Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Palipana had not entered the field of archaeology until he was middle-aged. And he had risen in the career not as a result of family contacts but simply because he knew the languages and the techniques of research better than those above him. He was not an easily liked man, he had lost charm somewhere in his youth. He would discover among his students over the years only four dedicated protégés. Sarath was one of them. By the time Palipana was in his sixties, however, he had fought with each of them. Not one of the four had forgiven him for their humiliations at his hands. But his students continued to believe two things-no, three: that he was the best archaeological theorist in the country, that he was nearly always right, and that even with his fame and success he continued to live a life-style more minimal than any of them. Perhaps this was the result of being the brother of a monk. Palipana’s wardrobe was, apparently, reduced to two identical outfits. And as he grew older he linked himself less and less with the secular world, save for his continuing vanity regarding publication. Sarath had not seen him for several years.

During these years Palipana had been turned gracelessly out of the establishment. This began with his publication of a series of interpretations of rock graffiti that stunned archaeologists and historians. He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century. The work was applauded in journals abroad and at home, until one of Palipana’s protégés voiced the opinion that there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts. They were a fiction. A group of historians was unable to locate the runes Palipana had written about. No one could find the sentences he had quoted and translated from dying warriors, or any of the fragments from the social manifestos handed down by kings, or even the erotic verses in Pali supposedly by lovers and confidants of the court mentioned by name but never quoted in the Cūlavaṃsa.

The detailed verses Palipana had published seemed at first to have ended arguments and debates by historians; they were confirmed by his reputation as the strictest of historians, who had always relied on meticulous research. Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world. Though perhaps it was more than a trick, less of a falsehood in his own mind; perhaps for him it was not a false step but the step to another reality, the last stage of a long, truthful dance.

But no one admired this strange act. Not his academic followers. Not even protégés like Sarath, who had been consistently challenged by his mentor during his academic years for crimes of laxness and inaccuracy. The gesture, ‘Palipana’s gesture,’ was seen as a betrayal of the principles on which he had built his reputation. A forgery by a master always meant much more than mischief, it meant scorn. Only when seen at its most innocent could it be regarded as an autobiographical or perhaps chemical breakdown.

The graffiti at the great rock fortress of Sigiriya was located on an overhang at the first quarter-mile mark of ascent. Older than the more famous paintings of goddesslike women on the Mirror Wall, it had been cut into the rock most probably in the sixth century. The faded moth-coloured writings had always been a magnet and a mystery for historians-they were enigmatic statements with no context-and Palipana himself had studied them and worried over them for fifteen years of his life. As a historian and a scientist he approached every problem with many hands. He was more likely to work beside a stonemason or listen to a dhobi woman washing clothes at a newly discovered rock pool than with a professor from the University of Peradeniya. He approached runes not with a historical text but with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills. His eyes recognized how a fault line in a rock wall might have insisted on the composure of a painted shoulder.

Having studied languages and text until he was forty, he spent the next thirty years in the field-the historical version already within him. So that approaching a site Palipana knew what would be there-whether a distinct pattern of free-standing pillars in a clearing or a familiar icon drawn on a cave wall high above. It was a strange self-knowledge for someone who had always been humble in his assumptions.

He spread his fingers over every discovered rune. He traced each letter on the Stone Book at Polonnaruwa, a boulder carved into a rectangle four feet high, thirty feet long, the first book of the country, laid his bare arms and the side of his face against this plinth that collected the heat of the day. For most of the year it was dark and warm and only during the monsoons would the letters be filled with water, creating small, perfectly cut harbours, as at Carthage. A giant book in the scrub grass of the Sacred Quadrangle of Polonnaruwa, chiselled with letters, bordered by a frieze of ducks. Ducks for eternity, he whispered to himself, smiling in the noon heat, having pieced together what he had picked up in an ancient text. A secret. His greatest joys were such discoveries, as when he found the one dancing Ganesh, possibly the island’s first carved Ganesh, in the midst of humans in a frieze at Mihintale.

He drew parallels and links between the techniques of stonemasons he met with in Matara and the work he had done during the years of translating texts and in the field. And he began to see as truth things that could only be guessed at. In no way did this feel to him like forgery or falsification.

Archaeology lives under the same rules as the Napoleonic Code. The point was not that he would ever be proved wrong in his theories, but that he could not prove he was right. Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water, they allowed a leap from treetop to treetop. The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unprovable truth emerged.

However much he himself had stripped worldly goods and social habits from his life, even more was taken from him in reaction to his unprovable theories. There was no longer any respect accorded to his career. But he refused to give up what he claimed to have discovered, and made no attempt to defend himself. Instead he retreated physically. Years earlier, on a trip with his brother, he had found the remaining structures of a forest monastery, twenty miles from Anuradhapura. So now, with his few belongings, he moved there. The rumour was that he was surviving in the remnants of a ‘leaf hall,’ with little that was permanent around him. This was in keeping with the sixth-century sect of monks who lived under such strict principles that they rejected any religious decoration. They would adorn only one slab with carvings, then use it as a urinal stone. This was what they thought of graven images.

He was in his seventies, his eyesight worrying him. He still wrote in cursive script, racing the truth out of himself. He was thin as a broom, wore the same cotton trousers bought along the Galle Road, the same two plum-coloured shirts, spectacles. He still had his dry, wise laugh that seemed, to those who knew them both, the only biological connection he had with his brother.

He lived in the forest grove with his books and writing tablets. But for him, now, all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain. Though as he worked he was conscious that the paper itself that held these histories was aging fast. It was insect-bitten, sun-faded, wind-scattered. And there was his old, thin body. Palipana too now was governed only by the elements.

Sarath drove with Anil north beyond Kandy, into the dry zone, searching for Palipana. There was no way the teacher could be told they were coming, and Sarath had no idea how they would be greeted-whether they would be spurned or grudgingly acknowledged. By the time they reached Anuradhapura they were in the heat of the day. They drove on and within an hour were at the entrance to the forest. They left the car and walked for twenty minutes along a path that snaked between large boulders, then opened unexpectedly into a clearing. There were abandoned stone-and-wood structures strewn in front of them-the dry remnants of a water garden, slabs of rock. There was a girl sifting rice, and Sarath went towards her and spoke with her.