Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  He walked away from the week’s pile of photographs. The doors opened and a thousand bodies slid in, as if caught in the nets of fishermen, as if they had been mauled. A thousand bodies of sharks and skates in the corridors, some of the dark-skinned fish thrashing . . .

  They had begun covering the faces on the photographs. He worked better this way, and there was no danger of his recognizing the dead.

  The joke was that he had entered the medical profession because he assumed it would have a nineteenth-century pace. He liked its manner of amateur authority. There was the anecdote about Dr. Spittel carrying a body out of a hospital when lights failed during a night operation in Kandy, placing it on a bench in the parking lot and aiming car headlights onto the patient. A quietly heroic life remembered in a few such stories. That was the satisfaction. He’d be remembered the way a cricketer was who played one classic innings on an afternoon in 1953, his name emerging in a street baila for a week or two. Famous in a song.

  As a boy, in the months when he fought off the fate of diphtheria, Gamini would lie on a mat during his afternoon sleeps and wish only for the life that his parents had. Whatever career he chose, he wanted it to move with their style and pace. To rise early and work until a late lunch, then sleep and conversation, then drop in at the office once more, briefly. His father’s and grandfather’s law offices took up one wing of the family’s large house on Greenpath Road. He was never allowed into the mysterious warrens during the workday when he was younger, but at five p.m. he would carry a glass filled with amber fluid, push the swing door with his foot and enter. There were squat filing cabinets and small desk fans. He said hullo to his father’s dog and then placed the drink on his father’s table.

  At this moment his body was yanked into the air and swivelled so that he now sat on his father’s lap, large dark arms around him. ‘Start at the beginning,’ he’d say, and Gamini proceeded to tell him about his day’s adventures, his day at school, what his mother had said when he came home. He was, in the early years, fully at ease with the family. When he looked back he never remembered anger or nervousness in the house. He recalled his parents gentle with each other. They were always conversing, sharing everything, and in bed he could hear the continuing hum of it like wool between the house and the world. He realized later that every dimension of his father’s world existed in the house. Clients came to him. There was a tennis court in the back where guests joined the family on weekends.

  It was assumed that the two brothers would be part of the family firm. But Sarath left home, deciding not to be a lawyer. And a few years later, Gamini also betrayed those voices in the house and entered medical school.

  *

  Two months after his wife left him, Gamini collapsed from exhaustion, and the administration ordered a leave. He had nowhere to go, his home abandoned. He realized Emergency Services had become for him, even in its mad state, a cocoon, as his parents’ house had been. Everything that was of value to him took place there. He slept in the wards, he bought his meals from the street vendor just outside the hospital. Now he was being asked to step away from the world he had burrowed into, created around himself, this peculiar replica of childhood order.

  He walked to Nugegoda, the neighbourhood where his house was, and banged on the locked door. He could smell cooking. A stranger appeared but would not open it. ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m Gamini.’ ‘So?’ ‘I live here.’ The man walked away and there were voices in the kitchen.

  It was a while before Gamini realized they were going to ignore him. He crossed the small garden. The odour of the food was wonderful to him. He had never felt so hungry. He didn’t want the house, he wanted a home-cooked meal. He entered through the back door. Glancing around, he was conscious they were looking after the place much better than he had. The man who had ignored him was with two women. He knew none of them. He had thought at first his wife had sent relatives over. ‘Can I have some water?’

  The man brought him a glass. Gamini heard children farther back in the bungalow and was pleased about that, that all the space was being used. He remembered something and asked if there was any mail. They brought him a stack of it. A letter from his wife, which he put in his pocket. Several cheques from the hospital. He opened them, signed a couple on the back and gave them to one of the women. Two others he kept for himself. The women gestured and he sat down to eat with them. String hoppers, pol sambol, chicken curry. Afterwards he strolled with a comfortably full stomach to the bank. He was flush. He phoned Quickshaw’s and hired a car and waited in the air-conditioned lobby of Grindlays until it rolled up. Gamini got in next to the driver.

  ‘To Trincomalee. Then to the Nilaveli Beach Hotel.’

  ‘No, no.’

  He was expecting this. It was supposedly dangerous with guerrilla forces in the vicinity. ‘It will be quite safe, I’m a doctor. They don’t touch doctors, we’re like prostitutes. Here’s a Red Cross sign for the windshield. I’m hiring you for a week. You don’t have to like me or be polite. I’m not one of those who needs to be loved. Stop here.’

  He got out of the car and climbed into the back seat, he needed to sprawl out. He was asleep by the time the car weaved itself out of Colombo. ‘Take the coast road,’ he murmured just before sleep. ‘Wake me up in Negombo.’

  Gamini and the driver walked into the dark, sunless lobby of the old Negombo rest house. A small lamp by the front desk lit up the manager, who sat in front of a poorly painted mural of the sea, and Gamini, remembering something, turned around, looked through the door and saw the same scene in reality. They had a beer and went on. Near Kurunegala he asked the driver to take a side road. A few miles past Kurunegala, Gamini climbed out and asked the driver to meet him at the same place the next morning. It took a while for the driver to understand. Still, he wanted to be here for the night.

