Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Sarath said nothing in order that Anil would answer. She used her food-free hand to emphasize her method. ‘You put the cross-section of bone under a microscope. It’s got to be one-tenth of a millimetre-so you can see the blood-carrying canals. As people get older, the canals, channels really, are broken up, fragmented, more numerous. If we can get hold of such a machine, we can guess any age this way.’

‘Guess,’ he muttered.

‘Five-percent margin of error. I’d guess that the person whose skull you inspected was twenty-eight years old.’

‘How certain…’

‘More certain than what you could know feeling the skull and the brow ridges and measuring the jaw.’

‘How wonderful.’ He turned his head to her. ‘What a wonder you are.’

She flushed with embarrassment.

‘I suppose you can tell how old a geezer like me is too, with a piece of bone.’

‘You’re seventy-six.’

‘How?’ Palipana was disarmed. ‘My skin? Nails?’

‘I checked the Sinhala encyclopaedia before we left Colombo.’

‘Ah. Yes, yes. You’re lucky you got hold of an old edition. I’m erased from the new one.’

‘Then we will have to build a statue of you,’ Sarath said, a bit too gracefully.

There was an awkward silence.

‘I’ve lived around graven images all my life. I don’t believe in them.’

‘ Temples have secular heroes too.’

‘So you removed the head…’

‘We don’t know yet the year he was murdered. Ten years ago? Five years ago? More recently? We don’t have the equipment to discover that. And given the circumstances of where he was buried, we can’t ask for such assistance.’

Palipana was silent, sitting with his head down, his arms crossed. Sarath continued. ‘You have reconstructed eras simply by looking at runes. You’ve used artists to re-create scenes from just paint fragments. So. We have a skull. We need someone to re-create what he might have looked like. One way to discover when he was twenty-eight is to have someone identify him.’

No one moved. Even Sarath was looking down now. He went on. ‘But we don’t have a specialist or knowledge of how to do it. That’s why I brought the skull here. For you to tell us where to go, what to do. It is something we have to do quietly.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Palipana stood, so they all did, and walked out of the leaf hall into the night. They were treating his sudden movements the way they would have given a dog rein. The four of them walked to the pokuna and stood by the dark water. Anil kept thinking of Palipana’s sightlessness in this landscape of dark green and deep gray. The stone steps and rock nestled into the inclines of earth just as the fragments of brick and wood nestled against rock. These bones of an old settlement. It felt to Anil as if her pulse had fallen asleep, that she was moving like the slowest animal in the world through grass. She was picking up intricacies of what was around them. Palipana’s mind was probably crowded with such things, in his potent sightlessness. I will not want to leave this place, she thought, remembering that Sarath had said the same thing to her.

‘Do you know the tradition of Nētra Mangala?’ He was asking them in a murmur, as if thinking aloud. Palipana raised his right hand and pointed it to his own face. He seemed to be talking to her more than to Sarath or the girl.

‘Nētra means “eye.” It is a ritual of the eyes. A special artist is needed to paint eyes on a holy figure. It is always the last thing done. It is what gives the image life. Like a fuse. The eyes are a fuse. It has to happen before a statue or a painting in a vihara can become a holy thing. Knox mentions it, and later on Coomaraswamy. You’ve read him?’

‘Yes, but I don’t remember.’

‘Coomaraswamy points out that before eyes are painted there is just a lump of metal or stone. But after this act, “it is thenceforward a God.” Of course there are special ways to paint the eye. Sometimes the king will do it, but it is better when done by a professional artificer, the craftsman. Now of course we have no kings. And Nētra Mangala is better without kings.’

Anil and Sarath and Palipana and the girl had reached and now sat within the square wooden structure of an ambalama, an oil lamp at the centre of it. The old man had gestured towards it and said they could talk there perhaps, even sleep within it this night. It was a structure of wood, with no walls and a high ceiling. Travellers or pilgrims used its shade and coolness during the day. At night it was simply a skeletal wooden form open to the dark, its few beams creating an idea of order. A structure built on rock. A home of wood and boulders.

It was almost dark, and they could smell the air that came towards them over the water of the pokuna, could hear the rustling of unseen creatures. Each evening Palipana and the girl walked from their forest clearing to sleep in the ambalama. He could relieve himself off the edge of the platform without having to wake the girl to lead him somewhere. He would lie there conscious of the noises from the surrounding ocean of trees. Farther away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war.

The girl was to his left, Sarath to his right, the woman across from him. He knew the woman was now standing up, either looking towards him or beyond, towards the water. He had also heard the splash. Some water creature on this calm night. There was a turkey vulture coming out of the trees. Between him and the woman-on the rock, beside the ochre lamp-was the skull they had brought with them.

‘There was one man who painted eyes. He was the best I knew. But he stopped.’

‘Painting eyes?’

He heard the fresh curiosity in her voice.

‘There is a ceremony to prepare the artificer during the night before he paints. You realize, he is brought in only to paint the eyes on the Buddha image. The eyes must be painted in the morning, at five. The hour the Buddha attained enlightenment. The ceremonies therefore begin the night before, with recitations and decorations in the temples.

‘Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence. Later he will be honoured with gifts. Lands or oxen. He enters the temple doors. He is dressed like a prince, with jewellery, a sword at his waist, lace over his head. He moves forward accompanied by a second man, who carries brushes, black paint and a metal mirror.

‘He climbs a ladder in front of the statue. The man with him climbs too. This has taken place for centuries, you realize, there are records of this since the ninth century. The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him-so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation. Around him the mantras continue. May thou become possessed of the fruits of deeds… May there be an increase on earth and length of days… Hail, eyes!

‘His work can take an hour or less than a minute, depending on the essential state of the artist. He never looks at the eyes directly. He can only see the gaze in the mirror.’

Anil was standing on the wood ledge that she would later sleep on, thinking of Cullis. Where he might be. No doubt in the arms of his busy marriage. She would avoid thinking of him there. He had not allowed her much room in that world, and her view of him had always been a partially blindfolded one.