Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Her campaign had caused anger and frustration within the household. She stopped responding when called by either of her given names, even at school. In the end her parents relented, but then they had to persuade her irritable brother to forfeit his second name. He, at fourteen, claimed he might need it someday. Two names gave him more authority, and a second name suggested perhaps an alternative side to his nature. Also there was his grandfather. Neither of the children had in fact known the grandfather whose name it had been. The parents threw their hands up and finally the siblings worked out a trade between them. She gave her brother one hundred saved rupees, a pen set he had been eyeing for some time, a tin of fifty Gold Leaf cigarettes she had found, and a sexual favour he had demanded in the last hours of the impasse.

After that she allowed no other first names on her passports or school reports or application forms. Later when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that name and the joy of getting it that she remembered most. Everything about the name pleased her, its slim, stripped-down quality, its feminine air, even though it was considered a male name. Twenty years later she felt the same about it. She’d hunted down the desired name like a specific lover she had seen and wanted, tempted by nothing else along the way.

Anil recalled the nineteenth-century air of the city she had left behind. The prawn sellers holding out their wares to passing traffic on Duplication Road, the houses in Colombo Seven painted that meticulous flat white. This was where the old money and the politically powerful lived. ‘Heaven… Colombo Seven…’ her father would sing, to the tune of ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ as he let Anil thread his cuff links into his shirtsleeves while he dressed for dinner. There was always this whispering pact between them. And she knew that no matter what time he returned home from dances or other engagements or emergency operations, he would drive her to her dawn swimming practice the next morning, through the empty streets towards the Otters Club. On the drive home they would pause at a stall for a bowl of milk and sugar hoppers, each wrapped in a shiny page from an English magazine.

Even during the monsoon months, at six in the morning she would run from the car through heavy rain and dive into the pocked water and swim her heart out for an hour. Just ten girls and the coach, the noise of the rain clattering on the tin roofs of cars, on the hard water and the taut rubber bathing caps as the swimmers sloshed, turned and emerged again, while a handful of parents read the Daily News. All real effort and energy when she was a kid seemed to have happened by seven-thirty in the morning. She kept that habit in the West, studying for two or three hours before going off to classes at medical school. In some ways her later obsessive tunneling toward discovery was similar to that underwater world, where she swam within the rhythm of intense activity, as if peering through time.

So in spite of Sarath’s suggestion the day before that she sleep in, Anil had breakfasted and was already on her way to Kynsey Road Hospital by six in the morning. The eternal prawn sellers were there on the side of the road, holding out last night’s catch. The smell of hemp idled in the air from ropes lit outside cigarette stalls. She had always veered towards this smell as a child, loitered beside it. Suddenly, and she didn’t know why, she recalled the schoolgirls of Ladies’ College on a balcony looking down at the boys from St. Thomas’s, cads all of them, singing as many verses as they could of ‘The Good Ship Venus’ before the matron chased them off the grounds.

It was on the Good Ship Venus-

By Christ, you should have seen us.

The figurehead was a whore in bed

Astride a rampant penis.

The girls, normally as secure in their school as women within the bounds of courtly love, had thus been startled at the age of twelve and thirteen by this strange choreography, but had no desire to stop listening. It was not until Anil was twenty and in England that she heard the song again. And there-at a post-rugby match party-it seemed a more natural context, in tune with the male braying around her. But the trick of the boys of St. Thomas’s had been to hold up sheet music, and at first the song had sounded like a carol, with trills and descants and preverbal humming, and in this way they had fooled the matron, who was not really listening to anything but the tone. It was only the girls of the fourth and fifth forms who heard every word.

The captain’s name was Mugger,

A dirty-minded bugger.

He wasn’t fit to shovel shit

From one deck to another.

Anil was fond of that verse, and its neatly packed rhyme slid back into her mind at odd moments. She loved songs of anger and judgement. So at six a.m., walking towards the hospital, she tried to recall the other verses to ‘The Good Ship Venus,’ singing the first out loud. The rest she was less certain about, and played them on her lips, a faux tuba. ‘One of the greats,’ she muttered to herself. ‘One of the crucial ones.’

The trainee in Colombo who had written about pupae research turned out to be working in one of the offices off the postmortem lab. It had taken Anil some time to remember the name, but she now found Chitra Abeysekera typing an application form, the paper limp from the humidity of the room. She was standing as she typed, wearing a sari, with what seemed a portable office beside her-two large cardboard boxes and one metal case. They contained research notes, lab specimens, petri dishes and test tubes. The metal case held growing bugs.

The woman looked up at her.

‘Am I disturbing…?’ Anil looked down at the four lines the woman had just typed. ‘Why don’t you take a break and let me type it for you?’

‘You’re the woman from Geneva, right?’ The face was disbelieving.

‘Yes.’

Chitra looked at her hands and they both laughed. Her skin was covered with cuts and bites. They could probably slip easily into a beehive and come out with plunder.

‘Just tell me what to say.’

Anil sidled up and, as Chitra spoke, did a quick edit, adding adjectives, improving her request for funds. Chitra’s blunt description of her project would not have gone far. Anil gave it the necessary drama and turned Chitra’s list of abilities into a more suggestive curriculum vitae. When they finished she asked if Chitra would like to get something to eat.

‘Not the hospital cafeteria,’ Chitra said helpfully. ‘The cook moonlights in the postmortem labs. You know what I’d like? Chinese air-conditioned. Let’s go to Flower Drum.’

There were three businessmen eating at the restaurant, but otherwise it was empty.

‘Thank you for the application help,’ Chitra said.

‘It’s a good project. It’ll be important. Can you do all that here? Do you have facilities?’

‘I have to do it here… the pupae… the larvae. The tests have to be done in this temperature. And I don’t like England. I’ll go to India sometime.’

‘If you need help, contact me. God, I’d forgotten what cool air feels like. I might just move in here. I want to talk to you about your research.’

‘Later, later. Tell me what you like about the West.’

‘Oh-what do I like? Most of all I think I like that I can do things on my own terms. Nothing is anonymous here, is it. I miss my privacy.’

Chitra looked totally uninterested in this Western virtue.

‘I have to be back by one-thirty,’ she said, and ordered chow mein and a Coke.

The cardboard box with test tubes was open and Chitra was prodding a larva under the microscope. ‘This is two weeks old.’ She tweezered it out and placed it in a tray holding a piece of human liver, which Anil assumed must have been obtained illegally.