  His father had brought him to the forest monastery nearby, in Arankale. He had brought him as a child, and every few years Gamini managed to revisit the place. As a war doctor he had come to have little faith, but he always felt a great peace here. With nothing much, just a light shirt and pants, no umbrella for the sunlight, no food, he made his way into the forest. Sometimes when he came here he saw that the place had been kept up; sometimes it had closed down like an eye in the forest.

  There was the well. There was the corrugated sheet that made a roof over the porch where old monks slept. He could stay there. He could bathe at the well in the morning. He buttoned the breast pocket of his shirt so his glasses would not fall out and be lost.

  . . .

  A week later, Gamini stepped from the Nilaveli Beach Hotel compound and walked to the sea. He was very drunk. He had been shambling around in the deserted resort with a cook and a night manager and two women who cleaned the empty bedrooms and screamed whenever the cook attempted to push them into the swimming pool. They were always wrestling in the halls. On the beach he fell asleep, and when he woke there were gunmen around him laughing.

  His sarong had half fallen off. He said, as clearly as he could in the two official languages, ‘I—am—a—doctor—’ and passed out again. The next time he woke up he was in a hut full of wounded boys. Seventeen years old. Sixteen years old. Some even younger. This was supposed to be his holiday and he said so to one of the gunmen. ‘I’m expected at dinner at seven. If I’m not there by seven-thirty they don’t serve—’

  ‘Yes, yes. But this—’ The man gestured with his arm all the way down the hut to the wounded. ‘There’s this, no?’

  Gamini had been weaning himself off his pills and was in midstream, in his switch to alcohol, so he was not sure of his present level of drunkenness. He’d been sleeping a lot. He’d wake up and find himself in a stranger’s garden. It wasn’t so much the desire for sleep as the need for it. Inside a dream he’d be carrying bodies in and out of elevators. Elevators always made him claustrophobic, but they were better than the creaking vertigo of the stairs.

  When the guerrillas found him curled up on the beach the sea had
been at his ankles. They’d come looking for the tourist who was supposed to be a doctor. One of the women by the swimming pool had directed them to the beach.

  Gamini walked up and down, looking at the bodies in the hut. Rags knotted around the wounds, no painkillers, no bandages. He sent a soldier to his hotel room with the key to get sheets they could tear up and to collect the plastic bag with various things that would be useful—aftershave, pills. The gunman returned wearing one of his shirts. Gamini shook the tablets out onto the table and cut them into quarters. There was going to be a problem with communication. He couldn’t speak Tamil well enough, they couldn’t speak Sinhala. There was just paltry English between Gamini and the leader.

  It was late afternoon and he was hungry. He had missed the lunch sitting and the hotel staff was unbending. He asked the leader to send someone over to scare up some food for him. He hoped he was not going to hear gunshots in the distance. He began to work, moving down the line of the wounded.

  Most would survive but would lose an arm or be impaired in some way. He had already seen the evidence of so many woundings in his brief ride through Trincomalee. He continued along the makeshift ward carrying a wooden pakispetti box, sat beside a boy and dressed his limbs with strips of sheet. Those he would operate on shortly were each given a quarter of one of his precious pills so they would be high when he worked on them. He was startled to see how strong the effect was of even this small section of pill; he’d been swallowing them whole for more than a year. Fifteen minutes after the patient swallowed the pill, three guerrillas held him firmly to the bed and Gamini sutured a gash. The air was so hot he had already taken off his shirt, tied rags around his wrists to stop the sweat from going down to his fingers. He needed to sleep, his eyes flickering, always a signal, and there was still no food. He came close to throwing a small tantrum, lay down beside the bodies and curled himself up into sleep.

  He snored loudly. When his wife was leaving him, Gamini accused her of abandoning him because he snored. Now the boys around him were silent so they would not disturb him.

  But he woke to someone shouting in pain. He went out and washed his face at the tap. By this time the cook had been brought over on a bicycle, and slowly, in Sinhala, Gamini ordered ten large meals to be shared among them, and made sure the cook put it on his bill. This had an influence. When the feast arrived surgery was stopped. The hotel staff had brought two bottles of beer for him. During the meal he remembered the disappearance of Dr. Linus Corea and wondered whether he himself would ever return to Colombo.

  He worked into the night, bending over patients while someone on the other side of their beds held an old Coleman lamp. Some of the boys were delirious when they emerged from the influence of the pills. Who sent a thirteen-year-old to fight, and for what furious cause? For an old leader? For some pale flag? He had to keep reminding himself who these people were. Bombs on crowded streets, in bus stations, paddy fields, schools had been set by people like this. Hundreds of victims had died under Gamini’s care. Thousands couldn’t walk or use their bowels anymore. Still. He was a doctor. In a week he would be back working in Colombo.

  After midnight he walked along the beach with an escort gunman to his hotel. There he noticed right away that the alarm clock he had bought in Kurunegala was missing. He climbed onto and slept on his sheetless bed.

