that.’

  She would not tell him where she was—Sarath had warned her of that—and when he asked for the second time she pretended she could not hear, said, ‘Hello . . . hello? Are you there, sir?’ and hung up.

  *

  Anil moves in silence, the energy held back. Her body taut as an arm, the music brutal and loud in her head, while she waits for the rhythm to angle off so she can open her arms and leap. Which she does now, throwing her head back, her hair a black plume, back almost to the level of her waist. Throws her arms too, to hold the ground in her back flip, her loose skirt having no time to discover gravity and drop before she is on her feet again.

  It is wondrous music to dance alongside—she has danced to it with others on occasions of joy and gregariousness, carousing through a party with, it seemed, all her energy on her skin, but this now is not a dance, does not contain even a remnant of the courtesy or sharing that is part of a dance. She is waking every muscle in herself, blindfolding every rule she lives by, giving every mental skill she has to the movement of her body. Only this will lift her backward into the air and pivot her hip to send her feet over her.

  A scarf tied tight around her head holds the earphones to her. She needs music to push her into extremities and grace. She wants grace, and it happens here only on these mornings or after a late-afternoon downpour—when the air is light and cool, when there is also the danger of skidding on the wet leaves. It feels as if she could eject herself out of her body like an arrow.

  Sarath sees her from the dining room window. He watches a person he has never seen. A girl insane, a druid in moonlight, a thief in oil. This is not the Anil he knows. Just as she, in this state, is invisible to herself, though it is the state she longs for. Not a moth in a man’s club. Not the carrier and weigher of bones—she needs that side of herself too, just as she likes herself as a lover. But now it is herself dancing to a furious love song that can drum out loss, ‘Coming In from the Cold,’ dancing the rhetoric of a lover’s parting with all of herself. She thinks she is most sane about love when she chooses damning gestures against him, against herself, against them together, against eros the bittersweet, consumed and then spat out in the last stages of their love story. Her weeping comes easy. It is for her in this state no more than sweat, no more than a cut foot she earns during the dance, and she will not stop for any of these, just as she would not change herself for a lover’s howl or sweet grin, the
n or anymore.

  She stops when she is exhausted and can hardly move. She will crouch and lean there, lie on the stone. A leaf will come down. Its click of applause. The music continues furious like blood moving for a few more minutes in a dead man. She lies under the sound and witnesses her brain coming back, lighting its candle in the dark. And breathes in and breathes out and breathes in and breathes out.

  On the weekend, while they were in the front garden of the walawwa, Ananda sat down beside them and talked to Sarath in Sinhala.

  ‘He has finished the head,’ Sarath said, not even turning towards her but still watching Ananda’s face. ‘Apparently, he says, it’s done. If there are any problems with it I suggest we don’t complain, he’s badly drunk. Save whatever hesitations. Or he might disappear on us.’

  She said nothing and the two men continued speaking, the dusk settling around them within the sound of the frogs. She got up and strolled towards the twangings and croaks. She was lost in the antiphonies until she felt Sarath’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Come. Let’s see it now.’

  ‘Before he passes out? Yes, yes. No criticism.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I humour him. I humour you. When do I get my turn?’

  ‘I don’t think you like being humoured.’

  ‘A favour then, sometime.’