Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘Do you think we can get a breakfast?’ she asked as they walked towards his car.

‘Are you married? Got a family?’

‘Not married. Not a swimmer.’

‘Right.’

‘The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies-one in the north, two in the south-using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are. I am just an archaeologist. This pairing by your commission and the government was not my idea-a forensic pathologist, an archaeologist, odd pairing, if you want my opinion. What we’ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerrilla separatists. Murders committed by all sides.’

‘I couldn’t tell who was worst. The reports are terrible.’

He ordered another tea and looked at the food that had arrived. She had specifically asked for curd and jaggery. When they were finished he said, ‘Come. I’ll take you to the ship. Let me show you where we will work…’

The Oronsay, a passenger liner in the old days of the Orient Line, had been gutted of all valuable machinery and luxury furnishings. It had once travelled between Asia and England -from Colombo to Port Said, sliding through the narrow-gauge waters of the Suez Canal and journeying on to Tilbury Docks. By the 1970s it made just local trips. The rooms of tourist class were broken apart to become a cargo hold. Tea, fresh water, rubber products and rice replaced difficult passengers, save for a few souls, such as nephews of shareholders of the shipping line looking for work and adventure. It remained a ship of the Orient, a vessel that could survive the heat of Asia, that still contained the smells of salt water, rust and oil, and the waft of tea in cargo.

For the last three years the Oronsay had been berthed permanently in an unused quay at the north end of Colombo harbour. The grand ship had now become essentially part of the land and was being used by Kynsey Road Hospital as a storage and work area. With limited lab space in the hospitals in Colombo, a section of the transformed liner was to be Sarath and Anil’s base.

They left Reclamation Street and walked up the gangplank.

She struck a match, and in the dark hold, light focussed and spilled up her arm. She saw the cotton thread of ‘protection’ on her left wrist, and then the match went out. In the month since the raksha bandhana had been tied on during a friend’s pirith ceremony it had lost its rose colour. When she pulled on a rubber glove in the laboratory, the thread was even paler under it, as if within ice.

Next to her Sarath turned on a torch he had located during the flare of her match, and they both moved forward behind the spoke of twitching light, towards the metal wall. When they reached it he banged hard with the flat of his hand and they heard movement in the room beyond, the scurrying of rats. He banged again, and again there were sounds of movement. She murmured, ‘Like a man and a woman scrambling out of bed when his wife comes home,’ then stopped. Anil didn’t know him well enough to taunt the structure of marriages. She was about to add, Honey, I’m home.

Honey, I’m home, she would say, crouching beside a corpse to ascertain the hour of death. The phrase came out caustic or tender, depending on her mood, mostly in a whisper as she put her hand out and held her palm a millimetre over the flesh to take in its body heat. Its. Not his or hers anymore.

‘Bang it once more,’ she asked him.

‘I’ll use the claw hammer.’ This time the metallic noise echoed into the dark space, and when it died down everything became silent.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘I’ll light a sulphur lamp.’ But Anil had worked in night quarries alongside sulphur brightness, or in basements made naked by it. The porous light revealed a large room, the remnants of a toppled saloon counter in the corner, behind which she later would find a chandelier. This was to be their storage space and work lab, claustrophobic, the odour of Lysol in the air.

She noticed Sarath had already begun using the space to store some of his archaeological findings. There were rock and bone fragments wrapped in clear plastic all over the floor, crates roped tight. Well, she hadn’t come here to deal with the Middle Ages.

He was saying something she could not hear, while unlocking boxes, bringing out the results of a recent dig.

‘… mostly sixth century. We think it was a sacred grave for monks, near Bandarawela.’

‘Were any skeletons found?’

‘So far three of them. And some fossilized wood pots of the same period. Everything fits into the same time pattern.’

She pulled her gloves on and lifted an old bone to test the weight. The dating seemed right.

‘The skeletons were wrapped in leaves, then cloth,’ he told her. ‘Then stones were placed on top of them, which slid down later through the rib cage into the chest area.’

Years after a body was buried there would be a small shift on the surface of the earth. Then a falling of that stone into the space left by decayed flesh, as if signalling the departure of a spirit. This was a ceremony of nature that always affected her. As a child in Kuttapitiya Anil had once stepped on the shallow grave of a recently buried chicken, her weight driving the air in the dead body out through its beak-there was a muffled squawk, and she’d leapt back with fear, her soul jostled, then clawed earth away, terrified she would see the creature blink. But it was dead, sand in its eyes. Anil was still haunted by what had occurred that afternoon. She had buried it once more and walked backwards away from the grave.

Now she picked a fragment of bone from the detritus pile and rubbed it. ‘This is from the same place? It doesn’t seem sixth-century.’

‘All this material comes from the monks’ burial midden, in the government archaeological preserve. Nobody else gets in.’

‘But this bone-it doesn’t come from that time.’

He had stopped what he was doing and was watching her.

‘It’s a government-protected zone. The skeletons were interred in natural hollows near the Bandarawela caves. Skeletons and loose bones. It’s unlikely you’d find anything from another era.’

‘Can we go there?’

‘I suppose so. Let me try and get a permit.’

They climbed back up onto the deck of the ship, into sunlight and noise. They could hear powerboats in the main channel of Colombo harbour, megaphones shouting out over the crowded waterways.

On her first weekend, Anil borrowed a car and drove to a village a mile beyond Rajagiriya. She parked by a lot tucked away behind trees, so small she could not believe a house existed there. Large speckled leaves of crotons spilled into the courtyard. There seemed to be no one at home.

The day after she arrived in Colombo Anil had sent a letter but there had been no reply. So she didn’t know if this would be a wasted trip, whether the silence meant acceptance or the address she had was extinct. She knocked, then looked through the bars of the window, turning around quickly as she heard someone come out onto the porch. Anil could hardly recognize the tiny aged woman. They stood facing each other. Anil stepped forward to embrace her. Just then a young woman walked out and watched them without a smile. Anil was aware of the stern eyes that were taking in this sentimental moment.