Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

She took journeys with him-a two-day walk to a chapter house in Mihintale, climbing the 132 steps, clinging to this blind man with her fear when he insisted they go once by bus to Polonnaruwa so he could be in the presence of the Stone Book, his hands upon the ducks-that were for eternity-for the last time. They rode in bullock carts and he would sniff the air or hear the hum within the gum trees and know where he was, would know there was a half-buried temple nearby, and his lean body would be off the cart and she would follow him. ‘We are, and I was, formed by history,’ he would say. ‘But the three places I love escaped it. Arankale. Kaludiya Pokuna. Ritigala.’

So they journeyed south as far as Ritigala, getting rides in slow bullock carts, where she felt safer, and climbed the holy mountain for hours up through the hot forest alongside the noise of cicadas. They came upon the footpath that curved uphill in a giant S. They broke a small branch as the two of them entered the forest and dedicated that as an offering, and took nothing else from there.

Every historical pillar he came to in a field he stood beside and embraced as if it were a person he had known in the past. Most of his life he had found history in stones and carvings. In the last few years he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie.

He had deciphered the shallowly incised lines during lightning, had written them down during rain and thunder. A portable sulphur lamp or a thorn brushfire by the overhang of cave. The dialogue between old and hidden lines, the back-and-forth between what was official and unofficial during solitary field trips, when he spoke to no one for weeks, so that these became his only conversations-an epigraphist studying the specific style of a chisel-cut from the fourth century, then coming across an illegal story, one banned by kings and state and priests, in the interlinear texts. These verses contained the darker proof.

Lakma watched him and listened, never speaking, a silent amanuensis for his whispered histories. He blended fragments of stories so they became a landscape. It did not matter if she could not distinguish between his versions and the truth. She was safe, finally, with him, this man who was her mother’s elder brother. They slept on mats in the leaf hall in the afternoon, within the frames of the ambalama at night. As his vision left him he gave more and more of his life to her. The last days of his sight he spent simply gazing at her.

With his blindness she gained the authority he had been unable to give her. She rearranged the paths of the day. What she did in proximity to him was now a part of the invisible world. Her new semi-nakedness in a way represented her state of mind. She wore a sarong as a man would. Palipana would not see this, or her left hand on her pubis tugging the new hair or playing with it while he talked to her. The only governor to her manner was to do with his safety and comfort. She would bound over to him if he was walking towards a root. Every morning she wet his face with water she had boiled over a fire, and then shaved him. They were early risers and early sleepers, aligned to the sun and moon. She was with him this way for two years before the appearance of Sarath and Anil. With their arrival the girl stepped back, although by then they were invading what was her home more than Palipana’s. It was her pattern of the day that was broken. If Anil witnessed politeness or kindness in the old man, it was only in his hand gestures and murmurs to Lakma, just loud enough to be heard a step away, so Anil and Sarath were excluded from most of their conversation. In the late afternoon the girl sat between his legs, and his hands were in her long hair searching for lice with those thin fingers and combing it while the girl rubbed his feet. When he walked she steered him away from any obstacle in his path with a slight tug of the sleeve.

The girl would slip into the forest, nocturnal, still as bark, when Palipana died.

She would dress his nakedness with thambili leaves that were part of the decoration for death, sew his last notebooks into his clothes. She had already prepared a pyre for him on the edge of the pokuna, whose sound he loved-and now its flames shivered in the water of the lake. She had already cut one of his phrases into the rock, one of the first things he had said to her, which she had held on to like a raft in her years of fear. She had chiselled it where the horizon of water was, so that, depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements. Now she stood waist-deep in the water, cutting the Sinhala letters into the dark stone the way he had described the methods of artisans to her. He had once shown her such runes, finding them even in his blindness, and their marginalia of ducks, for eternity. So she carved the outline of ducks on either side of his sentence. In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears. It has already become an old legend. But the girl who stood waist-deep and cut it into rock in the last week of Palipana’s dying life and carried him into the water beside it and placed his hand against it in the slop of the water was not old. He nodded, remembering the words. And now he would remain by the water and each morning the girl undressed and climbed down against the wall of submerged rock and banged and chiselled, so that in the last days of his life he was accompanied by the great generous noise of her work as if she were speaking out loud. Just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake.

He had handed Lakma his old, weathered spectacles, and in the end, after she had sewn his notebooks into his clothing, she would take only this talisman of these glasses with her when she went into the forest.

But that night, with the two strangers on the ambalama, the girl could sense the restlessness of Anil, as clear to her as Sarath’s beedi brightening now and then in the dark. Palipana sat up and Lakma knew he would speak, as if there had been no half-hour pause.

‘The man I mentioned, the artist, there was tragedy in his life. Now he works in the gem pits, goes down into them four or five days a week. An arrack drinker, I’ve heard. It is not safe to be with him underground. Maybe he’s still there. He was the craftsman who painted eyes-as his father and grandfather did. An inherited talent, though I think he was the best of the three. I think he’s the one you should find. You will have to pay him.’

Anil said, ‘Pay him for what?’

‘To rebuild the head,’ Sarath murmured in the darkness.

They set out for Colombo the next day, although neither of them wished to leave the spell of the old man and his forest site. They waited for the cool of sundown and left when Palipana and the girl walked towards the ambalama to sleep. An hour south of Matale, the car took a corner and Sarath saw the lights of a truck coming towards them. He braked hard and the car shuddered and skidded on the macadam. Then he saw it was not moving; the truck was parked on the road facing them, its headlights on.

He released the brake and they drifted slowly forward. She had been asleep and now she put her head out the window. There was a man lying on the road in front of the truck. Spread-eagled on his back. The truck was immense above him, the glare of its lights shot beams ahead, but the man was below them in darkness. He was shirtless, his bare feet pointed up saucily, his arms out. Their fear was followed by the humour of it all. Everything was quiet around them as their car crept past. Not even a dog barking. No cicadas. The motor of the truck turned off.