Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘No. He’s just one of those who try to kill themselves because they lost people.’

  She caught a waver in the eyes in front of her.

  . . .

  Anil was not conscious of Sarath’s leaving. She remained with Ananda in the corner of the room, lamplight holding them together. She should have been the one to go. Sarath could talk and calm him. Or did he need silence? Perhaps. Perhaps the presence of a woman helped.

  She slipped in the blood getting up from her crouch, went to the bed and tore more strips off the pillowcase. She felt an amulet under the pillow and took it. When she returned, his eyes were wide open, seemed to be swallowing everything. Oh my God—he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He couldn’t see. She found them on the floor, he had been wearing them when he began to kill himself.

  She rubbed the blood on her hands onto her sarong and placed the spectacles on his face. Suddenly, in spite of his wound, in spite of the knife still in his right hand, still a threat, he seemed to be back with her, among the living. She felt she could speak in any language, he would understand the purpose of any gesture. How far back was their moment of connection, when his hand had been on her shoulder? Just a few hours earlier. She put the amulet in his left hand but he could not or would not hold it. He was drifting back into unconsciousness or sleep.

  What was an amulet, what was a baila, to him now? Or spectacles, or a bond. All that was for her own peace. She had interrupted his death. She was the obstacle to what he wanted. The blood had already filled the bandage. She rose and hurried through the courtyard, along with the random glance of the flashlight, into the kitchen, to their portable icebox. Opened it, and at the back, wrapped in newspaper, found the emergency epinephrine she always carried. Perhaps it would slow the bleeding, constrict the blood vessels and help his blood pressure. She rolled an ampule between her palms to warm it. On her knees, beside him, she sucked the epinephrine up into the syringe. He was looking at her, it felt, from a great distance, with no interest in what she was doing. She put her left hand on his chest to keep him from moving—she was pushing him back, she realized, as far as he would go, to stay secure, into the room’s corner—then stabbed it into the arm. Continuing to hold him with her left hand, she filled the syringe once more, from a second ampule held between her knees, then gave him another injection. When she looked up he was still gazing through her. But when the drug started to influence him, his eyes became endangered. They slipped slowly, as if grasping for a ledge to stay awake on. As if he thought he would die now should he fall back into stillness.

  It was ten in the morning and she heard the sounds of the foreman arriving as usual on the property. He was there to weigh the tea that had been picked and collected into sacks by seven workers. Anil always went out to watch the ceremony. She was there for a memory she’d held on to since she was a child. She always had loved the thick odour from the leaves, and as for that green leaf she knew there was nothing greener. She remembered entering tea and rubber factories as if they were kingdoms and imagining which of those kingdoms she wished to be a part of when she became an adult. A husband in tea or a husband in rubber. There was no other choice. And their house flung on top of a solitary hill.

  Sarath had not been able to locate his brother and so had driven Ananda to Ratnapura Hospital. He was still not back. She stood by the neighbouring shed where the weigh-scales were, and when the tea pluckers had gone she stepped onto the platform’s wobble, bent down and took a few small green leaves.

  Before going to bed the previous night, she’d carried a bucket of water into the room and scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees. She had wanted to do it then, while he was still alive. If he died in the night she could not face going in there again. She worked for half an hour. The blood looked black in that light. Later, in the courtyard, she stripped off her T-shirt and sarong and washed them. And only then began to bathe herself—every inch of skin where she could sense the dried blood, every strand of her thin dark hair. She removed her bangle and scrubbed her wrist, then dropped the bangle into the bucket and washed that too. Several more times she jerked the full bucket up out of the well and poured water over herself. She felt manically awake, shivering, she wanted to talk. She left the clothes by the well and walked to her room and tried to disappear into sleep. She could feel the coldness of the well water reaching her in her exhaustion, knew it had entered her bones. She was with Sarath and Ananda, citizened by their friendship—the two of them in the car, the two of them in the hospital while a stranger attempted to save Ananda. Her hands were at her sides, she was barely able to reach for a sheet to cover herself. It was almost morning and light was in the room with her. Only then did she drift off, believing that the good stranger would save Ananda.

