Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Palipana stood and held out the skull for one of them to take. ‘It’s cooler now, we can have supper. Can you stay the night?’

‘Yes,’ Anil said.

‘I will help Lakma cook, we cook the meals together-while you both rest, perhaps.’

‘I’d like a well bath,’ she told him. ‘We’ve been on the road since five this morning. Is that all right?’

Palipana nodded.

Sarath went into the darkness of the leaf hall and lay down on a floor mat. He seemed exhausted from the long drive. Anil returned to the car and pulled two sarongs out of her bag, then walked back to the clearing. She undressed by the well, unstrapped her watch and got into the diya reddha cloth, and dropped the bucket into the depths. There was a hollow smash far below her. The bucket sank and filled. She jerked the rope so the bucket flew up, and caught the rope near the handle. Now she poured the cold water over herself and its glow entered her in a rush, refreshing her. Once more she dropped the bucket into the well and jerked it up and poured it over her hair and shoulders so the water billowed within the thin cloth onto her belly and legs. She understood how wells could become sacred. They combined sparse necessity and luxury. She would give away every earring she owned for an hour by a well. She repeated the mantra of gestures again and again. When she had finished she unwrapped the wet cloth and stood naked in the wind and the last of the sunlight, then put on the dry sarong. She bent over and beat the water off her hair.

Sometime later she woke and sat up on the bench. She heard splashing and turned to see Palipana at the well, the girl pouring water over his naked body. He stood facing Anil, his arms straight down. He was thin, like some lost animal, some idea. Lakma kept pouring water over him, and they were both gesturing and laughing now.

A t five-fifteen in the morning those who had woken in the dark had already walked a mile, left the streets and come down into the fields. They had blown out the one lantern among them and now moved confidently in the darkness, their bare feet in the mud and wet grass. Ananda Udugama was used to the dark paths. He knew they would soon come upon the scattering of sheds, the mounds of fresh earth, and the water pump and the three-foot-diameter hole in the ground that was the pit head.

With the dark-green light of morning around them the men appeared to float over the open landscape. They could hear and almost see the birds that shot out of the fields with life in their mouths. They began stripping off their vests. They were all gem-pit workers. Soon they would be under the earth, on their knees digging into walls, feeling for any hardness of stone or root or gem. They would move in the underground warrens, sloshing barefoot in mud and water, combing their fingers into the wet clay, the damp walls. Each shift was six hours long. Some entered the earth in darkness and emerged in light, some returned to dusk.

Now the men and women stood by the pump. The men doubled their sarongs and retied them at the waist, hung their vests on the beams of the shed. Ananda took a mouthful of petrol and sprayed it onto the carburetor. When he pulled the cord, the motor jumped to life, thudding against the earth. Water began pouring out of a hose. They heard another motor start up half a mile away. In the next ten minutes the dawn landscape became visible, but by then Ananda and three others had disappeared down a ladder into the earth.

Before the men went down, seven lit candles were lowered in a basket through the three-foot-diameter hole, forty feet below into the darkness by rope. The candles gave light as well as a warning in case the air was unsafe. At the base of the pit, where the candles rested, were three tunnels that disappeared into deeper darkness where the men would go.

Alone now on the surface the women began arranging the silt baskets and within fifteen minutes they heard the whistles and started pulling baskets of mud from below. By the time there was full light in the fields the entire flat region of Ratnapura district was sputtering into life as pumps drained water from the pits and the women used it to flush mud free from what had been sent up in the search for anything of value.

The men in the earth worked in a half-crouch, damp with sweat and tunnel water. If someone cut an arm or a thigh with a digging blade the blood looked black in the tunnel light. When candles smoked out because of the ever-present moisture, the men would lie there in the water, while the digger closest to the entrance would drag himself through darkness and send the candles up to the dry daylight of the pit head to be lit and returned.

At noon Ananda’s shift was over. He and the men with him climbed the ladder and paused ten feet below the surface to accustom themselves to the glare, then continued and stepped out onto the fields. Helped by the women, they moved to the mound where they could be hosed off, beginning with hair and shoulders, the water jetting onto their almost naked bodies.

They dressed and began their walk home. By three in the afternoon, in the village where he lived with his sister and brother-in-law, Ananda was drunk. He would roll off the pallet he had been put on, would move in his familiar half-crouch out the door and piss in the yard, unable to stand or even look up to be aware who might be watching him.

In the leaf hall, shade-filled and muted in colour, the only bright object Anil was conscious of was Sarath’s wristwatch. There were two rolled mats and a small table where Palipana still wrote, in spite of blindness, in large billowing script that was half language, half pageantry-the borders between them blurred. This was where he sat most mornings while his thoughts circled and then were caught in the dark room.

The girl placed a cloth on the floor, and they sat around it and leaned towards their food, eating with their fingers. Sarath remembered how Palipana used to travel around the country with his students, how he would eat in silence, listening to them, and suddenly expose his opinions in a twenty-minute monologue. So Sarath had eaten his first meals in silence, never putting forward a theory. He was learning the rules and methods of argument the way a boy watching a sport from the sidelines learns timing and skills with his still body. If the students ever assumed something, their teacher would turn on them. They had trusted him because of his severity, because he was incorruptible.

You, Palipana would say, pointing. Never using anyone’s name, as if that were immaterial to the discussion or search. Just, When was this rock cut? The missing letter? The name of the artificer who drew that arm?

They would travel on side roads, stay at third-rate rest houses, drag chiselled slabs from brush into sunlight, and at night draw maps of courtyards and palace sites based on the detritus of pillars and archways they had seen during the day.

‘I removed the head for a reason.’

Palipana’s hand kept moving towards the bowl.

‘Have some brinjals, this is my pride…’

Sarath knew that Palipana’s interruptions at moments like this meant he was eager. It was a little taunt. The reality of life versus a concept.

‘I photographed the skeleton with and without the head for a record. Meanwhile we’ll continue analyzing the skeleton-its soil traces, palymology. The brinjals are very good… Sir, you and I work on ancient rocks, fossils, rebuild dried-up water gardens, concern ourselves with why an army moved into the dry zone. We can identify an architect by his habit of building winter and summer palaces. But Anil lives in contemporary times. She uses contemporary methods. She can cut a cross-section of bone with a fine saw and determine the skeleton’s exact age at death that way.’

‘How is that?’