Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

These were the markers of occupation…

The night before, Anil had leafed through Kennedy’s charts in Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton, one of her constant travelling companions. On Sailor’s bones she could find no precise marker of occupational stress. As she stood utterly still in the courtyard, she realized there were two possible versions of a life that she could deduce from the skeleton in front of her. And the two aspects of the skeleton did not logically fit together. The first, from her reading of the bones, suggested ‘activity’ above the height of the shoulder. He had worked with his arms stretched out, reaching up or forward. A man who painted walls perhaps, or chiselled. But it appeared to be a harder activity than painting. And the arm joints showed a symmetrical use, so both arms had been active. His pelvis, trunk and legs also gave the suggestion of agility, something like the swivel of a man on a trampoline. Acrobat? Circus performer? Trapeze, because of the arms? But how many circuses were around in the Southern Province during the emergency? She remembered there had been many roaming ones in her childhood. And she remembered once seeing a children’s book on extinct animals where one of the extinct creatures was an acrobat.

The other version of him was different. The left leg had been broken badly, in two places. (These wounds were not a part of his murder. She could tell the breaks had occurred about three years before his death.) And the heel bones-the heel bones suggested an alternate profile completely, a man static and sedentary.

Anil looked around the courtyard. Sarath was barely visible, sitting in the darkness of the house, while Ananda squatted comfortably in front of the head on the turntable, a lit beedi in his mouth. She could imagine the squint of his eyes behind his spectacles. She passed him as she walked to the granary cupboards. Then moved back.

‘Sarath,’ she said quietly, and he came out. He sensed the edge to her voice.

‘I- Can you tell Ananda not to move. To stay as he is. That I’m going to have to touch him, okay?’

Sarath’s glasses were on his nose. He looked at her.

‘Do you understand me?’

‘Not really. You want to touch him?’

‘Just tell him not to move, okay?’

As soon as Sarath entered his work space, Ananda threw a cloth over the head. There was a brief conversation, then hesitant monosyllabic agreement repeated after each of Sarath’s phrases. She walked in slowly and kneeled beside Ananda, but as soon as she touched him he jumped up.

She turned away in frustration.

‘Ne, ne!’ Sarath tried to explain once more. It took a while for them to arrange Ananda into exactly the same position he had been in.

‘Get him to keep it taut, as if he was working.’

Anil took hold of Ananda’s ankle in both hands. She pressed her thumbs into the muscle and cartilege, moved them up a few inches above his ankle bone. There was a dry laugh from Ananda. Then down to the heel again. ‘Ask him why he works like this.’ She was told by Sarath that he was comfortable.

‘It’s not comfortable,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the foot is relaxed. There’s stress. The ligament is being stretched against the bone. There will be a permanent bruise to it. Ask him.’

‘What?’

‘Ask him why he works this way.’

‘He’s a carver. That’s how he works.’

‘But does he usually squat like this?’

Sarath asked the question and the two men rattled back and forth.

‘He said he got used to squatting in the gem mines. The height down there is only about four feet. He was in them for a couple of years.’

‘Thank you. Please, will you thank him…’

She was excited.

‘Sailor worked in a mine too. Come here, look at the strictures on the ankle bones of the skeleton-this is what Ananda has under his flesh. I know this. This was my professor’s area of specialty. See this sediment on the bone, the buildup. I think Sailor worked in one of the mines. We need to get a chart of the mines in this area.’

‘Are you talking about gem mines?’

‘It could be anything. Also, this is just one aspect of his life, the rest is very different. He must have done something more active before he broke his leg. So we have a story about him, you see. A man who was active, an acrobat almost, then he was injured and had to work in a mine. What other mines do they have around here?’

There followed two days of storms when they had to stay indoors. As soon as the bad weather ended, Anil borrowed Sarath’s cell phone, found an umbrella and went into a light rain. She clambered down a slope away from the trees and stalked across to the far edge of the paddy field, to where Sarath had told her there was the clearest reception.

She needed communication with the outside world. There was too much solitude in her head. Too much Sarath. Too much Ananda.

Dr. Perera at Kynsey Road Hospital answered the phone. It took a while for him to remember who she was, and he was startled to be told that she was speaking to him from a paddy field. What did she want?

She had wanted to talk to him about her father, knew she had been skirting the memory of him since her arrival on the island. She apologized for not calling and meeting him before she left Colombo. But on the phone Perera seemed muted and wary.

‘You sound sick, sir. You should take a lot of liquids. A viral flu comes like that.’

She would not tell him where she was-Sarath had warned her of that-and when he asked for the second time she pretended she could not hear, said, ‘Hello… hello? Are you there, sir?’ and hung up.

Anil moves in silence, the energy held back. Her body taut as an arm, the music brutal and loud in her head, while she waits for the rhythm to angle off so she can open her arms and leap. Which she does now, throwing her head back, her hair a black plume, back almost to the level of her waist. Throws her arms too, to hold the ground in her back flip, her loose skirt having no time to discover gravity and drop before she is on her feet again.

It is wondrous music to dance alongside-she has danced to it with others on occasions of joy and gregariousness, carousing through a party with, it seemed, all her energy on her skin, but this now is not a dance, does not contain even a remnant of the courtesy or sharing that is part of a dance. She is waking every muscle in herself, blindfolding every rule she lives by, giving every mental skill she has to the movement of her body. Only this will lift her backward into the air and pivot her hip to send her feet over her.

A scarf tied tight around her head holds the earphones to her. She needs music to push her into extremities and grace. She wants grace, and it happens here only on these mornings or after a late-afternoon downpour-when the air is light and cool, when there is also the danger of skidding on the wet leaves. It feels as if she could eject herself out of her body like an arrow.

Sarath sees her from the dining room window. He watches a person he has never seen. A girl insane, a druid in moonlight, a thief in oil. This is not the Anil he knows. Just as she, in this state, is invisible to herself, though it is the state she longs for. Not a moth in a man’s club. Not the carrier and weigher of bones-she needs that side of herself too, just as she likes herself as a lover. But now it is herself dancing to a furious love song that can drum out loss, ‘Coming In from the Cold,’ dancing the rhetoric of a lover’s parting with all of herself. She thinks she is most sane about love when she chooses damning gestures against him, against herself, against them together, against eros the bittersweet, consumed and then spat out in the last stages of their love story. Her weeping comes easy. It is for her in this state no more than sweat, no more than a cut foot she earns during the dance, and she will not stop for any of these, just as she would not change herself for a lover’s howl or sweet grin, then or anymore.