Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

Prethiko

Seela

Raduka

Buddhika

Kaashdya

He moves his fingers down the ledger to check the assignments, discovers her name.

He walks almost a mile to the event, in his only good jacket. The rest house is serving the usual bad food in the glassed-in dining room that hangs over the water. The children wait with unlit sparklers, in delirium for any kind of ceremony. Cake in one hand, a sparkler in the other. Lakdasa is organizing the fireworks display and is on the raft lining up his catherine wheels and burning schoolrooms. Gamini has caught a glimpse of her in the distance. He hasn’t seen her since the cup of tea they shared two weeks earlier.

When she is close to him later, he sees the small red earrings against her darkness. They were her grandmother’s, and the shortness of her boyishly cut hair allows him to see them clearly, the red gem on each lobe tiny as a ladybug. ‘I bury them when I am not wearing them,’ she says. They stroll towards the ruins, away from the rest house. A sign says: PLEASE DO NOT ENTER AND PUT YOUR FEET AGAINST THE IMAGE AND TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS.

Behind her are old fragments of colour, the white-red borders on the painted stone he can see even in this moonlight. From the promontory they watch the start of the fireworks. Some of the extravagant explosions are cut short, crashing too soon into the water, or they skitter dangerously like flung lit stones towards the rest house.

He turns to her. She is wearing his jacket over her ruffled shirt.

And she realizes there is an emotional seriousness in this distant man. She needs to step backwards out of the maze they have innocently entered. He is content to be near her, the beauty of this ear and earring, then a comparison with the other side of her head, the way the moon is over them and also in water, the way the water holds the night lilies and their reflection. The false and true alternatives surround them.

She takes his hand and brings it to her forehead. ‘Feel that. Do you feel that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That’s my brain. I’m not as drunk as you, so I am smarter than you. Or even if you were not drunk I might be clearer about this than you. A little.’ Then a smile from her that will make him forgive anything she says.

She talks to him, more strongly than what the scar on her wrist suggests, her shirt open in a billow at the neck.

‘You look, at some moments, like my brother’s wife.’ He laughs.

‘You are going to be my husband’s brother, then. That’s how I’ll treat you. That is a kind of love.’

He leans back against the pavilion of stone, someone or other’s cosmic mountain, and she moves forward, he thinks it is to him, but she is only returning his black jacket.

He remembers swimming later that evening, entering the dark water naked and climbing out onto the abandoned firework raft. He sees a few silhouettes in the glassed room over the water. The Queen of England came to this rest house years ago, when she was young. He sits out there clearing his head of the way she disappeared into the throng with the subtlest of courtesies. The way…

A year from now he will return to Colombo and meet his future wife. Gamini? A woman named Chrishanti will say, approaching him. Chrishanti. He knew her brother at school. It is another fancy-dress party. Neither of them is wearing a costume, but they are both disguised by the past.

T here were some passengers on the train squatting in the aisles with wrapped bundles, pet birds.

I was the one she should have loved, Gamini said.

Anil sitting beside him assumed she was to get a confession. The mercurial doctor about to expose his heart. That category of seduction. But there was nothing he did or said during the remaining journey-to the ayurvedic hospital he had offered to show her-that used the reins of seduction. Just his slow drawl as the train swept unhesitatingly into the darkness of tunnels and he would turn from looking at his hands towards his reflection in the glass. That was how he told her, looking down or away from her, and she seeing him only in a wavering mirror image lost when they moved back into light.

I saw her often. More than most people knew. With her job at the radio station, my strange hours, it was easy. And we were ‘related.’… It wasn’t a courtship. That suggests two people in a dance. Well, maybe one dance at my wedding, I suppose. ‘The Air That I Breathe.’ Remember that song? A romantic moment. It was a wedding after all, you could embrace each other. I was getting married. She was married already. But I was the one she should have loved. I was already on speed, in those days, when I would see her.

Who are you speaking of, Gamini?

I’m always awake. I’m good at what I do. So when she was brought in to Dean Street Hospital, I was there. She had swallowed lye. Suiciders decide on that method of death because, since it’s the most painful, they might stop themselves doing it. The throat is burned out, then the organs. She was unconscious, even when she woke she didn’t know where she was. I ran her through into Emergency with a couple of nurses.

With one hand I was giving her painkillers and with the other using ammonia to snap her awake. I needed to reach her. I didn’t want her to feel alone, in this last stage. I overloaded her with painkillers but I didn’t want her asleep. It was selfishness on my part. I should have just knocked her out, let her go. But I wanted her to be comforted by me being there. That it was me, not him, not her husband.

I held her eyelids up with my thumbs. I shook her until she saw who it was. She didn’t care. I’m here. I love you, I said. She closed her eyes, it seemed to me in disgust. Then she was in pain again.

I can’t give you any more, I said, I’ll lose you completely. She put her hand up and made a gesture across her throat.

The train was sucked into the tunnel and they moved within it, shuddering in the darkness.

Who was she, Gamini? She could not see him. She touched his shoulder and could feel him turn towards her. He brought his face close to her. She could see nothing in spite of the muddy flicker of light now and then.

What would you do with a name? But it wasn’t a question. He spat it out.

The train came into daylight for a few seconds, then slid into the darkness of another tunnel.

All the wards were busy that night, he continued. Shootings, others to be operated on. There are always a lot of suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it. And she, I think, was overcome by it. The nurses left me with her and then I was called into the triage wards. She was full of morphine, asleep. I found a kid in the hall and I got him to watch her. If she woke he was to come and find me in D wing. This was three a.m. I didn’t want him falling asleep, so I broke a Benzedrine and gave him half. He found me later and told me she was awake. But I couldn’t save her.

There was a train window open and the sound of the clatter doubled. She could feel the gusts.

What would you do with her name? Would you tell my brother?

Someone kicked her ankle and she drew in her breath.

When Leaf left Arizona Anil didn’t hear from her for more than six months. Although during every moment of her farewell she had promised to write. Leaf, who was her closest friend. Once there was just a postcard of a stainless-steel pole. Quemado, New Mexico, the postmark seemed to read, but there was no contact address. Anil assumed she’d abandoned her, for a new life, for new friends. Watch out for the armadillos, señorita! Still, Anil left a snapshot on her fridge of the two of them dancing at some party, this woman who had been her echo, who watched movies with her in her backyard. They’d sway in the hammock, they’d consume rhubarb pie, they’d wake up at three in the morning entangled in each other’s arms, and then Anil would drive home through the empty streets.