Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

It was always six-thirty a.m. when she reached the bridge. There would be a few prawn boats, a man up to his neck in the water, whose hands, out of sight, would be straightening the nets that had been dropped by his son from a boat during the night. The man moved in his quietness as she walked past him. From here Sirissa would reach the school in ten minutes, change in a cubicle, soak rags in a bucket, and begin cleaning the blackboards. Then sweep the rooms free of leaves that had slipped in through the grilled windows if there had been wind or a storm in the night. She worked in the empty school grounds until she heard the gradual arrival of the children, the teenagers, the older youths, like a gradual arrival of birds, voices deepening, as if it were a meeting called for in a jungle clearing. She would go among them and wipe clean the blackboards on the edge of the sand courtyard-used by the youngest children, who would sit on the earth in front of the teachers learning their Sinhala, their mathematics, their English: ‘The peacock is a beautiful bird… It has a long tail!’

There was a strict stillness during the morning classes. Then, at one in the afternoon, the courtyard filled with noise and bodies again, the school day completed, the students in their white uniforms scattering to three or four villages that fed the school, back into their other life. She ate her lunch at the desk in the math classroom. She opened up the leaf with the food inside, held it in her left hand and wandered beside the blackboard, collecting the food with three fingers and a thumb, not even looking down, but peering at the chalked numbers and symbols to catch and follow the path of the argument. She had been good at theorems in school. Their logic fell clearly in front of her. She could pick an edge and fold it neatly into an isosceles. She would always listen to the teachers as she worked in the flower beds or hallways. Now she washed her hands at the tap and began her walk home, a few teachers still in the hall, a few later cycling past her.

In the evenings during the government curfews she remained indoors, with a lamp and a book in her room. Her husband would be with her in a week. She’d turn a page and find a drawing of her by Ananda on a frail piece of paper he had tucked into the later reaches of the book’s plot. Or a line drawing of a wasp she had disliked, its giant eyes. She would have preferred to walk into the streets after dinner, for she loved the closing up of stores. The streets dark, the fall of electric light out of the shops. It was her favourite time, like putting away the senses one by one, this shop of drinks, this cassette store, these vegetables packed away, and the street growing darker and darker as she walked on. And a bicycle riding off with three sacks of potatoes balanced on it into even purer darkness. Into the other life. That existence. For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered. So Sirissa loved the calm of the night streets that no longer had commerce in them, like a theatre after the performance was over. Vimalarajah’s herb shop, or his brother Vimalarajah’s silver shop with a shutter halfway down its darkness, the light slowly dwarfed till it revealed just an inch under the metal door, a line of gold varnish, and then the turning off of a switch so that horizon disappeared. The air would breeze around her dress as she imagined herself walking without curfew. The pigeons settled in among the lightbulbs spelling out the name Cargill’s. So many things happened during the feathers of night. The frantic running, the terrified, the scared, the pea-brain furious and tired professional men of death punishing another village of dissent.

At five-thirty in the morning, Sirissa wakes and bathes herself at the well behind the house she is living in. She dresses, eats some fruit, and leaves for the school. It is the same twenty-five-minute walk she is familiar with. She knows she will turn lazily after passing the boys on the bridge. There will be the familiar birds, Brahminy kites, perhaps a flycatcher. The road narrows. A hundred yards ahead of her is the bridge. Lagoon on the left. Salt river on the right. This morning there are no fishermen and it is an empty road. She is the first to walk it, being a servant at the school. Six-thirty a.m. Nobody to whirl for, her gesture that shows she knows she is equal to them. She is about ten yards from the bridge when she sees the heads of the two students on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old… she doesn’t know or care. She sees two more heads on the far side of the bridge and can tell even from here that she recognizes one of them. She would shrink down into herself, go back, but she cannot. She feels something is behind her, whatever is the cause of this. She desires to become nothing at all. Mind capable of nothing. She does not even think of releasing them from this public gesture. Cannot touch anything because everything feels alive, wounded and raw but alive. She begins running forward, past their eyes, her own shut dark until she is past them. Up the hill towards the school. She keeps running forward, and then she sees more.

Anil stood lost in the stricture of no movement, in a precise focus of thought. She had no idea how long she had been there in the courtyard, how long she had been thinking through all the possible trajectories of Sailor, but when she came out of it and moved, her neck felt as if it had an arrow in it.

The central truism in her work was that you could not find a suspect until you found the victim. And in spite of their knowledge that Sailor had probably been killed in this district, in spite of details of age and posture, her theorizing of height and weight, in spite of the “head composition” that she had not much faith in, it seemed unlikely that they would identify him; they still knew nothing about the world Sailor had come from.

And in any case, if they did identify him, if they did discover the details of his murder, what then? He was a victim among thousands. What would this change?

She remembered Clyde Snow, her teacher in Oklahoma, speaking about human rights work in Kurdistan: One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. She and Sarath both knew that in all the turbulent history of the island’s recent civil wars, in all the token police investigations, not one murder charge had been made during the troubles. But this could be a clear case against the government.

However, without identifying Sailor, they had no victim yet.

Anil had worked with teachers who could take a seven-hundred-year-old skeleton and discover through evidence of physical stress or trauma in those bones what the person’s profession had been. Lawrence Angel, her mentor at the Smithsonian, could, from just the curvature of a spine to the right, recognize a stonemason from Pisa, and from thumb fractures among dead Texans tell that they had spent long evenings gripping the saddle on mechanical barroom bulls. Kenneth Kennedy at Cornell University remembered Angel identifying a trumpet player from the scattered remains in a bus crash. And Kennedy himself, studying a first-millennium mummy of Thebes, discovered marked lines on the flexor ligaments of the phalanges and theorized the man was a scribe, the marks attributed to his constantly holding a stylus.

Ramazzini in his treatise on the diseases of tradesmen had begun it all, talking of metal poisoning among painters. Later the Englishman Thackrah spoke of pelvic deformations among weavers who sat for hours at their looms. (‘Weaver’s bottom,’ Kennedy noted, may have led to Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Comparisons were made because of similar anatomical ailments between javelin throwers among Neolithic Saharans of the Niger and modern golf professionals.