Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

The girl boiled water for tea over a twig fire and the three of them sat on a bench and drank it. The girl still had said nothing. Anil assumed Palipana was asleep in the darkness of a hut, and a while later an old man came out of one of the structures in a sarong and shirt. He went around to the side, pulled up a bucket from a well and washed his face and arms. When he returned he said, ‘I heard you talking, Sarath.’ Anil and Sarath both stood, but Palipana made no further gesture towards them. He just stood there. Sarath bent down and touched the old man’s feet, then led him to the bench.

‘This is Anil Tissera… We’re working together, analyzing some skeletons that were found near Bandarawela.’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you do, sir?’

‘A most beautiful voice.’

And Anil suddenly realized he was blind.

He reached out and held her forearm, touching the skin, feeling the muscle underneath; she sensed he was interpreting her shape and size from this fragment of her body.

‘Tell me about them-how ancient?’ He let go of her.

Anil looked quickly at Sarath, who gestured to the forest around them. Who was the old man going to tell?

Palipana’s head kept tilting, as if trying to catch whatever was passing in the air around him.

‘Ah-a secret against the government. Or perhaps a government secret. We are in the Grove of Ascetics. We are safe here. And I am the safest secret-holder. Besides, it makes no difference to me whose secret it is. You already know that, don’t you, Sarath? Otherwise you would not have come all this way for help. Is that not correct?’

‘We need to think something through, perhaps to find someone. A specialist.’

‘As you can tell, I am unable to see anymore, but bring what you have over to me. What is it?’

Sarath went to his bag beside the twig fire, removed the plastic wrapping, and walked over and put the skull in Palipana’s lap.

Anil watched the old man as he sat in front of them, calm and still. It was about five in the evening and without the harsh sunlight the rock outcrops around them were now pale and soft. She became aware of the quieter sounds around them.

‘ Bell and other archaeologists thought this place the location of a secular summer palace when he came upon it in the nineteenth century. But the Cūlavaṃsa describes the establishment of forest-dwelling fraternities-by monks who opposed rituals and luxuries.’

Palipana gestured to his left without moving his head. Of the five structures in the clearing, he was living in the simplest one, built against a rock outcrop, with a contemporary leaf roof.

‘They were not really poor, but they lived sparsely-you know the distinction between the gross material world and the “subtle” material world, don’t you? Well, they embraced the latter. Sarath has no doubt told you about the elaborate urinal stones. He always enjoyed that detail.’

Palipana pursed his lips. There was a tinge of dry humour to his expression and she supposed it was the closest he came to a smile.

‘We are safe here, but of course history teaches. During the reign of Udaya the Third, some monks fled the court to escape his wrath. And they came into the Grove of Ascetics. The king and the Uparaja followed them and cut their heads off. Also recorded in the Cūlavaṃsa is the population’s reaction to this. They became rebellious, “like the ocean stirred by a storm.” You see, the king had violated a sanctuary. There were huge protests all over the kingdom, all because of some monks. All because of a couple of heads…’

Palipana fell silent. Anil watched his fingers, beautiful and thin, moving over the outlines of the skull Sarath had given him, his long fingernails at the supraorbital ridge, within the orbital cavities, then cupping the shape as if warming his palms on the skull, as if it were a stone from some old fire. He was testing the jaw’s angle, the blunt ridge of its teeth. She imagined he could hear the one bird in the forest distance. She imagined he could hear Sarath’s sandals pacing, the scrape of his match, the sound of the fire roasting the tobacco leaf as Sarath smoked his beedi a few yards away. She was sure he could hear all that, the light wind, the other fragments of noise that passed by his thin face, that glassy brown boniness of his own skull. And all the while the blunt eyes looked out, piercing whatever caught them. His face was immaculately shaved. Had he done that, or was it the girl?

‘Tell me what you think-you.’ He turned his head in Anil’s direction.

‘Well… We’re not in full agreement. But we both know the skeleton this skull comes from is contemporary. It was found in a cache of nineteenth-century bones.’

‘But the pedicle on the back of the neck was recently broken,’ the old man said.

‘He-’

‘I did that,’ Sarath said. ‘Two days ago.’

‘Without my permission,’ she said.

‘Sarath always does what he does for a reason, he is not a random man. He travels in mid-river, always.’

‘A visionary decision while drunk, we are calling it for now,’ she said as calmly as she could.

Sarath looked between them, at ease with this wit.

‘Tell me more. You.’ He turned his head towards her again.

‘My name is Anil.’

‘Yes.’

She saw Sarath shaking his head and grinning. She ignored Palipana’s question and gazed into the darkness of the structure he lived in.

They were not surrounded by verdant landscape. Ascetics always chose outcrops of living rock and cleared the topsoil away. There was just the roof of thatch and palm. His leaf hall. Old pissed-off ascetics.

Still, it was calm here. Cicadas noisy and invisible. Sarath had told her that the first time he visited a forest monastery he had not wanted to leave. He had guessed that his teacher in exile would select one of the leaf halls that ringed Anuradhapura, a traditional home for monks. And Palipana had said once how he wished to be buried in this region.

Anil walked past the old man and stood by the well, looking down into it. ‘Where is she going?’ she heard Palipana say, no real annoyance in his voice. The girl came out of the house with some passion fruit juice and cut guava. Anil drank from a glass quickly. Then she turned to him.

‘It’s likely he was buried twice. What’s important is that the second time it was in a restricted area-accessible only to the police or the army or some high-level government officials. Someone at Sarath’s level, for example. No one else has access to such places. So this doesn’t seem a crime by an average citizen. I know that murders are sometimes committed during a war for personal reasons, but I don’t think a murderer would have the luxury of burying a victim twice. The skeleton this head is part of was found by us in a cave in Bandarawela. We need to discover if we’re talking about a murder committed by the government.’

‘Yes.’

‘The trace elements on Sailor’s bones do not-’

‘Who is Sailor?’

‘Sailor is a name we have given the skeleton. The trace elements of soil in his bones do not match the soil where we found him. We don’t necessarily agree about the exact bone age, but we are certain he was buried somewhere else first. That is, he was killed and then buried. Then he was dug up, moved to a new location and buried again. Not only do the trace elements of soil not match, but we suspect the pollen that adhered to him before he was buried comes from a totally different region.’

‘Wodehouse’s Pollen Grains…’

‘Yes, we used that. Sarath has located the pollen to two possible places, one up near Kegalle and another in the Ratnapura area.’

‘Ah, an insurgent area.’

‘Yes. Where many villagers disappeared during the crisis.’