Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

He snored loudly. When his wife was leaving him, Gamini accused her of abandoning him because he snored. Now the boys around him were silent so they would not disturb him.

But he woke to someone shouting in pain. He went out and washed his face at the tap. By this time the cook had been brought over on a bicycle, and slowly, in Sinhala, Gamini ordered ten large meals to be shared among them, and made sure the cook put it on his bill. This had an influence. When the feast arrived surgery was stopped. The hotel staff had brought two bottles of beer for him. During the meal he remembered the disappearance of Dr. Linus Corea and wondered whether he himself would ever return to Colombo.

He worked into the night, bending over patients while someone on the other side of their beds held an old Coleman lamp. Some of the boys were delirious when they emerged from the influence of the pills. Who sent a thirteen-year-old to fight, and for what furious cause? For an old leader? For some pale flag? He had to keep reminding himself who these people were. Bombs on crowded streets, in bus stations, paddy fields, schools had been set by people like this. Hundreds of victims had died under Gamini’s care. Thousands couldn’t walk or use their bowels anymore. Still. He was a doctor. In a week he would be back working in Colombo.

After midnight he walked along the beach with an escort gunman to his hotel. There he noticed right away that the alarm clock he had bought in Kurunegala was missing. He climbed onto and slept on his sheetless bed.

Where did the secret war begin between him and his brother? It had begun with the desire to be the other, even with the impossibility of emulating him. Gamini would always remain in spirit the younger, unable to catch up, nicknamed ‘Meeya.’ The Mouse. And he loved his lack of responsibility, loved never being at the centre, while perceptive of what went on there. His parents much of the time weren’t even aware of him half buried in an armchair, reading a book, ears perked up, listening to their conversations faithful as a dog. Sarath loved history, their father loved law, Gamini burrowed away unknown. The mother who had wished to be a dancer in her youth now choreographed them all. She would remain mysterious to Gamini. The love she showed was a general affection, never specifically for him. He found it difficult to imagine her as his father’s lover. She seemed daughterless, simply keeping up with the three males in the house-a garrulous husband, an intelligent and bound-to-be-successful older son, and a second-born secretive one. Gamini. The Mouse.

The fact that neither brother wanted to follow his father into the family law firm left the mother defending everyone’s position-a foot in each son’s camp, a hand on her husband’s shoulder. In any case, they scattered. Sarath moved into archaeological studies and Gamini flung himself into medical school, but most of all into the world outside the family. The only way he visited them now was via the rumours of his wildness. If they had never really been too conscious of Gamini at home, his parents now met a legion of unsavory anecdotes about him. It appeared he wanted them to give up on him, and eventually, out of embarrassment, they did.

In fact he had loved that family world. Though later, in conversations with Sarath’s wife, she would argue, ‘What kind of family would call a child “the Mouse”?’ She could picture him in his youth, irrelevant to adult preoccupations, with his big ears, in that big armchair.

Though he didn’t mind. Thought it was true for all children. He and his brother had become content with aloneness, the lack of necessity for speaking. ‘Well, it drives me mad,’ Sarath’s wife retaliated. ‘It drives me mad about both of you.’ In conversations with her Gamini continued to see his childhood as a time of contentment, while she saw him as a soul who had only just survived, never secure in the love around him. ‘I was spoiled,’ he’d say. ‘You’re only secure when you are alone doing things on your own. You weren’t spoiled, you were ignored.’ ‘I’m not going through the rest of my life blaming my mother for my lack of kisses.’ ‘You could.’

He had loved his childhood, he thought to himself. He had loved the dark living rooms during the afternoons, following the path of ants on the balcony, the costumes he put together by taking clothes out of various almirahs and dressing up and singing in front of mirrors. And the grandeur of that chair remained with him. He wanted to go out and buy one just like it, now, an adult’s prerogative and whim. When he thought of succour, it was the chair he remembered, not a mother or a father. ‘I rest my case,’ Sarath’s wife said quietly.

And Sarath, for his parents, was the boy who walked the heavens. The three of them laughed and argued during dinner while Gamini watched their style and manner. By the time he was eleven he was proud of being a good mimic, could imitate the quizzical expressions of concerned dogs, for instance.

Still, he remained invisible, even to himself, seldom looking into mirrors save when dressed in costumes. He had an uncle who used to direct amateur theatrical productions, and once, alone in his house, Gamini had come across some outfits. He tried them on one by one, wound the record player, then danced over sofas, singing invented songs, until interrupted by the return of his aunt. Who had simply exclaimed, ‘Aha! So that’s what you do…’ And he was humiliated and embarrassed beyond measure or imagining. For years afterwards he judged himself vain, and as a result revealed even less of himself to others. He quietened, became barely aware of the subtler gestures within himself. Later he would be vivid only with strangers-in the storm of the last stages of a party or in the chaos of emergency wards. This was the state of grace. It was here that people could lose themselves as if in a dance, too intent on skills or desires to be conscious of their power while they chased romance or reacted to some emergency. He could be at the centre and still feel he was invisible. This was when his notoriousness began.

The barrier that separated him from his family during childhood remained in place. He did not want it dislodged, he did not want the universes brought together. He wasn’t self-conscious about this. The awareness of it was to come later in a terrible crisis and with clarity. He would be holding his brother and be aware that as far back as childhood he had known that for him the catalyst for the freedom and secrecy he always wanted was this benign brother. Gamini, beside Sarath years later, would say all this out loud to him, shocked at his own unlearned vengeance. When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children. There is always that murmuring conviction of family, like the sea around an island. So youth hides in the shape of something lean as a spear, or something as antisocial as a bark. And we become therefore more comfortable and intimate with strangers.

The Mouse insisted that for his final years of school he leave Colombo and go to boarding school at Trinity College in Kandy. In this way he was a good distance from his family for much of the year. He loved the slow-rocking train that took him away, up-country. He always loved trains, never bought a car, never learned to drive. In his twenties he luxuriated in the wind against his drunk head when he leaned into the noise and fear of tunnels, deep space around him. He enjoyed talking intimately and with humour to strangers; oh, he knew all this was a sickness-but he did not dislike it, this distance and anonymity.

He was tender, nervous and gregarious. After more than three years up north, working in the peripheral hospitals, he would become more obsessive. His marriage a year later failed almost instantly, and after that he was mostly alone. In surgery he asked for just one assistant. Others could watch and learn at a distance. He was never articulate in explaining what he did and what was going on. Never a good teacher but a good example.