Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Gamini worked in the northeast for more than three years. Lakdasa would remain there, setting up clinics. And the eye doctor with the dubious diploma would also never leave the peripheral hospitals. During the worst crises Gamini had seen her passing out swabs and lotions to trainees even as she operated on an emergency case. What the others envied most about her, apart from her presence as an attractive woman, was the physical evidence of her work. Gamini loved the sight of her ward as everyone in the fifteen-bed room turned towards the door when he walked in, all with the same white patch taped over their dark faces, the same badge of belonging to her.

Somebody once brought a book about Jung into their midst. In the book one of them had found a sentence and underlined it. (There was a habit among them of critical marginalia. An exclamation point beside something not psychologically or clinically valid. If there was any instance in a novel of outrageous or unlikely physical prowess or sexual achievement, Skanda, the surgeon, would write in the margin beside the scene: This happened to me once… and add with even more irony, Dambulla, August 1978. A scene where a man was met in a hotel room by a woman in a negligée and handed a martini received similar comments. When Skanda left to work in the cancer wards in Karapitiya, near Galle, the others knew he would be defacing books there as well, medical texts as well as novels; he was the worst of the marginalia criminals among them.) In any case, it was the anaesthetist who probably brought in the book about Jung. Pictures, essays, commentaries and biography. And someone had underlined Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

Whatever this meant, it seemed a thoughtful warning, and they let the remark seep into them. They all knew it was about the sense of self-worth that, during those days, in that place, had overcome them. They were not working for any cause or political agenda. They had found a place a long way from governments and media and financial ambition. They had originally come to the northeast for a three-month shift and in spite of the lack of equipment, the lack of water, not one luxury except now and then a tin of condensed milk sucked in a car while being surrounded by jungle, they had stayed for two years or three, in some cases longer. It was the best place to be. Once, after performing surgery for almost five hours straight, Skanda said, ‘The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.’

The quotation about Jung and Skanda’s remark were what Gamini carried with him. And the sentence about the sixth sense was the gift he gave to Anil a few years later.

It was in the Arizona labs that Anil met and worked with a woman named Leaf. A few years older, Leaf became Anil’s closest friend and constant companion. They worked side by side and they talked continually on the phone to each other when one was on assignment elsewhere. Leaf Niedecker-what kind of name is that, Anil had demanded to know-introduced Anil to the finer arts of ten-pin bowling, raucous hooting in bars, and high-speed driving in the desert, swerving back and forth in the night. ‘Tenga cuidado con los armadillos, señorita.’

Leaf loved movies and remained in depression about the disappearance of drive-ins and their al fresco quality. ‘All our shoes off, all our shirts off, rolling against Chevy leather-there has been nothing like it since.’ So two or three times a week Anil would buy a barbequed chicken and arrive at Leaf’s rented house. The television had already been carried into the yard and sat baldly beside a yucca tree. They’d rent The Searchers or any other John Ford or Fred Zinnemann movie. They watched The Nun’s Story, From Here to Eternity, Five Days One Summer, sitting in Leaf’s lawn chairs, or curled up beside each other in the double hammock, watching the calm, carefully sexual black-and-white walk of Montgomery Clift.

Nights in Leaf’s backyard, once upon a time in the West. The heat still in the air at midnight. They would pause the movie, take a break and cool off under the garden hose. In three months they managed to see the complete oeuvres of Angie Dickinson and Warren Oates. ‘I’m asthmatic,’ Leaf said. ‘I need to become a cowboy.’

They shared a joint and disappeared into the intricacies of Red River, theorizing on the strangely casual shooting of John Ireland before the final fight between Montgomery Clift and John Wayne. They rewound the video and watched it once more. Wayne swirling around gracefully, hardly interrupting his walk, to shoot a neutral friend who was trying to stop a fight. On their knees in the parched grass by the television screen they looked at the scene frame by frame for any sign of outrage at this unfairness on the victim’s face. There seemed to be none. It was a minor act directed towards a minor character that may or may not have ended the man’s life, and no one said anything about it during the remaining five minutes of the film. One of those Jacobean happy endings.

‘I don’t think the bullet killed him.’

‘Well, we can’t tell where it hit him, Hawks goes off too quickly. The guy just puts his hand up to his stomach and then drops.’

‘If he got hit in the liver he’s had it. Don’t forget, this is Missouri in eighteen-fuck-knows-when.’

‘Yeah. What’s his name?’

‘Who?’

‘The guy shot.’

‘Valance. Cherry Valance.’

‘Cherry? You mean like Jerry, or Cherry, like apple.’

‘Cherry Valance, not Apple Valance.’

‘And he’s Montgomery ’s friend.’

‘Yeah, Montgomery ’s friend Cherry.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I don’t think it hit him in the liver. Look at the angle of the shot. The trajectory seems to be going up. Popped a rib, I suspect, or glanced off it.’

‘… Maybe glanced off and killed some woman on the sidewalk?’

‘Or Walter Brennan…’

‘No, some dame on the sidewalk that Howard Hawks was fucking.’

‘Women remember. Don’t they know that? Those saloon girls are gonna remember Cherry…’

‘You know, Leaf, we should do a book. A Forensic Doctor Looks at the Movies.’

‘The film noir ones are tough. Their clothes are baggy, it’s too dark.’

‘I’m doing Spartacus.’

In Sri Lankan movie theatres, Anil told Leaf, if there was a great scene-usually a musical number or an extravagant fight-the crowd would yell out ‘Replay! Replay!’ or ‘Rewind! Rewind!’ till the theatre manager and projectionist were forced to comply. Now, on a smaller scale, the films staggered backwards and forwards, in Leaf’s yard, until the actions became clear to them.

The film they worried over most was Point Blank. At the start of the movie, Lee Marvin (who once played Liberty Valance, no relation) is shot by a double-crossing friend in the abandoned Alcatraz prison. The friend leaves him for dead and steals his girl and his share of the money. Vengeance results. Anil and Leaf composed a letter to the director of the film, asking if he remembered, all these years later, where on the torso he imagined Lee Marvin was shot so that he could get to his feet, stagger through the prison while the opening credits came up and swim the treacherous waters between the island and San Francisco.

They told the director that it was one of their favourite films, they were simply inquiring as forensic specialists. When they looked at the scene closely they saw Lee Marvin’s hand leap up to his chest. ‘See, he has difficulty on his right side. When he swims later in the bay he uses his left arm.’ ‘God, it’s a great movie. Very little music. Lots of silence.’