Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘It’s necessary,’ Chitra said, aware of Anil’s gaze, trying to be casual about it. ‘A little got removed before someone was buried, a small favour. There is an important difference in the speed of growth when insects feed on this as opposed to organs from an animal.’ She dropped the rest of the liver into a picnic cooler, pulled out her charts and spread them over the central table. ‘So tell me how I can help you…’

‘I’ve got a skeleton, partially burned. Can one still pick up information about pupae from it?’

Chitra covered her mouth and burped, as she had been doing continually since the meal. ‘It helps if it is in situ.’

‘That’s the problem. I’ve got earth from the location where we found it, but we think it was moved. We don’t know the first location. I’ve got earth only from the last site.’

‘I could look at the bone. Some insects are attracted to bone, not flesh.’ Chitra smiled at her. ‘So there might be pupae remains from the first location. We could reduce the site possibilities by knowing the type of insect. It’s strange, it’s just those first couple of months when bone attracts some creatures.’

‘Unusual.’

‘Mmm,’ Chitra said, as if eating chocolate. ‘Some butterflies also go to bone for moisture…’

‘Can I show you some of the bone?’

‘I go up-country tomorrow for a few days.’

‘Then later tonight? Is that all right?’

‘Mmm.’ Chitra sounded unconcerned, preoccupied with a clue, a timing on one of her charts. She turned from Anil to an array of insects, then selected one of the right plumpness and age with her forceps.

That night within the ship’s hold Sarath poured plastic that had been dissolved in acetone into a shallow dish, and brought out the camel-hair brush he would use on the bones. A diffuse light, the hum of the generator around him.

He moved to the lab table where a skeleton lay, picked up the alligator-clip lamp-the one source of focussed bright light here-and walked with it and the long cord, still lit, to a cupboard at the far end of the deep room. He opened it, poured himself three-quarters of a tumbler of arrack from a bottle and walked back to the skeleton.

The four skeletons from Bandarawela, revealed now to the air, would soon begin to weaken.

He loosened a new tungsten-carbide needle from its plastic container and attached it to a hand pick and began cleaning the bones of the first skeleton, drilling free the fragments of dirt. Then he turned on a slim hose and let it hover over each bone, air nestling into the evidence of the trauma as if he were blowing cool breath from a pursed mouth onto a child’s burn. He dipped the camel-hair brush into the dish and began painting a layer of protective plastic over the bones, moving down the spine and ribs. After that he carried the alligator-clip lamp to the second table and started on the second skeleton. Then the third. When he came to Sailor’s table he turned the heel bone sideways to find the centimetre-deep chip Anil had furrowed out of the calcaneus.

Sarath stretched and walked out of the light into the darkness, his hands out feeling for the arrack bottle, which he brought back with him to Sailor under the cone of light. It was about two in the morning. When he’d coated all four skeletons, he made notes on each of them and photographed three from anterior and lateral views.

He drank as he worked. The smell of the plastic was now strong in the room. There was no opening for fresh air. He unlocked the doors noisily and climbed up with the bottle of arrack onto the deck. Colombo was dark with curfew. It would be a beautiful hour to walk or cycle through it. The fraught quietness of the roadblocks, the old trees a panoply along Solomon Dias Mawatha. But in the harbour around him there was activity, the light from a tug rolling in the water, the white beams from tractors moving crates on the quay. Three or four a.m. He would lock up and sleep on the ship for the rest of the night.

The hold was still full of the smell of plastic. He pulled out a tied bundle of beedis from a drawer and lit one, then inhaled its rich mortal thirty-two rumours of taste. Picked up the clip lamp and walked over to Sailor. He still had to photograph him. Okay, do it now, he said to himself, and took two shots, anterior and lateral. He stood there as the Polaroids developed, waving them in the air. When Sailor’s image was fully revealed he put the pictures in a brown envelope, sealed and addressed it, and dropped it into his coat pocket.

The three other skeletons had no skulls. But Sailor had a skull. Sarath put the half-smoked beedi on the metal sink and leaned forward. With a scalpel he cut apart the ligaments that attached the skull to the neck vertebrae, and separated it. He brought the skull to his desk. The burning hadn’t reached the head, so the frontal, orbital and lacrimal plates were smooth, the knit marks on the skull tight. Sarath wrapped it in plastic and placed it in a large shopping bag that said ‘Kundanmal’s.’ He returned and photographed Sailor without the skull, twice, lateral and anterior.

He was aware now more than anything that he and Anil needed help.

The epigraphist Palipana was for a number of years at the centre of a nationalistic group that eventually wrestled archaeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans. He had made his name translating Pali scripts and recording and translating the rock graffiti of Sigiriya.

The main force of a pragmatic Sinhala movement, Palipana wrote lucidly, basing his work on exhaustive research, deeply knowledgeable about the context of the ancient cultures. While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia.

The 1970s had witnessed the beginning of a series of international conferences. Academics flew into Delhi, Colombo and Hong Kong for six days, told their best anecdotes, took the pulse of the ex-colony, and returned to London and Boston. It was finally realized that while European culture was old, Asian culture was older. Palipana, by now the most respected of the Sri Lankan group, went to one such gathering and never went to another. He was a spare man, unable to abide formality and ceremonial toasts.

The three years Sarath spent as a student of Palipana’s were the most difficult of his academic life. All archaeological data proposed by a student had to be confirmed. Every rock cuneiform or carving had to be drawn and redrawn onto the pages of journals, in sand, on blackboards, until it was a part of dreams. Sarath had thought of Palipana during the first two years as someone mean with praise and mean (rather than spare) in the way he lived. He seemed incapable of handing out compliments, would never buy anyone a drink or a meal. His brother, Nārada, who had no car and was always cadging rides, at first appeared similar, but was generous with time and friendship, generous with his laughter. Palipana always seemed to be saving himself for the language of history. He was vain and excessive only in how he insisted on having his work published a certain way, demanding two-colour diagrams on good paper that would survive weather and fauna. And it was only when a book was completed that his terrierlike focus would shift away from a project, so he could go empty-handed into another era or another region of the country.

History was ever-present around him. The stone remnants of royal bathing pools and water gardens, the buried cities, the nationalistic fervour he rode and used gave him and those who worked with him, including Sarath, limitless subjects to record and interpret. It appeared he could divine a thesis at any sacred forest.