  She opened her eyes in the afternoon and Sarath was there.

  ‘He will be all right.’

  ‘Oh,’ she murmured. She pressed Sarath’s hand to the side of her face.

  ‘You saved him. Getting to him so quickly, then the bandage, the epinephrine. The doctor said he didn’t know too many who would know to do that in a crisis.’

  ‘It was lucky. I’m allergic to bees, I always carry it. Some people can’t breathe after a bee attack. And epinephrine also slows bleeding.’

  ‘You should live here. Not be here just for another job.’

  ‘This isn’t just “another job”! I decided to come back. I wanted to come back.’

  There is a long stone path from the village road up to the walawwa. There is an old wall on the right hidden by foliage. A fork in the driveway after thirty yards. If you are driving you turn left and park, near the tea pluckers’ shed. If you are cycling or walking you veer right and approach the house and enter it through a small east door.

  It is a classic building, two hundred years old, handed down through five generations. From no viewing point does the house look excessive or pretentious. The site and location, the careful use of distance—how far back you can stand from the building to look at it, the lack of great views of another person’s land—make you turn inward rather than dominate the world around you. It has always seemed a hidden, accidentally discovered place, a grand meulne.

  You enter through the gate with its idiosyncratic slope on the top beam and you are in a walled front garden, with sand-coloured packed-down earth. There are two locations of shade here. The shadowed porch and the shadow under the great red tree. Beneath the tree is a low stone bench. Anil spends much of her time here, under the tree bent like an Aeolian harp that throws a hundred variations of shadow textures onto the sandy earth.

  How old was the painter in the Wickramasinghe family when he died? How old is Ananda? How old was Anil, standing once in an airport unable to cry out the pain of her frustrated unreturned desire? What were the missing organs in men that made them stroll through life as courteously unfaithful, nonverbal creatures? If two lovers felt they could kill themselves over loss or desire, what of the rest of the planet of strangers? Those who were not in the slightest way in love and who were led and swayed into enemy camps by the ambitious and vainglorious . . .

  She was in the garden alongside the moonamal tree and the kohomba tree. The flowers of the moonamal when shed always turned face up to the moon. The kohomba twigs she could break off and strip to clean her teeth, or burn to keep mosquitoes away. This place seemed the garden of a wise prince. But the wise prince had killed himself.

  The aesthetics of the walawwa never surfaced among the three of them. It had been a location of refuge and fear, in spite of calm, consistent shadows, the modest height of the wall, the trees that flowered at face level. But the house, the sand garden, the trees had entered them. Anil would never get over her time here. Years later she might see an etching or a drawing and understand something about it, not sure why—unless she were told that the walawwa she lived in had belonged to the artist’s family and that the artist had also lived there for a time. But what was it about the drawing? This simple series of lines of a naked water
carrier, say, and the exactly right distance of his figure from the tree whose arced trunk echoed the shape of a harp.

  One can die from private woes as easily as from public ones. Here various families had been solitary, might have begun speaking quietly to themselves while a pencil was being sharpened. Or they would listen to a transistor radio, hearing something faint at the farthest radius point of the antenna. When batteries died it was sometimes a week before one of them walked into the village, that sea of electric light! For it was a grand house built in the era of lamps, built when there seemed to be only the possibility of private woe. But it was here the three of them hunted a public story. ‘The drama of our time,’ the poet Robert Duncan remarked, ‘is the coming of all men into one fate.’

  The storm comes towards them from the north. The sky black, fresh wind shaking branches and shadows as they sit under their red tree. The only thing unaffected by the storm is Sarath, his eyes searching into the distance as they talk back and forth.

  ‘Come on, let’s go in—’

  ‘Stay,’ he says. ‘We’re already wet.’

