Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

  He had been in love with just one woman and she was not the one he married. Later there was another woman, a wife in a field hospital near Polonnaruwa. Eventually he felt himself on a boat of demons and himself to be the only clearheaded and sane person there. He was a perfect participant in the war.

  The rooms Sarath and Gamini lived in as children were hidden from the sunlight of Colombo, from traffic noises and dogs, from other children, from the sound of the metal gate clanging into its socket. Gamini remembers the swivel chair he spun in, bringing whirling chaos to the papers and shelves, the forbidden atmosphere of his father’s office. All offices, for Gamini, would have the authority of complex secrets. Even as an adult, stepping into such rooms made him feel unworthy and illicit. Banks, law firms, underlined his uncertainty, gave him a sense of being in a headmaster’s room, believing that things would never be explained enough for him to understand.

  We evolve deviously. Gamini grew up not knowing half the things he thought he was supposed to know—he was to make and discover unusual connections because he had not known the usual routes. He was for most of his life a boy spinning in a chair. And just as things had been kept away from him, he too became a container of secrets.

  In the house of his childhood he would press his right eye into a door handle, he would knock gently and if there was no reply slip into his parents’ room, a brother’s room, an uncle’s room, during their afternoon sleep. Then walk barefoot towards the bed and look at the sleepers, look from the window and leave. Not much going on there. Or silently approach a gathering of adults. He was already in the habit of not speaking unless responding to a question.

  . . .

  He was staying at his aunt’s house in Boralesgamuwa, and she and her friends were playing bridge on the long porch that surrounded the house. He came towards them carrying a lit candle, shielding the flame. He placed it on a side table a yard or so to the right of them. No one noticed this. He drifted back into the house. A few minutes later Gamini crawled on his belly with his air rifle through the grass, stalking his way from the bottom of the garden towards the house. He was wearing a small camouflage hat of leaves to disguise his presence even further. He could almost hear the four women bidding, having halfhearted conversations.

  He estimated they were twenty yards away. He loaded the air rifle and positioned himself like a sniper, elbows down, legs at angles to give him balance and firmness, and fired. Nothing was hit. He reloaded and settled in to aim again. This time he hit the side table. One of the women looked up, cocking her head, but she could see nothing around her. What he wished to do was shoot out the flame of the candle with the pellet, but the next shot flew low, only a few inches above the red porch floor, and hit an ankle. At that instant, simultaneous with the gasp from Mrs. Coomaraswamy, his aunt looked up and saw him with the air rifle hugged against his cheek and shoulder, aiming right at them.

  Gamini felt happiest when he stepped from disorganized youth into the exhilaration of work. On his first medical appointment, travelling to the hospitals in the northeast, it seemed he was finally part of a nineteenth-century journey. He remembered the memoir he had read by old Dr. Peterson, who wrote of such travels, it must have been, sixty years before. His book included etchings—a hackery travelling along canopied roads, bulbuls drinking at a tank—and Gamini recalled one sentence.

  I travelled by train to Matara and the rest of the way on horse and cart, with a bugler going ahead all the way, blowing his bugle to keep the wild animals off the road.

  Now, in the middle of civil war, he rode the slow, wheezing bus at almost the same pace, into almost the same landscape. In a small romantic section of his heart he wished for a bugler.

  There were just five doctors working in the northeast. Lakdasa was in charge, responsible for assigning them out to the peripherals and the small villages. Skanda was main surgeon, head of triage operations when there was an emergency. There was the Cuban, with them for just one year. C——, the eye doctor, who had joined three months earlier. ‘She’s got an unreliable diploma,’ Lakdasa said to the others after a week, ‘but she works hard, and I’m not letting her go.’ And the young graduate Gamini in his first posting.

