Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Sarath’s wife visited Gamini once in Emergency Services, putting her arm through his as he came off duty. She said that she and Sarath were offering Gamini a place to stay, he had become too much of a vagabond. She was the only person who could say things like that to him. He took her to lunch, ate more than he had eaten in months, and curled her interrogation back onto her specific interests. All through the meal he just looked at her face and arms. He was as gracious as possible, didn’t touch her once, the only touch was when her arm had slipped through his as they met. When they separated he didn’t embrace her. She would have felt how thin his frame was.

There was no talk about Sarath. Only about her work at the radio station. She knew he had always liked her. He knew he’d always loved her, her busy arms, the strange lack of confidence in one who seemed to him so complete. He had met her the first time at a fancy-dress party in someone’s garden outside Colombo. She was in a man’s tuxedo, her hair swept back. He began a conversation and danced twice with her, disguised, so she didn’t know who he was. This was years earlier, before either of them was married.

Who he was, that night, was her fiancé’s brother.

He proposed marriage to her twice during the party. They were on the cadju terrace. He had the paint and the tattered clothes of a yakka on him, and she half laughed him off, saying she was engaged already. They had been talking seriously about the war and she thought his proposal was a joke, simply a wish for diversion. So he talked about how long he had known the gardens they were in, how many times he had come here. You must know my fiancé, she said, he comes here too. But he claimed not to recall the name. They were both hot and she untied her bow tie so it hung loose. ‘You too must be hot. All this stuff on you.’ ‘Yes.’ There was a pond with a bamboo fountain spout that tilted over when it filled, and he kneeled by it. ‘Don’t get paint in the pond, there are fish.’ So he unwrapped the turban he was wearing, and soaked it and began wiping the colours from his face. When he got up she saw who he was, her fiancé’s brother, and he asked her to marry him again.

Now, years later, after his own marriage had ended, they walked out of the cafeteria and onto the street where her car was. He kept a distance as he said good-bye, not touching her, just that offhand hungry gaze, that offhand wave to the departing vehicle.

Gamini woke in the almost empty ward of the hospital. He showered and dressed, watched intently by the patient next to him. It was still before dawn and the grand staircase was dark. He walked down slowly, not putting his hand on the banister, which hid who knew what in that old wood. He passed Pediatrics, Communicable Diseases, Bone Work, and entered the front courtyard, bought some tea and a potato roti at the street canteen and consumed them there, under a tree full of loud birds. Apart from a few moments like this he was indoors most of the day. He’d come out and sit on a bench. He’d tell one of the interns to wake him after an hour in case he fell asleep. The boundary between sleep and waking was a cotton thread so faintly coloured he often crossed it unawares. When he performed night surgery he would sometimes feel as if he were cutting into flesh surrounded only by night and stars. He would wake from this reverie and be back in the building, recognize it once more fitting itself around him. His duties made him come upon strangers and cut them open without ever knowing their names. He rarely spoke. It seemed he did not approach people unless they had a wound, even if he couldn’t see it-the orderly yawning in the hall, the visiting politician Gamini refused to be photographed with.

Nurses read the charts out to him as he scrubbed. They loved working with him; he was strangely popular though unforgiving. He was brutal in his decisions when he realized he couldn’t save the body he was working on. ‘Enough,’ he would say, and walk out. ‘Basta,’ someone who’d been abroad said, and he laughed by the swinging door. It was almost a moment of human conversation. Gamini knew he had never been good company; small talk plunged to its death around him. Now and then a night nurse woke him and asked for help. She would be cautious, but he would wake quickly and then walk with her in just a sarong to hold an intravenous over a struggling child. Then he would slip back to his borrowed bed. ‘I owe you a favour,’ the nurse would say as he was leaving her. ‘You don’t owe anyone favours. Wake me anytime you need help.’

Her light on all night.

Sometimes bodies washed in onto the shore, the combers throwing them onto the beaches. On the Matara coast, or at Wellawatta, or by St. Thomas ’s College in Mount Lavinia where they, Sarath and Gamini, had learned to swim as children. These were the victims of politically motivated murders-victims of torture in the house at Gower Street or a house off the Galle Road-lifted into the air by helicopter, flown a couple of miles out to sea and dropped through the fathoms of air. But only a few of these ever came back as evidence into the arms of the country.

Inland the bodies came down the four main rivers-the Mahaveli Ganga, the Kalu Ganga, the Kelani Ganga, the Bentota Ganga. All of them were eventually brought to Dean Street Hospital. Gamini had chosen not to deal with the dead. He avoided the south-wing corridors, where they brought the torture victims to be identified. Interns listed the wounds and photographed the bodies. Still, once a week, he went over the reports and the photographs of the dead, confirmed what was assumed, pointed out fresh scars caused by acid or sharp metal, and gave his signature. He was running on the energy of pills when he arrived to do this, and spoke quickly into a tape recorder left for him by an Amnesty man; he stood by the windows so he could get more light on the terrible photographs, covering the faces with his left hand, the pulse in his wrist jumping. He read out the number of the file, gave his interpretation and signature. The darkest hour of the week.

He walked away from the week’s pile of photographs. The doors opened and a thousand bodies slid in, as if caught in the nets of fishermen, as if they had been mauled. A thousand bodies of sharks and skates in the corridors, some of the dark-skinned fish thrashing…

They had begun covering the faces on the photographs. He worked better this way, and there was no danger of his recognizing the dead.

The joke was that he had entered the medical profession because he assumed it would have a nineteenth-century pace. He liked its manner of amateur authority. There was the anecdote about Dr. Spittel carrying a body out of a hospital when lights failed during a night operation in Kandy, placing it on a bench in the parking lot and aiming car headlights onto the patient. A quietly heroic life remembered in a few such stories. That was the satisfaction. He’d be remembered the way a cricketer was who played one classic innings on an afternoon in 1953, his name emerging in a street baila for a week or two. Famous in a song.

As a boy, in the months when he fought off the fate of diphtheria, Gamini would lie on a mat during his afternoon sleeps and wish only for the life that his parents had. Whatever career he chose, he wanted it to move with their style and pace. To rise early and work until a late lunch, then sleep and conversation, then drop in at the office once more, briefly. His father’s and grandfather’s law offices took up one wing of the family’s large house on Greenpath Road. He was never allowed into the mysterious warrens during the workday when he was younger, but at five p.m. he would carry a glass filled with amber fluid, push the swing door with his foot and enter. There were squat filing cabinets and small desk fans. He said hullo to his father’s dog and then placed the drink on his father’s table.