Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

It was dark now. It looked as if the room were full of grey water. He walked to the entrance and touched the switch, and seven central lights came on. He came back and sat with his brother.

He was still there an hour later when the bodies started coming in from a bombing somewhere in the city.

President Katugala was in a white cotton outfit, looking old, not at all like the giant posters of him throughout the city that had celebrated and idealized him for years. When you looked at the real image of the man, the lean face below the thinning white hair, there was a compassion for him, no matter what he had done. He looked weary and scared. He had been tense during the previous days, as if there was some kind of foreshadowing in his mind, as if some mechanism he had no control of had been put in motion. But it was now National Heroes Day. And the one thing the Silver President did every National Heroes Day was to go out and meet the people. He could never give up a political rally.

The week before, there had been warnings from the special forces of the police and army for him not to go among the crowds. He had in fact promised he would not do so. But around three-thirty in the afternoon, it was discovered the President was out meeting the people. The head of Katugala’s special unit, with a few other officials, leapt into a jeep and went looking for him. They located him reasonably quickly in the crowded Colombo streets and had just reached him and were standing behind him at the moment the bomb went off.

Katugala was wearing a loose white long-sleeved jacket and sarong. He was wearing sandals. He had a watch on his left wrist. He stopped by Lipton Circus and made a short speech from his bulletproof vehicle.

R- wore denim shorts and a loose shirt. Underneath these was a layer of explosives and two Duracell batteries and two blue switches. One for the left hand, one for the right, linked by wires to the explosives. The first switch armed the bomb. It would stay on as long as the bomber wished. When the other switch was turned on, the bomb detonated. Both needed to be activated for the explosion to occur. You could wait as long as you wanted before turning on the second switch. Or you could turn the first switch off. R- had more clothing on above the denim shorts. Four Velcro straps held the explosives pack to his body, and along with the dynamite there was the great weight of thousands of small ball bearings.

After Katugala finished speaking at Lipton Circus, he travelled in the bulletproof Range Rover towards the large rally on Galle Face Green. A year earlier a fortune-teller had said, ‘He will be destroyed like a plate falling to the ground.’ Now he made his way along the dual carriageway. But he kept climbing out from his vehicle and greeting the crowd. R- threaded his way on a bicycle through the chaos of people, or maybe he was walking, wheeling it. In any case, Katugala was now among the people; he had stopped again because he saw a procession of slogan-waving supporters coming onto the street from a side road. He tried to help supervise it. And R-, who would kill him, who had infiltrated the outer circle of Katugala’s residential staff so that he was well known by them, R- came slowly towards him, riding or walking his bicycle.

There are a few photographs of Katugala taken during the last half-hour of his life that exist only in a file belonging to the army. A couple of pictures were taken by the police from a high building, some by journalists, which were later confiscated and never returned, never published in the newspapers. They show him in his white outfit, looking frail, beginning to appear concerned. Mostly he looks old. Over the years no unflattering pictures of him were published in the newspapers. But in these photographs what you notice first is his age-emphasized by the fact that behind him is his platonic form on a giant cardboard cut-out, where he looks vibrant, with thick white hair. And behind him you can also see the armoured vehicle that he has left for the last time.

Katugala’s plan, in his last minutes, was to get the procession of supporters from his constituency to join the crowd on Galle Face Green. He had begun walking back to his vehicle, changed his mind and returned to choreograph the procession once more; this was how he came to be caught with his bodyguards between two very different processions-his supporters and the general populace celebrating National Heroes Day. If someone had said the President was in their midst, most of those in the crowd would have been surprised. Where is the President? At street level, in the crowd, the only presidential presence was a giant cardboard cut-out of him carried like a film prop, bobbing up and down.

No one knows really if R- came with this new procession, as seems most likely, or whether he was at the junction where the group met the larger crowd. Or he could have been waiting near the vehicle. In any case, he had been waiting for this day, when he was sure he would be able to get to Katugala on the street. There was no way R- could have entered the presidential grounds with explosives and ball bearings strapped to him. The bodyguards were unforgiving. There were never exceptions. Every pen in every pocket was examined. So R- had to approach him in a public place, with all the paraphernalia of devastation sewn onto himself. He was not just the weapon but the aimer of it. The bomb would destroy whomever he was facing. His own eyes and frame were the cross-hairs. He approached Katugala having already switched on one of the batteries. One blue bulb lighting up deep in his clothing. When he was within five yards of Katugala he turned on the other switch.

At four p.m. on National Heroes Day, more than fifty people were killed instantly, including the President. The cutting action of the explosion shredded Katugala into pieces. The central question after the bombing concerned whether the President had been spirited away, and if so whether by the police and army forces or by terrorists. Because the President could not be found.

Where was the President?

The head of the President’s unit, who half an hour earlier had been told that Katugala was out meeting the crowds, who had leapt into the jeep and made his way towards the Silver President, had just reached him and was insisting that he return to the armoured vehicle and be driven back to his residence. When the bomb went off he was left miraculously untouched. The direct spray of ball bearings entered and were held within the body of Katugala or went through him and fell in a clatter to the tarmac in the few feet behind him. But the sound of the blast drowned out the clatter. And it was the awfulness of the noise that most remember, those who survived.

So he was the only human left standing in the silence that contained the last echoes of the bomb. There was no one within twenty yards of him save the Gulliver-like replica of Katugala, rays of sun coming through the cardboard, which the ball bearings had reached and gone through.

Around him were the dead. Political supporters, an astrologer, three policemen. The armoured Range Rover just a few yards away was undamaged. There was blood on the unbroken windows. The driver sitting inside was unhurt except for damage to his ears from the sound.

Some flesh, probably from the bomber, was found on the wall of the building across the street. The right arm of Katugala rested by itself on the stomach of one of the dead policemen. There were shattered curd pots all over the pavement. Four p.m.

By four-thirty every doctor who could be located had reported for duty in the emergency hospitals in Colombo. There were more than a hundred injured on the periphery of the killing. And soon rumours rose in every ward that Katugala too had been in the crowd when the bomb went off. So each hospital waited for the possibility that his wounded body would be brought in. But it never arrived. The body, what remained of it, was not found for a long time.