  From the base hospital at Polonnaruwa they would travel to peripheral hospitals, where some of them were to live. An anaesthetist turned up one day a week, which was the day surgery was performed. If there were emergency operations on other days, they improvised with chloroform or whatever pills they could find to knock the patient out. And from the base hospital they drove to places Gamini had never heard of and couldn’t even locate on a map—Araganwila, Welikande, Palatiyawa, visiting clinics in half-built schoolrooms, met by mothers and infants, malaria and cholera patients.

  The doctors who survived that time in the northeast remembered they never worked harder, were never more useful than to those strangers who were healed and who slipped through their hands like grain. Not one of them returned later into the economically sensible careers of private practice. They would learn everything of value here. It was not an abstract or moral quality but a physical skill that empowered them. There were no newspapers or varnished tables or good fans. Now and then a book, now and then the radio with cricket commentary alternating between Sinhala and English. They allowed a transistor radio into the operating room on special occasions or for a crucial few hours in a test match. When the commentator switched to English there had to be an instant translation into Sinhala by Rohan, the anaesthetist. He was the most bilingual of the staff, having had to read the small-type texts that came with tanks of oxygen. (Rohan was a reader, in any case, often travelling down to Colombo by bus to hear a local or visiting South Asian writer read from a new book at the Kelaniya campus.) Patients in the surgical ward often drifted back into consciousness and found themselves within the drama of a cricket match.

  . . .

  They shaved at night beside a candle and slept clean-shaven as princes. Then they woke at five a.m., in the dark. They would lie there for a moment locating themselves, trying to remember the shape of the room. Was there a mosquito net above them or a fan, or just a Lion brand mosquito coil? Were they in Polonnaruwa? They travelled so much, they slept in so many places. There was the stirring outside of koha birds. A bajaj. Predawn loudspeakers being turned on so there was just their hum and crackle. The doctors opened their eyes when someone touched them on the shoulder, in silence, as if in enemy territory. And there was the darkness, and the minimal clues as to where they were. Ampara? Manampitiya?

  Or they would wake too soon and it was still only three hours past midnight, and they feared they would not go back to sleep again but did so within the sweep of a minute. Not one of them had sleeplessness in those days. They slept like pillars of stone, remaining in the same position they had lowered themselves into in the bed or cot or on the rattan mat, on their backs or facedown, usually on their backs because it allowed them the pleasure for a few seconds of resting, with all their senses alive, certain of coming sleep.

  Within minutes of waking they got dressed in the dark and gathered in the corridors, where there was hot tea. Soon they would be driving the forty miles to clinics, the vehicle chiselling with two weak headlamps through the darkness, jungle and an unseen view alongside them, now and then a villager’s fire beside the road. They would stop at a food stall. A ten-minute breakfast of fish cutlets in the lesser dark. The noise of utensils being passed. Lakdasa coughing. Still no conversation. Just the intimacy of walking across a road with a cup of tea for someone. These always felt like significant expeditions. They were kings and queens.

  Gamini worked in the northeast for more than three years. Lakdasa would remain there, setting up clinics. And the eye doctor with the dubious diploma would also never leave the peripheral hospitals. During the worst crises Gamini had seen her passing out swabs and lotions to trainees even as she operated on an emergency case. What the others envied most about her, apart from her presence as an attractive woman, was the physical evi
dence of her work. Gamini loved the sight of her ward as everyone in the fifteen-bed room turned towards the door when he walked in, all with the same white patch taped over their dark faces, the same badge of belonging to her.

