Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘Some of the reports…’ she said. ‘There are letters from parents who have lost children. Not something you can put aside, or get over in a hurry.’

She touched his shoulder. He brought his hand up for a moment and then his head slipped away and soon she saw he had fallen asleep. His skull, his uncombed hair, the weight of his tiredness on her lap. Sleep come free me. The words of a song in her head, she could not find the tune that went with it. Sleep come free me… She would remember later that Sarath was looking out into the black shift of the sea.

A mygdala.

The name had sounded Sri Lankan when Anil first heard it. Studying at Guy’s Hospital in London, having cut tissue away to reveal a small knot of fibres made up of nerve cells. Near the stem of the brain. The professor standing beside her gave her the word for it. Amygdala.

‘What does it mean?’

‘Nothing. It’s a location. It’s the dark aspect of the brain.’

‘I don’t-’

‘A place to house fearful memories.’

‘Just fear?’

‘We’re not too certain of that. Anger too, we think, but it specializes in fear. It is pure emotion. We can’t clarify it further.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well-is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? Or fear if we commit a crime? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body.’

‘As in dreams.’

‘As in dreams,’ he agreed. ‘Though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don’t know we have.’

‘So it’s something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from a knot in another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past.’

He paused before speaking again, surprised at the degree of her interest. ‘I don’t think we know yet how similar the knots are, or if there are essential patterns. I’ve always liked those nineteenth-century novels where brothers and sisters in different cities could feel the same pains, have the same fears… But I digress. We don’t know, Anil.’

‘It sounds Sri Lankan, the name.’

‘Well, check its derivation. It doesn’t sound scientific.’

‘No. Some bad god.’

She remembers the almond knot. During autopsies her secret habit of detour is to look for the amygdala, this nerve bundle which houses fear-so it governs everything. How we behave and make decisions, how we seek out safe marriages, how we build houses that we make secure.

Driving with Sarath once. He asked, ‘Is your tape recorder off?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘There are at least two unauthorized places of detention in Colombo. One of the locations is off Havelock Road in Kollupitiya. Some of those picked up are there for a month, but the torture itself doesn’t last that long. Most can be broken within an hour. Most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen.’

‘Is your tape recorder off?’ he had said. ‘Yes, it’s off.’ And only then had he talked.

‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear…’

Anil’s name-the one she’d bought from her brother at the age of thirteen-had another stage to go through before it settled. By the time Anil was sixteen, she was taut and furious within the family. Her parents brought her to an astrologer in Wellawatta in an attempt to mollify these aspects of her nature. The man wrote down her birth hour and date, subtracted and fractioned them, considered her neighbouring stars and, not realizing the involved commerce behind it, said the problem resided in her name. Her tempestuousness could be harnessed with a name change. Unknown to him was the deal that had involved Gold Leaf cigarettes and rupees. He spoke with a voice that approached serenity and wisdom in the small cubicle, behind whose curtain other families waited in the hall hoping to overhear gossip and family history. What they heard were loud insistent refusals from the girl. The astrologer-soothsayer had eventually compromised his solution down to a simple appendage-the addition of an e, so she would be Anile. It would make her and her name more feminine, the e would allow the fury to curve away. But she refused even this.

Looking back, she could see her argumentativeness was only a phase. There is often a point in a person’s life where there is bodily anarchy: young boys whose hormones are going mad, young girls bouncing like a shuttlecock in the family politics between a father and a mother. Girls and their dad, girls and their mum. It was a minefield in one’s teens, and it was only when the relationship between her parents broke down completely that she calmed and sailed, or essentially swam, through the next four years.

The family wars continued to reside in her, and hadn’t left her when she went abroad to study medicine. In the forensic labs she made it a point to distinguish female and male traits as clearly as possible. She witnessed how women were much more easily discombobulated by the personal slights of a lover or husband; but they were better at dealing with calamity in professional work than men. They were geared to giving birth, protecting children, steering them through crisis. Men needed to pause and dress themselves in coldness in order to deal with a savaged body. In all her training in Europe and America she saw that again and again. Women doctors were more confident in chaos and accident, calmer in dealing with the fresh corpse of an old woman, a young beautiful man, small children. The times Anil would slip into woe were when she saw a dead child in clothes. A dead three-year-old with the clothes her parents had dressed her in.

We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn’t take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries. In Sri Lanka one is surrounded by family order, most people know every meeting you have during the day, there is nothing anonymous. But if I meet a Sri Lankan elsewhere in the world and we have a free afternoon, it doesn’t necessarily happen, but each of us knows all hell could break loose. What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?’

Anil is talking to Sarath, who in his path from youth to manhood, she suspects, remained held within parental principles. He, she is sure, obeyed while not necessarily believing the rules. He would not have known the realities of sexual freedom available to him, though his head might have loafed through anarchy. He, she suspects, is a shy man, in that sense of lacking the confidence to approach and proposition. In any case, she knows they both come from a society that has involved hazardous intrigues of love and marriage and an equally anarchic system of planetary influence. Sarath told her about the henahuru in his family during a rest-house meal…

To be born under a certain star made people unsuitable as marriage partners. A woman born with Mars in the Seventh House was ‘malefic.’ Whoever she married would die. Meaning, in the minds of Sri Lankans, she would in essence be responsible for his death, she would kill him.

Sarath’s father, for instance, had two brothers. The older brother married a woman their family had known for years. He was dead within two years of a harsh fever, during which she nursed him day and night. There had been one child. The woman’s grief and retreat from the world at this death were terrible. The second brother was called upon by the family to bring her back into the world, for the sake of the boy. He brought the child gifts, insisted on taking mother and son on his vacations up-country, and eventually he and the woman, the former wife of his brother, fell in love. In many ways it was a greater and more subtle love than had existed in the first marriage. The intention of passion and sharing had not been there at the start. The woman had been brought back into the world. There was gratefulness towards the younger and good-looking brother. So when, during a car ride, the fragment of desire emerged with her first laughter in a year, it must have seemed a betrayal of his former motive, which was simply generous concern for his brother’s widow. They married, he cared for his brother’s child. They had a daughter, and within a year and a half he too fell ill and died in the arms of his wife.