Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

The first time Anil had gone into the desert, her guide had a water-mist bottle attached to his belt. He gestured her over, sprayed the thin leaves of a plant and pulled her head down towards it. She inhaled the smell of creosote. The plant spilled this toxic quality when it rained, to keep away anything that tried to grow too near it-and so reserved the small area around it for its own water supply.

She learned about agave, which had at least seven uses, among them its thorn as a needle, its fibres as thread. She saw cheese bushes, dyeweed, dead-man’s-fingers (a succulent you could eat only during one month of the year), smoke trees with their rare system of roots (an exact underground reflection of their size and shape above ground), and ocotillo, which dropped its leaves to preserve moisture. And plants whose colours seemed washed out and those that doubled their rich colours in twilight. She spent as little time as possible in the small house she shared on H Street. She was usually within the flat-roofed paleontology lab by seven-thirty with a coffee and a croissant. In the evenings she jeeped into the desert with her co-workers. There had been zebras here three million years before. Camels. All the usual browsers and grazers. She walked above the bones of these great defunct creatures, on atolls left from ocean days seven million years earlier. There was a slight flirtation as she brushed the hand of someone passing binoculars to her to search out a sparrow hawk.

Once again she discovered the passion for bowling among forensic anthropologists. Perhaps too much care during the day picking up fragments with tweezers or using whisper brushes made them want to hurl things around with six-drink abandon. There was no alley in Borrego Springs, so each night they’d clamber into a museum van and drive out of the valley into nearby hill towns. They brought their own ‘hammers’-specially weighted balls for competition bowling. All through these nights, in spite of the active jukebox in the Quonset hut, she kept singing a woeful song: Better days in jail, with your back turned towards the wall… Though there was no sadness in her during this time. It was as if she was expecting the sadness of that song to reach her eventually, almost knowing there would be a conflict with Cullis when he arrived.

Lovers who read stories or look at paintings about love do so supposedly for clarity. But the more confusing and anarchic the story, the more those caught in love will believe it. There are only a few great and trustworthy love drawings. And in these works is an aspect that continues to remain unordered and private, no matter how famous they become. They bring no sanity, give just a blue tormented light.

The writer Martha Gellhorn had said, ‘The best relationship is with someone who lives five blocks away with a great sense of humour and who is preoccupied with his work.’ Well, that was her lover Cullis, though make it five states, make it five thousand miles. Make him married.

It seemed they loved each other most when they were apart. They were too careful when together, when the extremes of possible joy remained dangerous. She had been content in Borrego Springs with just their phone conversations. Women love distance, he’d said to her once.

What happened in Borrego Springs took place during their first night together. She needed to be at work early the next day: something unexpected had come up. A beautiful new tusk, but she didn’t tell him that. He had arrived a few hours earlier, having flown a thousand miles. His sullenness and annoyance at the change of weekend plans forced an old fury out of her. They had been singing their fucking arias of romance with limits for too long.

She rose from the bed in Borrego and took a shower sitting on the edge of the bath, facing the rain of it. Her tight, furious wrists. Steam filled the room. A week before Cullis’s arrival she had booked a room for him, for them, at the Una Palma Motel. He was to come in on the eight-o’clock bus from the airport on a Friday night to coincide with her three-day weekend. Then they had unearthed the tusk.

Meeting him at the bus depot she gave him a carefully selected sprig of desert lavender, which he broke trying to insert into his buttonhole.

A good archaeologist can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel. If a bone had been grazed by any kind of stone, Sarath, she knew, could follow such grains of evidence to their likely origin. As she had taken the few fragments of the damaged section of Sailor’s skull and reconstructed it with a glue gun. But in Colombo she couldn’t locate half the equipment she and Sarath really needed, equipment they had in excess in America. It would be picks and shovels, strings and stones. She’d gone to Cargill’s department store and picked up a couple of shaving brushes and a whisk.

When Sarath finally arrived at the Archaeological Offices, he joined her by the wall maps. It was a few days after their evening on Galle Face Green with his brother. She had tried reaching Sarath the next day, but he seemed to have disappeared, gone to ground. In the meantime a package had come for her from Chitra, so during that first afternoon she consumed the entomologist’s badly typed notes, then pulled a road map out of her bag.

Now, on this Sunday morning, Sarath had called at dawn, apologizing not for the hour but for being away, out of touch. He’d asked her to meet him at the offices, ‘in an hour,’ he said. ‘You know how to get there? You go right from your place and fall into Buller’s Road.’

She’d hung up, looking at the luxury of the bed, and went off to shower.

‘I have samples from the first burial site,’ he said, ‘taken from the cranial cavities. Probably from a swamp. They buried him temporarily in wet earth. It makes sense. Less digging. They could have put him in a paddy field, then taken him later to the restricted area and hidden him there to disguise the fact that he was contemporary. Anyway, I think the original burial was in this general vicinity’-he pointed-‘Ratnapura district. That’s southeast from here. We need to check the water tables.’

‘Somewhere where there are fireflies,’ she said. And he looked at her with a blank face.

‘We can be more specific, we can make a smaller radius,’ she continued. ‘Fireflies. So not a busy settlement. Somewhere more open. Like a riverbank that people do not go to. Chitra, the entomologist I told you about-those marks that looked like freckles, she came to the boat and studied them and made notes. She has hundreds of charts of insect life on the island. She said it was pupae-encagle glue, from the “shout-and-die” cicadas-you find them in forest areas like Ritigala. Here-she drew a map for us of the possible places-they are all further south, which links with your soil results. Somewhere on the outskirts of Sinharaja Forest, maybe.’

‘On the north side of it,’ he said. ‘The soil on the other peripheries wouldn’t fit.’

‘Okay, then this stretch here.’

Sarath drew a rectangle with a red felt pen on the glass that covered the map. Weddagala to the west, Moragoda to the east. Ratnapura and Sinharaja.

‘Somewhere in here is a swamp or small lake, a pokuna in the forest,’ he said, clarifying.

‘Who else is there, I wonder.’

Since the Archaeological Offices were deserted, they took their time collecting whatever maps and books they needed. Sarath was walking in and out of the building, packing the jeep he had borrowed. She had no idea how long they would be away from Colombo, or where they would stay. Another of Sarath’s favourite rest houses perhaps. While he looked through various soil charts she grabbed a field manual from the library shelves.

‘So we stay where? In Ratnapura?’ She said it loud. She liked the echoes in this large building.