  Somebody once brought a book about Jung into their midst. In the book one of them had found a sentence and underlined it. (There was a habit among them of critical marginalia. An exclamation point beside something not psychologically or clinically valid. If there was any instance in a novel of outrageous or unlikely physical prowess or sexual achievement, Skanda, the surgeon, would write in the margin beside the scene: This happened to me once . . . and add with even more irony, Dambulla, August 1978. A scene where a man was met in a hotel room by a woman in a negligée and handed a martini received similar comments. When Skanda left to work in the cancer wards in Karapitiya, near Galle, the others knew he would be defacing books there as well, medical texts as well as novels; he was the worst of the marginalia criminals among them.) In any case, it was the anaesthetist who probably brought in the book about Jung. Pictures, essays, commentaries and biography. And someone had underlined Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

  Whatever this meant, it seemed a thoughtful warning, and they let the remark seep into them. They all knew it was about the sense of self-worth that, during those days, in that place, had overcome them. They were not working for any cause or political agenda. They had found a place a long way from governments and media and financial ambition. They had originally come to the northeast for a three-month shift and in spite of the lack of equipment, the lack of water, not one luxury except now and then a tin of condensed milk sucked in a car while being surrounded by jungle, they had stayed for two years or three, in some cases longer. It was the best place to be. Once, after performing surgery for almost five hours straight, Skanda said, ‘The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.’

  The quotation about Jung and Skanda’s remark were what Gamini carried with him. And the sentence about the sixth sense was the gift he gave to Anil a few years later.

  Between Heartbeats

  It was in the Arizona labs that Anil met and worked with a woman named Leaf. A few years older, Leaf became Anil’s closest friend and constant companion. They worked side by side and they talked continually on the phone to each other when one was on assignment elsewhere. Leaf Niedecker—what kind of name is that, Anil had demanded to know—introduced Anil to the finer arts of ten-pin bowling, raucous hooting in bars, and high-speed driving in the desert, swerving back and forth in the night. ‘Tenga cuidado con los armadillos, señorita.’

  Leaf loved movies and remained in depression about the disappearance of drive-ins and their al fresco quality. ‘All our shoes off, all our shirts off, rolling against Chevy leather—there has been nothing like it since.’ So two or three times a week Anil would buy a barbequed chicken and arrive at Leaf’s rented house. The television had already been carried into the yard and sat baldly beside a yucca tree. They’d rent The Searchers or any other John Ford or Fred Zinnemann movie. They watched The Nun’s Story, From Here to Eternity, Five Days One Summer, sitting in Leaf’s lawn chairs, or curled up beside each other in the double hammock, watching the calm, carefully sexual black-and-white walk of Montgomery Clift.

  Nights in Leaf’s backyard, once upon a time in the West. The heat still in the air at midnight. They would pause the movie, take a break and cool off under the garden hose. In three months they managed to see the complete oeuvres of Angie Dickinson and Warren Oates. ‘I’m asthmatic,’ Leaf said. ‘I need to become a cowboy.’

  They shared a joint and disappeared into the intricacies of Red River, theorizing on the strangely casual shooting of John Ireland before the final fight between Montgomery Clift and John Wayne. They rewound the video and watched it once more. Wayne swirling around gracefully, hardly interrupting his walk, to shoot a neutral friend who was trying to stop a fight. On their knees in the parched grass by the television screen they looked at the scene frame by frame for any sign of outrage at this unfairness on the victim’s face. There seemed to be none. It was a minor act directed towards a minor character that may or may not have ended the man’s life, and no one said anything about it during the remaining five minutes of the film. One of those Jacobean happy endings.

  ‘I don’t think the bullet killed him.’

  ‘Well, we can’t tell where it hit him, Hawks goes off too quickly. The guy just puts his hand up to his stomach and then drops.’

  ‘If he got hit in the liver he’s had it. Don’t forget, this is Missouri in eighteen-fuck-knows-when.’

  ‘Yeah. What’s his name?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy shot.’

  ‘Valance. Cherry Valance.’

  ‘Cherry? You mean like Jerry, or Cherry, like apple.’

  ‘Cherry Valance, not Apple Valance.’

  ‘And he’s Montgomery’s friend.’

  ‘Yeah, Montgomery’s friend Cherry.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I don’t think it hit him in the liver. Look at the angle of the shot. The trajectory seems to be going up. Popped a rib, I suspect, or glanced off it.’

  ‘. . . Maybe glanced off and killed some woman on the sidewalk?’

