Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

For the three days of the week when Sarath was away in Colombo, there was little communication between her and Ananda, the eye-painter turned drunk gem-pit worker turned head-restorer. They shuffled about each other, rattling around the house, basic courtesies having dropped away after the first day. She continued to see this project as Sarath’s folly.

In the evenings she carried whatever equipment might be damaged by rain into the granary. By then Ananda would be drinking. It hadn’t become serious until he began working on the head. Now he was easily annoyed if his food had been moved around in the kitchen or if he cut himself with the X-acto, as he was always doing. Once, he shouldered his way into the afternoon sunlight and found her taking some bone measurements, and as he passed her his sarong brushed the table. She barked at him, so he turned in a fury and yelled back at her. This was followed by a silent and even subtler fury. He stalked to his room and she half expected the head to come rolling out.

She went looking for him that night, walking out of the house with a lamp. She was relieved he had not shown up for dinner (they cooked their own meals but ate together, silently). By ten-thirty he was still not back, and before she locked up the house-something he usually did-she felt she should make a brief gesture of searching for him, so with the lamp she walked out into the darkness. And he was there on a low wall, passed out, wearing just his sarong. She pulled him to his feet and staggered back with his weight and arms all over her.

Anil wasn’t fond of drunks. She found nothing humorous or romantic about them. In the hallway, where she had steered him, he fell to the floor and was soon asleep. There was no way of waking him and getting him to move. She went to her room and returned with her Walkman and a tape. A little vengeance. She put the earphones on his head, switched the Walkman on. Tom Waits singing ‘Dig, Dig, Dig’ from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs channeled itself into his inner brain, and he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him, and finally ripped off the wires attached to his head.

She sat on the courtyard steps. The release of the moon so it stared down on what had been once the Wickramasinghe home. She buzzed the tape forward to Steve Earle’s ‘Fearless Heart,’ with its intricate swagger. No one but Steve Earle for her in the worst times. There was a thump in her blood, a sexual hip in her movement, when she heard any of his songs of furious loss. So she moved half-dancing into the courtyard, past the skeleton of Sailor. It was a clear night and she could leave him there.

But undressing in her room she thought of him under the claustrophobia of plastic and went out and unpinned the sheets. So the wind and all the night were in Sailor. After the burnings and the burials, he was on a wooden table washed by the moon. She walked back to her room, the glory of the music now gone.

There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be the long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck. Or she sat above him and watched him come into her fast hand movements. The precise and inarticulate sounds of each witnessed by the other.

Ananda drifted in front of her-the emaciated body of a serious drinker, still shirtless. He rubbed his arms and bony chest with his hands, peering around the courtyard unaware that she was in one of its dark corners.

At her worktable he carefully put his hands behind him so as to be sure not to disturb anything, and bent over, looking through those thick spectacles at her calipers, the weight charts, as if he were within the hush of a museum. He bent down further and sniffed at the objects. A mind of science, she thought. Yesterday she had noticed how delicate his fingers were, dyed ochre as the result of his work.

Now Ananda picked up the skeleton and carried it in his arms.

She was in no way appalled by what he was doing. There had been hours when, locked in her investigations and too focussed by hours of intricacy, she too would need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightning of politics raised his hands at the last minute, so they were broken. Ananda held Sailor and walked slowly with him and placed him back on the table, and it was then he saw Anil. She nodded imperceptibly to show there was no anger in her. Slowly rose and walked over to him. A small yellow leaf floated down and slipped into the skeleton’s ribs and pulsed there.

She saw the two moons caught in the mirror of Ananda’s glasses. It was a ramshackle pair-the lenses knitted onto the frame with wire and the stems wrapped in old cloth, rag really, so he could wipe or dry his fingers on them. Anil wished she could trade information with him, but she had long forgotten the subtleties of the language they once shared. She would have told him what Sailor’s bone measurements meant in terms of posture and size. And he-God knows what insights he had.

In the afternoons when Ananda could go no further with the skull’s reconstruction, he took it all apart, breaking up the clay. Strangely. It seemed a waste of time to her. But early the next morning he would know the precise thickness and texture to return to and could re-create the previous day’s work in twenty minutes. Then he thought and composed the face a further step. It was as if he needed the warm-up of the past work to rush over so he could move with more confidence into the uncertainty that lay ahead. Thus there was nothing to see if she entered his room when he was not working. After just ten days, the room was more like a nest-rags and padding, mud and clay, colours daubed everywhere, the large letters above him on the wall.

Still, on this night, without words, there seemed to be a pact. The way he had respected the order of her tools, touching nothing, the way he raised Sailor into his arms. She saw the sadness in Ananda’s face below what might appear a drunk’s easy sentiments. The hollows that seemed gnawed at. Anil put out her hand and touched his forearm, and then left him alone in the courtyard. For the next few days they went back to their mutual silences. It was possible he had been very drunk that night and remembered nothing about it. Two or three times a day he would put on one of the old 78s and stand in his doorway, looking out at whatever was going on in her life in that courtyard.

A t six in the morning she dressed, then began walking the mile to the school. A few hundred yards before she climbed the hill, the road narrowed into a bridge, a lagoon on one side, a salt river on the other. This is where Sirissa would start to see the teenagers, some with catapults hanging off their shoulders, some smoking. They would acknowledge her with their eyes but never speak to her, whereas she would always give a greeting. Later, when they saw her on the school grounds, they wouldn’t acknowledge her in any way. She would turn after she had gone five yards past them at the bridge, still moving away from them, to catch their curious watching of her. She was not that much older. And they were hungry in their search for a pose, and perhaps only one or two of them would have a knowledge already of women. They were aware of Sirissa’s silk-like hair, her litheness as she turned around to look at them, as she kept on walking-a sensual gesture they came to expect.