Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

When Anil leaned back the old woman was weeping; she put her hands out and ran them over Anil’s hair. Anil held her arms. There was a lost language between them. She kissed Lalitha on both cheeks, having to bend down to her because she was small and frail. When Anil let go, the old woman seemed stranded and the young woman-who was she?-stepped forward and led her to a chair, then left. Anil sat next to Lalitha and held her hand in silence, feeling an ache in herself. There was a large framed photograph on the table beside them, and Lalitha picked it up and passed it to Anil. Lalitha at fifty, and her ne’er-do-well husband, and her daughter, who held two babies in her arms. Her finger pointed to one of the babies and then into the darkness of the house. So the young woman was her granddaughter.

The young woman brought out a tray of sugar biscuits and tea, and for the next while the granddaughter talked in Tamil to Lalitha. Anil could understand only a few words when it was spoken, relying mostly on the manner of speech to understand what they were saying. She’d once said something to a stranger who had met her sentence with a blank stare, and had then been told that because of her lack of tone the listener didn’t understand the remark. He could not tell if it was a question, a statement or a command. Lalitha seemed embarrassed to be talking in Tamil and was whispering. The granddaughter, who barely looked at Anil after the first shaking of hands, was speaking loudly. She looked at Anil and said in English, ‘My grandmother wants me to take a picture of the two of you. To remember that you came here.’

She left once more, then returned with a Nikon and asked them to move closer to each other. She said something in Tamil and took one picture before Anil was quite ready. One seemed to be enough. She was certainly confident.

‘Do you live here?’ Anil asked.

‘No. This is my brother’s house. I work in the refugee camps up north. I try to come down every other weekend, so my brother and his wife can get away. How old were you when you last saw my grandmother?’

‘I was eighteen. I’ve been away since then.’

‘You have parents here?’

‘They’re dead. And my brother left. Just my father’s friends are still here.’

‘Then you don’t have any connection, do you?’

‘Just Lalitha. In a way she was the one who brought me up.’ Anil wanted to say more, to say that Lalitha was the only person who taught her real things as a child.

‘She brought all of us up,’ the granddaughter said.

‘Your brother, what does he-’

‘He’s quite a famous pop singer!’

‘And you work in the camps…’

‘Four years now.’

When they turned back to her, they saw Lalitha had fallen asleep.

She entered Kynsey Road Hospital and in the main hall found herself surrounded by hammering and yelling. They were breaking up the concrete floors in order to put down new tiles. Students and faculty rushed past her. No one appeared to be concerned that these sounds might be terrifying or exhausting to patients brought in to have wounds dressed or receive stabilizing drugs. Even worse was the voice of the senior medical officer, Dr. Perera, yelling to doctors and assistants, calling them devils for not keeping the building clean. It was so continuous, this yelling, that it seemed to go unheard by most who worked there.

He was a short, thin man, and he had probably only one ally in the building, a young woman pathologist, who, not realizing his reputation, had come to him for help once and thus, by startling him, was befriended. The rest of his colleagues in the building distanced themselves with a tidal wave of anonymous memos and posters. (One poster announced that he was wanted in Glasgow for murder.) Perera’s defense was that the staff was undisciplined, lazy, foolish, unclean and wrongheaded. It was only when he spoke in public that he switched to intellectual and subtle arguments about politics and its link to forensic pathology. His milder twin somehow seemed to have smuggled himself onto the stage.

Anil had heard one of his talks on her second night in Colombo and had been surprised that there were people with his opinions in positions of authority. But now, in the hospital, where she had come to use some equipment, she met the roving snapping dog that was the other side of his nature. She stood there openmouthed while exhausted staff, personnel and workmen and ambling patients veered away from Perera, creating a zone between themselves and this Cerberus.

A young man came up to her.

‘You are Anil Tissera, no?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You won the scholarship to America.’

She didn’t say anything. The foreign celebrity was being pursued.

‘Can you give a small talk, thirty minutes, on poisoning and snakebite?’

They probably knew just as much about snakebite as she did, and she was sure that this choice of subject was intentional-to level the playing field between the foreign-trained and the locally trained.

‘Yes, all right. When?’

‘Tonight?’ the young man said.

She nodded. ‘You contact me at lunch and tell me where.’ She was saying this as she swerved past Dr. Perera.

‘You!’

She turned to face the infamous senior medical officer.

‘You’re the new one, no? Tissera?’

‘Yes, sir. I heard your speech two nights ago. I’m sorry I-’

‘Your father was… this thing… right?’

‘What…’

‘Your father was Nelson K. Tissera?’

‘Yes.’

‘I worked with him at Spittel’s Hospital.’

‘Yes…’

‘Look at those padayas. Look-the rubbish here in the halls. This is a hospital, no? Bloody bastards, like a latrine. You are busy now?’

She was busy though she could have changed her plans. She was eager to speak to Dr. Perera and reminisce about her father, but she wanted to do so when he was decaffeinated, calm and alone, not in the midst of a fury. ‘I’ve got a government appointment, I’m afraid, sir. But I’m in Colombo for a while. I hope we can meet.’

‘Your dress is Western, I see.’

‘It’s a habit.’

‘You’re the swimmer, no?’

She walked away, nodding exaggeratedly.

Sarath was reading her postcard upside down as he sat across the desk from her. An unconscious curiosity on his part. He was a man used to cuneiform, faded texts in stone. Even in the shadowed light of the Archaeological Offices this was an easy translation for him.

The sound in the offices was mostly that of the careful pecking of typewriters. Anil had been given the desk by the copy machine, around which there was a permanent tone of complaint, for it never worked properly.

‘Gopal,’ Sarath said, slightly louder than usual, and one of his assistants came to his desk.

‘Two teas. Bullmilk.’

‘Yessir.’

Anil laughed.

‘It’s a Wednesday. Your malaria pill.’

‘Took it.’ She was surprised by Sarath’s concern.

The tea arrived with the condensed milk already in it. Anil picked up her cup and decided to push it.

‘To the comfort of servants. A vainglorious government. Every political opinion supported by its own army.’

‘You talk like a visiting journalist.’

‘I can’t ignore those facts.’

He put his cup down. ‘Look, I don’t join one side or the other. If that’s what you mean. As you said, everyone has an army.’

She picked up the postcard and spun it between her thumbs. ‘Sorry. I feel tired. I’ve spent all morning going through reports at the Civil Rights Movement office. There’s nothing hopeful there. Do you want to have dinner later?’

‘I cannot.’

She waited for some explanation but nothing more came from him. Just his eyes darting to a map on the wall, to the picture of the bird on her postcard. While he continued to tap his pencil against the desk.