Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

At this moment his body was yanked into the air and swivelled so that he now sat on his father’s lap, large dark arms around him. ‘Start at the beginning,’ he’d say, and Gamini proceeded to tell him about his day’s adventures, his day at school, what his mother had said when he came home. He was, in the early years, fully at ease with the family. When he looked back he never remembered anger or nervousness in the house. He recalled his parents gentle with each other. They were always conversing, sharing everything, and in bed he could hear the continuing hum of it like wool between the house and the world. He realized later that every dimension of his father’s world existed in the house. Clients came to him. There was a tennis court in the back where guests joined the family on weekends.

It was assumed that the two brothers would be part of the family firm. But Sarath left home, deciding not to be a lawyer. And a few years later, Gamini also betrayed those voices in the house and entered medical school.

Two months after his wife left him, Gamini collapsed from exhaustion, and the administration ordered a leave. He had nowhere to go, his home abandoned. He realized Emergency Services had become for him, even in its mad state, a cocoon, as his parents’ house had been. Everything that was of value to him took place there. He slept in the wards, he bought his meals from the street vendor just outside the hospital. Now he was being asked to step away from the world he had burrowed into, created around himself, this peculiar replica of childhood order.

He walked to Nugegoda, the neighbourhood where his house was, and banged on the locked door. He could smell cooking. A stranger appeared but would not open it. ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m Gamini.’ ‘So?’ ‘I live here.’ The man walked away and there were voices in the kitchen.

It was a while before Gamini realized they were going to ignore him. He crossed the small garden. The odour of the food was wonderful to him. He had never felt so hungry. He didn’t want the house, he wanted a home-cooked meal. He entered through the back door. Glancing around, he was conscious they were looking after the place much better than he had. The man who had ignored him was with two women. He knew none of them. He had thought at first his wife had sent relatives over. ‘Can I have some water?’

The man brought him a glass. Gamini heard children farther back in the bungalow and was pleased about that, that all the space was being used. He remembered something and asked if there was any mail. They brought him a stack of it. A letter from his wife, which he put in his pocket. Several cheques from the hospital. He opened them, signed a couple on the back and gave them to one of the women. Two others he kept for himself. The women gestured and he sat down to eat with them. String hoppers, pol sambol, chicken curry. Afterwards he strolled with a comfortably full stomach to the bank. He was flush. He phoned Quickshaw’s and hired a car and waited in the air-conditioned lobby of Grindlays until it rolled up. Gamini got in next to the driver.

‘To Trincomalee. Then to the Nilaveli Beach Hotel.’

‘No, no.’

He was expecting this. It was supposedly dangerous with guerrilla forces in the vicinity. ‘It will be quite safe, I’m a doctor. They don’t touch doctors, we’re like prostitutes. Here’s a Red Cross sign for the windshield. I’m hiring you for a week. You don’t have to like me or be polite. I’m not one of those who needs to be loved. Stop here.’

He got out of the car and climbed into the back seat, he needed to sprawl out. He was asleep by the time the car weaved itself out of Colombo. ‘Take the coast road,’ he murmured just before sleep. ‘Wake me up in Negombo.’

Gamini and the driver walked into the dark, sunless lobby of the old Negombo rest house. A small lamp by the front desk lit up the manager, who sat in front of a poorly painted mural of the sea, and Gamini, remembering something, turned around, looked through the door and saw the same scene in reality. They had a beer and went on. Near Kurunegala he asked the driver to take a side road. A few miles past Kurunegala, Gamini climbed out and asked the driver to meet him at the same place the next morning. It took a while for the driver to understand. Still, he wanted to be here for the night.

His father had brought him to the forest monastery nearby, in Arankale. He had brought him as a child, and every few years Gamini managed to revisit the place. As a war doctor he had come to have little faith, but he always felt a great peace here. With nothing much, just a light shirt and pants, no umbrella for the sunlight, no food, he made his way into the forest. Sometimes when he came here he saw that the place had been kept up; sometimes it had closed down like an eye in the forest.

There was the well. There was the corrugated sheet that made a roof over the porch where old monks slept. He could stay there. He could bathe at the well in the morning. He buttoned the breast pocket of his shirt so his glasses would not fall out and be lost.

…

A week later, Gamini stepped from the Nilaveli Beach Hotel compound and walked to the sea. He was very drunk. He had been shambling around in the deserted resort with a cook and a night manager and two women who cleaned the empty bedrooms and screamed whenever the cook attempted to push them into the swimming pool. They were always wrestling in the halls. On the beach he fell asleep, and when he woke there were gunmen around him laughing.

His sarong had half fallen off. He said, as clearly as he could in the two official languages, ‘I-am-a-doctor-’ and passed out again. The next time he woke up he was in a hut full of wounded boys. Seventeen years old. Sixteen years old. Some even younger. This was supposed to be his holiday and he said so to one of the gunmen. ‘I’m expected at dinner at seven. If I’m not there by seven-thirty they don’t serve-’

‘Yes, yes. But this-’ The man gestured with his arm all the way down the hut to the wounded. ‘There’s this, no?’

Gamini had been weaning himself off his pills and was in midstream, in his switch to alcohol, so he was not sure of his present level of drunkenness. He’d been sleeping a lot. He’d wake up and find himself in a stranger’s garden. It wasn’t so much the desire for sleep as the need for it. Inside a dream he’d be carrying bodies in and out of elevators. Elevators always made him claustrophobic, but they were better than the creaking vertigo of the stairs.

When the guerrillas found him curled up on the beach the sea had been at his ankles. They’d come looking for the tourist who was supposed to be a doctor. One of the women by the swimming pool had directed them to the beach.

Gamini walked up and down, looking at the bodies in the hut. Rags knotted around the wounds, no painkillers, no bandages. He sent a soldier to his hotel room with the key to get sheets they could tear up and to collect the plastic bag with various things that would be useful-aftershave, pills. The gunman returned wearing one of his shirts. Gamini shook the tablets out onto the table and cut them into quarters. There was going to be a problem with communication. He couldn’t speak Tamil well enough, they couldn’t speak Sinhala. There was just paltry English between Gamini and the leader.

It was late afternoon and he was hungry. He had missed the lunch sitting and the hotel staff was unbending. He asked the leader to send someone over to scare up some food for him. He hoped he was not going to hear gunshots in the distance. He began to work, moving down the line of the wounded.

Most would survive but would lose an arm or be impaired in some way. He had already seen the evidence of so many woundings in his brief ride through Trincomalee. He continued along the makeshift ward carrying a wooden pakispetti box, sat beside a boy and dressed his limbs with strips of sheet. Those he would operate on shortly were each given a quarter of one of his precious pills so they would be high when he worked on them. He was startled to see how strong the effect was of even this small section of pill; he’d been swallowing them whole for more than a year. Fifteen minutes after the patient swallowed the pill, three guerrillas held him firmly to the bed and Gamini sutured a gash. The air was so hot he had already taken off his shirt, tied rags around his wrists to stop the sweat from going down to his fingers. He needed to sleep, his eyes flickering, always a signal, and there was still no food. He came close to throwing a small tantrum, lay down beside the bodies and curled himself up into sleep.