  She sits down on the stone bench facing him, watching the rain break apart his neatly combed head of hair. She feels irresponsible, to be out in a storm like this. She would have done it as a kid. She can hear drumming from the village, barely audible beneath the sound of rain.

  ‘You look like your brother with your hair dishevelled. Actually I like your brother.’ She leans forward. ‘I’m going in.’

  She walks to the porch and climbs the steps out of the mud, shakes her hair loose and wrings it out like a cloth. She glances back. Sarath’s head is bent down, his lips moving, as if speaking with someone. She knows there will never be a boat to reach Sarath, to discover what he might be thinking. His wife? A cave fresco? The bounce of the rain in front of him? She dries her arms in the darkness of the dining room, puts her left hand to her mouth so she can lick the rain off the bangle.

  In the rain he remembers what he was going to tell her about Ananda. He thought of it on the drive back from the hospital. No. About Sailor. ‘Plumbago,’ he says, the word filling his head. ‘He may have worked in a plumbago mine.’

  . . .

  That night, long past midnight, Anil could still hear the drumming through the rain. It paced and choreographed everything. She kept waiting for its silence.

  Sailor’s head, Ananda’s version of him, was already in the village, and it was there that an unknown, unwished-for drummer had attached himself to it, begun playing beside it. Anil knew it was unlikely that identification would occur. There had been so many disappearances. She knew it was not the head that would give the skeleton a name but his markers of occupation. So she and Sarath would go now to the villages in the region where there were plumbago-graphite mines.

  The drum continued its intricate antiphonal pulse, like steps that led them down a stairway to the sea. The drumming would stop only when there was a name provided for the head. But that night it didn’t stop.

  The Mouse

  When Gamini’s wife, Chrishanti, left their marriage, he remained in the house for a week, surrounded by all the things he had never wished for—state-of-the-art kitchen equipment, her zebra-striped table mats. Without her presence the gardener and sweeper and cook loosened away from necessity. He let his driver go. He would walk to Emergency Services. At the end of that first week he left the house and stayed at the hospital, where he knew he could always find a bed; this way he could rise at dawn and soon be in surgery. Now and then his hand slapped his breast pocket for the pen Chrishanti had given him, which he had lost, but he missed little of his past life.

  When his brother phoned, concerned, he told him he did not want his concern. He was already taking pills with a protein drink so he could be continuously awake to those dying around him. In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary. If he had not been such a good doctor his behaviour would have been reported. He knew that what he was able to do in the hospital was his only societal value. It was where he met his fate, this offstage battle with the war. He ignored war news. He was told he had begun to smell, and for some reason this distressed him. He hoarded Lifebuoy soap and showered three times a day.

  Sarath’s wife visited Gamini once in Emergency Services, putting her arm through his as he came off duty. She said that she and Sarath were offering Gamini a place to stay, he had become too much of a vagabond. She was the only person who could say things like that to him. He took her to lunch, ate more than he had eaten in months, and curled her interrogation back onto her specific interests. All through the meal he just looked at her face and arms. He was as gracious as possible, didn’t touch her once, the only touch was when her arm had slipped through his as they met. When they separated he didn’t embrace her. She would have felt how thin his frame was.

  There was no talk about Sarath. Only about her work at the radio station. She knew he had always liked her. He knew he’d always loved her, her busy arms, the strange lack of confidence in one who seemed to him so complete. He had met her the first time at a fancy-dress party in someone’s garden outside Colombo. She was in a man’s tuxedo, her hair swept back. He began a conversation and danced twice with her, disguised, so she didn’t know who he was. This was years earlier, before either of them was married.

  Who he was, that night, was her fiancé’s brother.