  ‘Or Walter Brennan . . .’

  ‘No, some dame on the sidewalk that Howard Hawks was fucking.’

  ‘Women remember. Don’t they know that? Those saloon girls are gonna remember Cherry. . . .’

  ‘You know, Leaf, we should do a book. A Forensic Doctor Looks at the Movies.’

  ‘The film noir ones are tough. Their clothes are baggy, it’s too dark.’

  ‘I’m doing Spartacus.’

  In Sri Lankan movie theatres, Anil told Leaf, if there was a great scene—usually a musical number or an extravagant fight—the crowd would yell out ‘Replay! Replay!’ or ‘Rewind! Rewind!’ till the theatre manager and projectionist were forced to comply. Now, on a smaller scale, the films staggered backwards and forwards, in Leaf’s yard, until the actions became clear to them.

  The film they worried over most was Point Blank. At the start of the movie, Lee Marvin (who once played Liberty Valance, no relation) is shot by a double-crossing friend in the abandoned Alcatraz prison. The friend leaves him for dead and steals his girl and his share of the money. Vengeance results. Anil and Leaf composed a letter to the director of the film, asking if he remembered, all these years later, where on the torso he imagined Lee Marvin was shot so that he could get to his feet, stagger through the prison while the opening credits came up and swim the treacherous waters between the island and San Francisco.

  They told the director that it was one of their favourite films, they were simply inquiring as forensic specialists. When they looked at the scene closely they saw Lee Marvin’s hand leap up to his chest. ‘See, he has difficulty on his right side. When he swims later in the bay he uses his left arm.’ ‘God, it’s a great movie. Very little music. Lots of silence.’

  Gamini worked in the base hospital at Polonnaruwa during his last year in the northeast. This was where the serious casualties from all over the Eastern Province, Trincomalee to Ampara, were brought. Family murders, outbreaks of typhoid, grenade injuries, attempted assassinations by one side or another. The wards were always in turmoil—outpatients in General Surgery, floor patients in the corridors, technicians arriving from a radio store to fix the electrocardiogram unit.

  The only cool place was the blood bank, where the plasma was refrigerated. The only silent place was Rheumatology, where a man slowly and quietly turned a giant wheel to exercise his shoulders and arms, which had been broken in an accident a few months earlier, and where a solitary woman sat with her arthritic hand in a basin of warm wax. But in the corridors, the walls mildewed with dampness, men would be rolling giant cylinders of oxygen noisily off the carts. Oxygen was the essential river, h
issed into neonatal wards where incubators sheltered babies. Outside this room of infants, and beyond the shell of the hospital building, was a garrisoned country. The rebel guerrillas controlled all roads after dark, so even the army didn’t move at night. In the children’s ward Janaka and Suriya circled their patients—one had a heart murmur, another suffered from fits—but if there was bombing or a village attack they too became part of the hospital ‘Flying Squad,’ and even those in the neonatal ward worked the triage and operating room. They left an intern behind.

  The specialists who came north seldom worked only in their specific area of knowledge. They were in Pediatrics one day, but might spend the rest of the week helping to contain an outbreak of cholera in the village settlements. If cholera drugs were not available, they did what doctors in another era had done—dissolved a teaspoon of potassium permanganate in a pint of water and poured it into every well or standing pool. The past was always useful. At one time Gamini tried to keep an infant alive for four days. The girl could hold nothing down, not her mother’s milk, not even water, and she was dehydrating. He remembered something and got hold of a pomegranate and fed the child the juice. It stayed down. Something he’d heard about pomegranates in a song his ayah had sung . . . It was legendary that every Tamil home on Jaffna peninsula had three trees in the garden. A mango, a murunga, and the pomegranate. Murunga leaves were cooked in crab curries to neutralize poisons, pomegranate leaves were soaked in water for the care of eyes and the fruit eaten to aid digestion. The mango was for pleasure.