Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Their hospital existed like a medieval village. A chalkboard in the kitchen listed the numbers of loaves of bread and the bushels of rice needed to feed five hundred patients a day. This was before massacre victims were brought in. The doctors pooled money and hired two market scribes as registrars who moved alongside them in the wards listing and recording the patients’ names and their ailments. The most frequently seen problems were snakebite, rabies caused by fox or mongoose, kidney failure, encephalitis, diabetes, tuberculosis, and the war.

Night had its own activity. He woke and was attached instantly to the sounds of the world. A dogfight, a man running to fetch something, the pouring of water into a vessel. When Gamini was a boy, nights were terrifying to him, his eyes wide open till he fell asleep, certain that he and his bed had lost their moorings in the darkness. He needed loud clocks beside him. Ideally he would have a dog in the room, or someone-an aunt or an ayah who snored. Now, working or sleeping during the night shifts, he was secure with all of the human and animal activity beyond the ward’s light. Only bird life, so vocal and territorial during the day, was shut down, though there was one Polonnaruwa rooster that cried out false dawns from three in the morning on. Interns had been trying to kill it.

He walked the stretch of hospital, from wing to wing, open air on either side of him. There was the buzz of electricity close beside the pools of light as you passed them. You were aware of it only at night. You saw a bush and you sensed it growing. Someone came out and poured blood into a gutter and coughed. Everyone had a bad cough in Polonnaruwa.

He was aware of every sound. A shoe or sandal step, the noise of the bedspring when he lifted a patient, the snapping of an ampule. Sleeping in the wards, he could be one limb of a large creature, linked to the others by the thread of noises.

Later, if he was unable to sleep in the district medical officer’s building, he would walk back the two hundred yards along the empty curfewed main street to the hospital. The nurse stationed at a night desk would turn and see the look on him and find a bed for him. He would be asleep in seconds.

In the village clinic were twenty mothers and their infants. They filled out clinic records and the pregnant women were checked for diabetes and anemia. The doctors talked to each of the women, studying their forms as they moved forward in the queue. On a makeshift table a nurse wrapped vitamin pills in newspaper and gave them to the mothers. A pressure cooker was being used as a steam sterilizer for glass syringes and needles.

The screams began as soon as the first baby got a needle, and within seconds most of the babies in the small shack that served as a medical outpost were howling. After about five minutes they were silent again; breasts had been pulled out and mothers beamed at their infants and there was solution and victory for all. This one clinic served four hundred families from the area as well as three hundred from an adjoining region. No one from the Ministry of Health had ever come to the border villages.

For all of the doctors, Lakdasa was the great moral force, the rough brother of justice. ‘The problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem.’ He was thirty-seven and his hair was grey. When he drank he revealed an intricate set of confabulations, as if he were steering himself through a well-mapped harbour. ‘If I drink more than seventy-two millimetres, my liver plays up. If I drink less, my heart plays up.’

Lakdasa lived mostly on potato rotis. He smoked Gold Leaf cigarettes in his jeep where a fan rotating air was glued to the dashboard. He kept his sarong in the glove compartment and slept wherever he had to-the DMO’s office, a sofa in the living room of a friend. There were months when his weight would suddenly drop ten pounds. Obsessed with his blood pressure, he tested it daily, and any session at a clinic ended with his weighing himself on the scales and checking his blood sugar. He noted the bell curves and continued as usual driving through jungles and garrisoned land to meet his patients. It didn’t matter what state he was in as long as he knew what state he was in.

On Saturday mornings Gamini and Lakdasa drove back to Polonnaruwa listening to the cricket. A long day at a clinic. Sometimes along the road, now and then, there were thirty-foot strips of grain being dried on the tarmac, strips laid so narrow a car could pass over them without having the wheels touch the drying grain. A man with a broom stood nearby to signal to passing cars to be aware of it, and to sweep the grain back to the centre if they were not.

In the cafeteria of the base hospital-a half-hour break in his shift-a woman sat down at Gamini’s table and drank her tea, ate a biscuit with him. It was about four in the morning and he didn’t know her. He just nodded to her, he felt private and too tired to talk.

‘I helped you with an operation once, some months ago. The massacre night.’ His mind wheeled back a century.

‘I thought you got transferred.’

‘Yes, I was, then I came back here.’

He hadn’t recognized her at all. She’d had a mask on when he spent the crucial long hours with her over the boy. When she was not wearing a mask, in pre-op, he had probably only glanced at her. Their comradeship had been mostly anonymous.

‘You’re married to someone here, right?’ She nodded. There was a scar at her wrist. It was new, he would have noticed that during the surgery.

He looked up quickly at her face. ‘It is very good to meet you.’

‘Yes. For me too,’ she said.

‘Where did you go?’

‘He’-a cough-‘he got stationed in Kurunegala.’

Gamini kept watching her, the way she was selecting the words carefully. Her face was young and lean and dark, her eyes bright as if it were daylight.

‘Actually, I have passed you in the wards a lot!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. I know you didn’t recognize me. Why should you.’ A pause. She put her hand through her hair and then was very still.

‘I’ve seen that boy.’

‘That boy?’

She looked down, smiling to herself now. ‘The boy we operated on. I have visited him. They… they renamed the boy Gamini. The parents. After you. It was a lot of trouble, red tape, for them to do that.’

‘Good. So I have an heir.’

‘Yes, you do… I am training now extra hours in the children’s ward.’ She was about to continue, then stopped.

He nodded, suddenly tired. What he wanted in his life now seemed a huge thing. What he wished for would involve the lives of others, years of effort. Chaos. Unfairness. Lying.

She looked at her tea and drank the last of it.

‘It was good to meet with you.’

‘Yes.’

Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on. When later he turned over the hands of a patient, he thought of the scar at her wrist, the way her fingers had slipped through her hair, what he wished to reveal to her. But it was his own heart that could not step into the world.

There is a break before the ward visits at six p.m. Gamini pulls down the registrar’s log from the shelf. Since the scribes have taken over, the entries are much better-the handwriting immaculate and small, green ink underlining the months and Sundays. He cannot remember the date so he looks for a flurry of entries, as there would have been around the time of the killings. Then goes down the list of interns and nurses.