  Where did the secret war begin between him and his brother? It had begun with the desire to be the other, even with the impossibility of emulating him. Gamini would always remain in spirit the younger, unable to catch up, nicknamed ‘Meeya.’ The Mouse. And he loved his lack of responsibility, loved never being at the centre, while perceptive of what went on there. His parents much of the time weren’t even aware of him half buried in an armchair, reading a book, ears perked up, listening to their conversations faithful as a dog. Sarath loved history, their father loved law, Gamini burrowed away unknown. The mother who had wished to be a dancer in her youth now choreographed them all. She would remain mysterious to Gamini. The love she showed was a general affection, never specifically for him. He found it difficult to imagine her as his father’s lover. She seemed daughterless, simply keeping up with the three males in the house—a garrulous husband, an intelligent and bound-to-be-successful older son, and a second-born secretive one. Gamini. The Mouse.

  The fact that neither brother wanted to follow his father into the family law firm left the mother defending everyone’s position—a foot in each son’s camp, a hand on her husband’s shoulder. In any case, they scattered. Sarath moved into archaeological studies and Gamini flung himself into medical school, but most of all into the world outside the family. The only way he visited them now was via the rumours of his wildness. If they had never really been too conscious of Gamini at home, his parents now met a legion of unsavory anecdotes about him. It appeared he wanted them to give up on him, and eventually, out of embarrassment, they did.

  In fact he had loved that family world. Though later, in conversations with Sarath’s wife, she would argue, ‘What kind of family would call a child “the Mouse”?’ She could picture him in his youth, irrelevant to adult preoccupations, with his big ears, in that big armchair.

  Though he didn’t mind. Thought it was true for all children. He and his brother had become content with aloneness, the lack of necessity for speaking. ‘Well, it drives me mad,’ Sarath’s wife retaliated. ‘It drives me mad about both of you.’ In conversations with her Gamini continued to see his childhood as a time of contentment, while she saw him as a soul who had only just survived, never secure in the love around him. ‘I was spoiled,’ he’d say. ‘You’re only secure when you are alone doing things on your own. You weren’t spoiled, you were ignored.’ ‘I’m not going through the rest of my life blaming my mother for my lack of kisses.’ ‘You could.’

  He had loved his childhood, he thought to himself. He had loved the dark living rooms during the afternoons, following the path of ants on the balcony, the costumes he put together by taking clothes out of various almirahs and dressing up and singing in front of mirrors. And the grandeur of that chair remained with him. He wanted to go out and buy one just like it, now, an adult’s prerogative and whim. When he thought of succour, it was the chair he remembered, not a mother or a father. ‘I rest my case,’ Sarath’s wife said quietly.

  And Sarath, for his parents, was the boy who walked the heavens. The three of them laughed and argued during dinner while Gamini watched their style and manner. By the time he was eleven he was proud of being a good mimic, could imitate the quizzical expressions of concerned dogs, for instance.

  Still, he remained invisible, even to himself, seldom looking into mirrors save when dressed in costumes. He had an uncle who used to direct amateur theatrical productions, and once, alone in his house, Gamini had come across some outfits. He tried them on one by one, wound the record player, then danced over sofas, singing invented songs, until interrupted by the return of his aunt. Who had simply exclaimed, ‘Aha! So that’s what you do. . . .’ And he was humiliated and embarrassed beyond measure or imagining. For years afterwards he judged himself vain, and as a result revealed even less of himself to others. He quietened, became barely aware of the subtler gestures within himself. Later he would be vivid only with strangers—in the storm of the last stages of a party or in the chaos of emergency wards. This was the state of grace. It was here that people could lose themselves as if in a dance, too intent on skills or desires to be conscious of their power while they chased romance or reacted to some emergency. He could be at the centre and still feel he was invisible. This was when his notoriousness began.

  The barrier that separated him from his family during childhood remained in place. He did not want it dislodged, he did not want the universes brought together. He wasn’t self-conscious about this. The awareness of it was to come later in a terrible crisis and with clarity. He would be holding his brother and be aware that as far back as childhood he had known that for him the catalyst for the freedom and
secrecy he always wanted was this benign brother. Gamini, beside Sarath years later, would say all this out loud to him, shocked at his own unlearned vengeance. When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children. There is always that murmuring conviction of family, like the sea around an island. So youth hides in the shape of something lean as a spear, or something as antisocial as a bark. And we become therefore more comfortable and intimate with strangers.

  The Mouse insisted that for his final years of school he leave Colombo and go to boarding school at Trinity College in Kandy. In this way he was a good distance from his family for much of the year. He loved the slow-rocking train that took him away, up-country. He always loved trains, never bought a car, never learned to drive. In his twenties he luxuriated in the wind against his drunk head when he leaned into the noise and fear of tunnels, deep space around him. He enjoyed talking intimately and with humour to strangers; oh, he knew all this was a sickness—but he did not dislike it, this distance and anonymity.

  He was tender, nervous and gregarious. After more than three years up north, working in the peripheral hospitals, he would become more obsessive. His marriage a year later failed almost instantly, and after that he was mostly alone. In surgery he asked for just one assistant. Others could watch and learn at a distance. He was never articulate in explaining what he did and what was going on. Never a good teacher but a good example.