Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

He had been in love with just one woman and she was not the one he married. Later there was another woman, a wife in a field hospital near Polonnaruwa. Eventually he felt himself on a boat of demons and himself to be the only clearheaded and sane person there. He was a perfect participant in the war.

The rooms Sarath and Gamini lived in as children were hidden from the sunlight of Colombo, from traffic noises and dogs, from other children, from the sound of the metal gate clanging into its socket. Gamini remembers the swivel chair he spun in, bringing whirling chaos to the papers and shelves, the forbidden atmosphere of his father’s office. All offices, for Gamini, would have the authority of complex secrets. Even as an adult, stepping into such rooms made him feel unworthy and illicit. Banks, law firms, underlined his uncertainty, gave him a sense of being in a headmaster’s room, believing that things would never be explained enough for him to understand.

We evolve deviously. Gamini grew up not knowing half the things he thought he was supposed to know-he was to make and discover unusual connections because he had not known the usual routes. He was for most of his life a boy spinning in a chair. And just as things had been kept away from him, he too became a container of secrets.

In the house of his childhood he would press his right eye into a door handle, he would knock gently and if there was no reply slip into his parents’ room, a brother’s room, an uncle’s room, during their afternoon sleep. Then walk barefoot towards the bed and look at the sleepers, look from the window and leave. Not much going on there. Or silently approach a gathering of adults. He was already in the habit of not speaking unless responding to a question.

…

He was staying at his aunt’s house in Boralesgamuwa, and she and her friends were playing bridge on the long porch that surrounded the house. He came towards them carrying a lit candle, shielding the flame. He placed it on a side table a yard or so to the right of them. No one noticed this. He drifted back into the house. A few minutes later Gamini crawled on his belly with his air rifle through the grass, stalking his way from the bottom of the garden towards the house. He was wearing a small camouflage hat of leaves to disguise his presence even further. He could almost hear the four women bidding, having halfhearted conversations.

He estimated they were twenty yards away. He loaded the air rifle and positioned himself like a sniper, elbows down, legs at angles to give him balance and firmness, and fired. Nothing was hit. He reloaded and settled in to aim again. This time he hit the side table. One of the women looked up, cocking her head, but she could see nothing around her. What he wished to do was shoot out the flame of the candle with the pellet, but the next shot flew low, only a few inches above the red porch floor, and hit an ankle. At that instant, simultaneous with the gasp from Mrs. Coomaraswamy, his aunt looked up and saw him with the air rifle hugged against his cheek and shoulder, aiming right at them.

Gamini felt happiest when he stepped from disorganized youth into the exhilaration of work. On his first medical appointment, travelling to the hospitals in the northeast, it seemed he was finally part of a nineteenth-century journey. He remembered the memoir he had read by old Dr. Peterson, who wrote of such travels, it must have been, sixty years before. His book included etchings-a hackery travelling along canopied roads, bulbuls drinking at a tank-and Gamini recalled one sentence.

I travelled by train to Matara and the rest of the way on horse and cart, with a bugler going ahead all the way, blowing his bugle to keep the wild animals off the road.

Now, in the middle of civil war, he rode the slow, wheezing bus at almost the same pace, into almost the same landscape. In a small romantic section of his heart he wished for a bugler.

There were just five doctors working in the northeast. Lakdasa was in charge, responsible for assigning them out to the peripherals and the small villages. Skanda was main surgeon, head of triage operations when there was an emergency. There was the Cuban, with them for just one year. C-, the eye doctor, who had joined three months earlier. ‘She’s got an unreliable diploma,’ Lakdasa said to the others after a week, ‘but she works hard, and I’m not letting her go.’ And the young graduate Gamini in his first posting.

From the base hospital at Polonnaruwa they would travel to peripheral hospitals, where some of them were to live. An anaesthetist turned up one day a week, which was the day surgery was performed. If there were emergency operations on other days, they improvised with chloroform or whatever pills they could find to knock the patient out. And from the base hospital they drove to places Gamini had never heard of and couldn’t even locate on a map-Araganwila, Welikande, Palatiyawa, visiting clinics in half-built schoolrooms, met by mothers and infants, malaria and cholera patients.

The doctors who survived that time in the northeast remembered they never worked harder, were never more useful than to those strangers who were healed and who slipped through their hands like grain. Not one of them returned later into the economically sensible careers of private practice. They would learn everything of value here. It was not an abstract or moral quality but a physical skill that empowered them. There were no newspapers or varnished tables or good fans. Now and then a book, now and then the radio with cricket commentary alternating between Sinhala and English. They allowed a transistor radio into the operating room on special occasions or for a crucial few hours in a test match. When the commentator switched to English there had to be an instant translation into Sinhala by Rohan, the anaesthetist. He was the most bilingual of the staff, having had to read the small-type texts that came with tanks of oxygen. (Rohan was a reader, in any case, often travelling down to Colombo by bus to hear a local or visiting South Asian writer read from a new book at the Kelaniya campus.) Patients in the surgical ward often drifted back into consciousness and found themselves within the drama of a cricket match.

…

They shaved at night beside a candle and slept clean-shaven as princes. Then they woke at five a.m., in the dark. They would lie there for a moment locating themselves, trying to remember the shape of the room. Was there a mosquito net above them or a fan, or just a Lion brand mosquito coil? Were they in Polonnaruwa? They travelled so much, they slept in so many places. There was the stirring outside of koha birds. A bajaj. Predawn loudspeakers being turned on so there was just their hum and crackle. The doctors opened their eyes when someone touched them on the shoulder, in silence, as if in enemy territory. And there was the darkness, and the minimal clues as to where they were. Ampara? Manampitiya?

Or they would wake too soon and it was still only three hours past midnight, and they feared they would not go back to sleep again but did so within the sweep of a minute. Not one of them had sleeplessness in those days. They slept like pillars of stone, remaining in the same position they had lowered themselves into in the bed or cot or on the rattan mat, on their backs or facedown, usually on their backs because it allowed them the pleasure for a few seconds of resting, with all their senses alive, certain of coming sleep.

Within minutes of waking they got dressed in the dark and gathered in the corridors, where there was hot tea. Soon they would be driving the forty miles to clinics, the vehicle chiselling with two weak headlamps through the darkness, jungle and an unseen view alongside them, now and then a villager’s fire beside the road. They would stop at a food stall. A ten-minute breakfast of fish cutlets in the lesser dark. The noise of utensils being passed. Lakdasa coughing. Still no conversation. Just the intimacy of walking across a road with a cup of tea for someone. These always felt like significant expeditions. They were kings and queens.