Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

The bus climbed above the valley. Like him she couldn’t sleep. Like him she would continue the war. How would he sleep in the night with her name between him and his wife? Even the tenderest concerns between this couple would contain her presence, like a shadow. She didn’t want that anymore. To be a mote or an echo, to be a compass unused except to give his mind knowledge of her whereabouts.

And whom would he talk to if not her at midnight through several time zones? As if she were the stone in the temple grounds used by priests as the object of confession. Well, for now, they both had no destiny. They only had to escape the past.

Anil was one unable to sing, but she knew the words and the pace of phrasing.

Oh, the trees grow high in New York State,

They shine like gold in autumn-

Never had the blues whence I came,

But in New York State I caught ’em.

She said the lines in a whisper, head down, to her own chest. Autumn. Caught ’em. How the rhyme snuggled into its partner.

Sarath and Anil had identified Sailor at the third plumbago village. He was Ruwan Kumara and he had been a toddy tapper. After breaking his leg in a fall he had worked in the local mine, and the village remembered when the outsiders had picked him up. They had entered the tunnel where twelve men were working. They brought a billa-someone from the community with a gunnysack over his head, slits cut out for his eyes-to anonymously identify the rebel sympathizer. A billa was a monster, a ghost, to scare children in games, and it had picked out Ruwan Kumara and he had been taken away.

They now had a specific date for the abduction. Back at the walawwa they planned the next step. Sarath felt they should still be careful, have more evidence, or all their work would be rejected. He proposed that he go to Colombo and search for Ruwan Kumara’s name in a list of government undesirables; he claimed he could get hold of such a thing. It would take two days and then he would be back. He would leave her his cell phone, though she would probably not be able to contact him. So he would call her.

But after five days Sarath had not returned.

All her fears about him rose again-the relative who was a minister, his views on the danger of truth. She moved around the walawwa furiously alone. Then it was six days. She got Sarath’s cell phone working and called Ratnapura Hospital but it seemed that Ananda had left, had gone home. There was no one to talk to. She was alone with Sailor.

She took the phone and went out to the edge of the paddy field.

‘Who is this?’

‘Anil Tissera, sir.’

‘Ah, the missing one.’

‘Yes sir, the swimmer.’

‘You never came to see me.’

‘I need to talk to you, sir.’

‘What about.’

‘I have to make a report and I need help.’

‘Why me?’

‘You knew my father. You worked with him. I need someone I can trust. There is maybe a political murder.’

‘You are speaking on a cell phone. Don’t say my name.’

‘I’m stranded here. I need to get to Colombo. Can you help?’

‘I can try to arrange something. Where are you?’

It was the same question he had asked once before. She paused a moment.

‘In Ekneligoda, sir. The walawwa.’

‘I know it.’

He was off the phone.

A day later Anil was in Colombo, in the Armoury Auditorium that was a part of the anti-terrorist unit building in Gregory’s Road. She no longer had possession of Sailor’s skeleton. A car had picked her up at the walawwa but Dr. Perera had not been in it. When she arrived at the hospital in Colombo he had met her, put his arm around her. Then they’d eaten a meal in the cafeteria and he had listened to what she had done. He advised her to take it no further. He thought her work good, but it was unsafe. ‘You made a speech about political responsibility,’ she said. ‘I heard a different opinion then.’ ‘That was a speech,’ he replied. When they returned to the lab, there was confusion as to where the skeleton was.

Now, standing in the small auditorium that was half filled with various officials, among them military and police personnel trained in counter-insurgency methods, she felt stranded. She was supposed to give her report with no real evidence. It had been a way to discredit her whole investigation. Anil stood by an old skeleton laid out on a table, probably Tinker, and began delineating the various methods of bone analysis and skeletal identification relating to occupation and region of origin, although this was not the skeleton she needed.

Sarath in the back row, unseen by her, listened to her quiet explanations, her surefootedness, her absolute calm and refusal to be emotional or angry. It was a lawyer’s argument and, more important, a citizen’s evidence; she was no longer just a foreign authority. Then he heard her say, ‘I think you murdered hundreds of us.’ Hundreds of us. Sarath thought to himself. Fifteen years away and she is finally us.

But now they were in danger. He sensed the hostility in the room. Only he was not against her. Now he had to somehow protect himself.

Between Anil and the skeleton, discreetly out of sight, was her tape recorder, imprinting every word and opinion and question from officials, which she, till now, responded to courteously and unforgivingly. But he could see what Anil couldn’t-the half-glances around the hot room (they must have turned off the air-conditioning thirty minutes into the evidence, an old device to distract thought); there were conversations beginning around him. He shrugged himself off the wall and moved forward.

‘Excuse me, please.’

Everyone turned to him. She looked up, her face amazed at his presence and this interruption.

‘This skeleton was also located at the Bandarawela site?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And how much earth was found over it?’

‘Three feet approximately.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

‘We cannot. I really don’t see its relevance.’

‘Because sections of the hill outside the cave, where this one was found, had been worn down by cattle, trade, rains… isn’t that correct? Can someone turn on the damn air-conditioning in here, it’s difficult for us all to think clearly in this heat. Isn’t it true that in the old nineteenth-century burial grounds, murder sites as well as graves were often-in fact in nearly every case-found with less than two feet of earth over them?’

She was becoming agitated and decided to be silent. Sarath could sense them focusing on him, turning in their seats.

He walked down to the front of the auditorium and they let him approach her. He faced Anil now across the table, leaned forward and with a set of tongs pulled out the piece of stone imprisoned within the rib cage.

‘This stone was found in the ribs of the skeleton.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell us what happens in ancient customs… Think carefully, Miss Tissera, don’t just theorize.’

There was a pause.

‘Please don’t speak like that. Patronizing me.’

‘Tell us what happens.’

‘They bury bodies and they place a stone on the earth above it, usually. It acts like a marker and then it drops when the flesh gives way.’

‘Gives way? How?’

‘One minute!’

‘How many years does that take?’

Silence.

‘Yes?’

Silence.

He spoke very slowly now.

‘A minimum of nine years usually, isn’t it? Before the stone falls through, into the rib cage. Right?’

‘Yes, but-’

‘Right?’

‘Yes. Except for fire corpses. Burned ones.’

‘But we’re not even sure of this, because most of them were burned in the last century, these ones in the historical gravesites. As you know, there was a plague there in 1856. Another in 1890. Many were burned. The skeleton you have here is likely to be a hundred years old-in spite of your fine social work about its career and habits and diet…’