  He proposed marriage to her twice during the party. They were on the cadju terrace. He had the paint and the tattered clothes of a yakka on him, and she half laughed him off, saying she was engaged already. They had been talking seriously about the war and she thought his proposal was a joke, simply a wish for diversion. So he talked about how long he had known the gardens they were in, how many times he had come here. You must know my fiancé, she said, he comes here too. But he claimed not to recall the name. They were both hot and she untied her bow tie so it hung loose. ‘You too must be hot. All this stuff on you.’ ‘Yes.’ There was a pond with a bamboo fountain spout that tilted over when it filled, and he kneeled by it. ‘Don’t get paint in the pond, there are fish.’ So he unwrapped the turban he was wearing, and soaked it and began wiping the colours from his face. When he got up she saw who he was, her fiancé’s brother, and he asked her to marry him again.

  Now, years later, after his own marriage had ended, they walked out of the cafeteria and onto the street where her car was. He kept a distance as he said good-bye, not touching her, just that offhand hungry gaze, that offhand wave to the departing vehicle.

  Gamini woke in the almost empty ward of the hospital. He showered and dressed, watched intently by the patient next to him. It was still before dawn and the grand staircase was dark. He walked down slowly, not putting his hand on the banister, which hid who knew what in that old wood. He passed Pediatrics, Communicable Diseases, Bone Work, and entered the front courtyard, bought some tea and a potato roti at the street canteen and consumed them there, under a tree full of loud birds. Apart from a few moments like this he was indoors most of the day. He’d come out and sit on a bench. He’d tell one of the interns to wake him after an hour in case he fell asleep. The boundary between sleep and waking was a cotton thread so faintly coloured he often crossed it unawares. When he performed night surgery he would sometimes feel as if he were cutting into flesh surrounded only by night and stars. He would wake from this reverie and be back in the building, recognize it once more fitting itself around him. His duties made him come upon strangers and cut them open without ever knowing their names. He rarely spoke. It seemed he did not approach people unless they had a wound, even if he couldn’t see it—the orderly yawning in the hall, the visiting politician Gamini refused to be photographed with.

  Nurses read the charts out to him as he scrubbed. They loved working with him; he was strangely popular though unforgiving. He was brutal in his decisions when he realized he couldn’t save the body he was working on. ‘Enough,’ he would say, and walk out. ‘Basta,’ someone who’d been abroad sa
id, and he laughed by the swinging door. It was almost a moment of human conversation. Gamini knew he had never been good company; small talk plunged to its death around him. Now and then a night nurse woke him and asked for help. She would be cautious, but he would wake quickly and then walk with her in just a sarong to hold an intravenous over a struggling child. Then he would slip back to his borrowed bed. ‘I owe you a favour,’ the nurse would say as he was leaving her. ‘You don’t owe anyone favours. Wake me anytime you need help.’

  Her light on all night.

  Sometimes bodies washed in onto the shore, the combers throwing them onto the beaches. On the Matara coast, or at Wellawatta, or by St. Thomas’s College in Mount Lavinia where they, Sarath and Gamini, had learned to swim as children. These were the victims of politically motivated murders—victims of torture in the house at Gower Street or a house off the Galle Road—lifted into the air by helicopter, flown a couple of miles out to sea and dropped through the fathoms of air. But only a few of these ever came back as evidence into the arms of the country.

  Inland the bodies came down the four main rivers—the Mahaveli Ganga, the Kalu Ganga, the Kelani Ganga, the Bentota Ganga. All of them were eventually brought to Dean Street Hospital. Gamini had chosen not to deal with the dead. He avoided the south-wing corridors, where they brought the torture victims to be identified. Interns listed the wounds and photographed the bodies. Still, once a week, he went over the reports and the photographs of the dead, confirmed what was assumed, pointed out fresh scars caused by acid or sharp metal, and gave his signature. He was running on the energy of pills when he arrived to do this, and spoke quickly into a tape recorder left for him by an Amnesty man; he stood by the windows so he could get more light on the terrible photographs, covering the faces with his left hand, the pulse in his wrist jumping. He read out the number of the file, gave his interpretation and signature. The darkest hour of the week.