Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

The soldier leaned into the jeep and lifted out her shoulder bag and emptied it noisily on the hood. Everything out there in the sun, a pair of glasses and a pen sliding off onto the tarmac, where he let them remain. When she moved forward to pick them up he put his hand out. In the noon sunlight he slowly handled every object in front of him: unscrewed and sniffed a small bottle of eau de cologne, looked at the postcard with the bird, emptied her wallet, inserted a pencil into a cassette and twisted it silently. There was nothing of real value in her bag, but the slowness of his actions embarrassed and irritated her. He opened the back of her alarm clock and pulled out the battery, and when he saw the packets of batteries still sealed in plastic, he collected them too, and gave them to another soldier, who carried them to a sandbagged cave on the side of the road. Leaving the bag and its contents, the soldier walked away and signalled them on, without even looking back. ‘Don’t do anything,’ she heard Sarath say from the darkness of the jeep.

She gathered her things into the bag and got into the passenger seat.

‘The batteries are essential for making homemade bombs,’ Sarath explained.

‘I know that,’ she snapped back. ‘I know that.’

As they drove away she turned to see Ananda, unconcerned, twirling a pencil.

A walawwa in Ekneligoda, the house belonging to a family named Wickramasinghe, who had lived in it for five generations. The last Wickramasinghe, an artist, had lived there during the 1960s. After his death the two-hundred-year-old house was taken over by the Archaeological Society and Historical Board. (There was a distant family member connected with archaeology.) But when the region became unsafe and rife with disappearances, the building was no longer inhabited, and like a well that has gone dry it took on a sense of absence.

Sarath had come to this family estate for the first time as a boy, when his younger brother was expected to die. ‘Diphtheria,’ they had said. ‘Something white in the mouth,’ the doctors had whispered to his parents. So before Gamini was brought home from the hospital, Sarath, along with his favourite books, was packed into the car and driven to Ekneligoda, out of harm’s way. The Wickramasinghes were travelling in Europe, so for two months the thirteen-year-old, looked after by just an ayah, ranged into their gardens, drew maps of the mongoose paths in the thickets, created imaginary towns and neighbours. While on Greenpath Road in Colombo the family closed their doors and prepared to look after the dying younger son, ensconced like a small prince and armed with the secret of death he himself did not know about.

In his thirties Sarath would visit the house again whenever field trips brought him into the region, but he had not been back for at least a decade, and now the dishevelled vacuum of the building and grounds depressed him. Still, he knew where the old keys were hidden on the lower strut of the fence, found the same eternal path of the mongoose through the thornbush thicket in the lower garden.

With Anil and Ananda at his side, he opened all the rooms so they could each choose a work space and bedroom, then locked the unwanted rooms once more. They would camp out in the smallest space needed, not sprawl over the property. He walked with Anil through a house that now seemed much smaller to him, and he felt himself to be in two eras. He described the paintings that had been on the walls in an earlier decade, when he had lived there for two months and evolved into a privacy he had perhaps never fully emerged from. Few survive diphtheria, it had been emphasized to him. And he had accepted with certainty the likelihood of his brother’s death, that he would soon be the only son.

Now the whisper of Anil’s foot was beside him. Then her quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’ They’d entered a room off the courtyard, where someone had charcoalled two Sinhala words in giant script on the walls. MAKAMKRUKA. And on the wall opposite, MADANARAGA. ‘What’s that? Are those names?’ ‘No.’ He reached up so his hand could touch the brown lettering.

‘Not names. A makamkruka is-it’s difficult to describe-a man who is a makamkruka is a churner, an agitator. Someone who perhaps sees things more truly by turning everything upside down. He’s a devil almost, a yaksa. Though a makamkruka, strangely, guards the sacred spot in a temple ground. No one knows why this kind of person is honoured with such a responsibility.’

‘And?’

‘The other is stranger. Madanaraga means “with the speed of love,” sexual arousal. It’s the kind of word you find in ancient romances. Not in the vernacular.’

While Ananda laboured over the head, Anil was to continue work on Sailor’s skeleton, trying to discover among other things his ‘markers of occupation.’ She had been with Sarath for more than three weeks now, and they were ‘in the field,’ not in contact with Sarath’s political networks in the city. No one in Colombo would expect them to be camped in this family estate, close to the area where Sailor had possibly been buried the first time. Perhaps Sailor was locally ‘important’ or ‘identifiable.’ Here they would be closer to the source and they would be undisturbed.

The first morning they were there, Ananda Udugama had gone off without a word. Leaving Sarath frustrated and Anil carefully silent. She set up her workbench and temporary lab in a courtyard under a banyan’s ragged shade and brought Sailor out with her. Sarath decided to do his own research work in the grand dining room. He would occasionally have to return to Colombo for supplies and to report in. There were no telephones, except for his on-again, off-again cell phone, and they felt isolated from the rest of the country.

Ananda had in fact, that first morning, woken early and walked to the nearby village market, bought some fresh toddy and established himself by the public well. He chatted with anyone who sat near him, shared his few cigarettes and watched the village move around him, with its distinct behaviour, its local body postures and facial characteristics. He wanted to discover what the people drank here, whether there was a specific diet that would puff up cheeks more than usual, whether lips would be fuller than in Batticaloa. Also the varieties of hairstyle, the quality of eyesight. Did they walk or cycle. Was coconut oil used in food and hair. He spent a day in the village and then went into the fields and collected mud in three sacks. He could mix the two browns and one black into a variety of shades. Then he bought several bottles of arrack in the village and returned to the walawwa.

He would be up at dawn and would park himself in a square of sun and move as it moved, the way a cat would. He may have looked at the skull now and then, but that was all. He would go to the village and return with kite papers in several colours, suet, food dyes and one day two old turntables and a random selection of 78s.

Of all the possible spaces in the large house Ananda had chosen the room the artist had worked in. He knew nothing about the history of the place but liked the light within this room, where the two words MAKAMKRUKA and MADANARAGA were written. The courtyard where Anil worked was just outside. The morning he actually began to work on the skull she heard music coming from his room. A tenor burst into song, sang with energy for a few moments, then slowed before the song ended. Curious, she went in, to see Ananda winding the gramophone. Beside it was another turntable, where he was moulding a clay base, on which the skull rested. His free hand could spin it to the left or right like a potter’s wheel. He was already working on the throat. She stepped back and out.

She recognized the technique of face construction. He had marked several pins with red paint to represent the various thicknesses of the flesh over the bone, and then placed a thin layer of plasticine on the skull, thinning or thickening it according to the marks on the pins. Eventually he would press finer layers of rubber eraser onto the clay to build the face. Collaged this way with various household objects it would look like a five-and-dime monster.