Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

The general public first became aware of the assassination when phone calls started coming in from England and Australia, people saying they had heard Katugala was dead. And then the truth slipped across the city within an hour.

The 120-foot-high statue had stood in a field of Buduruvagala for several generations. Half a mile away was the more famous rock wall of Bodhisattvas. In noon heat you walked barefoot and looked up at the figures. This was a region of desperate farming, the nearest village four miles away. So these stone bodies rising out of the earth, their faces high in the sky, often were the only human aspect a farmer would witness in his landscape during the day. They gazed over the stillness, over the buzz-scream of cicadas which were invisible in the parched grass. They brought a permanence to brief lives.

After the long darkness of night the rising sun would first colour the heads of the Bodhisattvas and the solitary Buddha, then move down their rock robes until finally, free of forests, it swathed down onto the sand and dry grass and stone, onto the human forms that walked on bare burning feet towards the sacred statues.

Three men had travelled all night across the fields carrying a thin bamboo ladder. Some quiet talk, a fear of being witnessed. They had made the ladder that afternoon and now they propped it against the statue of the Buddha. One of them lit a beedi and put it in his mouth, then climbed up the ladder. He tucked the roll of dynamite into a stone fold of cloth on the statue and ignited the fuse with the cigarette. Then he jumped down and the three of them ran and turned at the noise and held hands and lowered their heads in a crouch as the statue buckled and the torso leapt towards the earth and the great expressive face of the Buddha fell forward and smashed into the ground.

The thieves pried the stomach open with metal rods but found no treasure, and so they left. Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life. This was for once not a political act or an act perpetrated by one belief against another. The men were trying to find a solution for hunger or a way to get out of their disintegrating lives. And the ‘neutral’ and ‘innocent’ fields around the statue and the rock carvings were perhaps places of torture and burials. Since it was mostly uninhabited land, with only a few farmers and pilgrims, this was a place where trucks came to burn and hide victims who had been picked up. These were fields where Buddhism and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century.

The artisan brought to Buduruvagala to attempt a reconstruction of the Buddha statue was a man from the south. Born in a village of stonecutters, he had been an eye painter. According to the Archaeological Department, which oversaw the project, he was a drinker but would not begin drinking until the afternoons. There was a small overlap of working and drinking but it was only in the evenings that he was unapproachable. He had lost his wife some years earlier. She was one of the thousands who had disappeared.

Ananda Udugama would be on the site by dawn, would peg the blueprints into the earth and assign duties to the seven men who worked with him. The workers had dug out the base, which held the lower legs and thighs of the statue. These had not been damaged. They were pulled out and stored in a field where there were bees and left there until the rest of the body was reconstructed. A quarter of a mile away, and simultaneously with the reconstruction of this large broken Buddha, another statue was being built-to replace the destroyed god.

It was assumed that Ananda would be working under the authority and guidance of foreign specialists but in the end these celebrities never came. There was too much political turmoil, and it was unsafe. They were finding dead bodies daily, not even buried, in the adjoining fields. Victims picked up as far away as Kalutara were brought here, out of family range. Ananda appeared to stare past it all. He gave two of the men on his team the job of dealing with the bodies-tagging them, contacting civil rights authorities. By the time the monsoon came the murders had subsided, or at least this area was no longer being used as a killing field or a burial ground.

Later it came to be seen that the work done by Ananda was complex and innovative. All through the various seasons of heat, the time of monsoons and their storms, he oversaw the work in the mud trench, which resembled a hundred-foot-long coffin. It was a structure in which the found fragments of stone would be dropped. Inside it was a grid divided into one-foot squares, and once the stones were identified as to what likely part of the body they came from, by someone at the head of the triage, as it were, these were placed in the appropriate section. All this was tentative, approximate. They had pieces of stone as big as boulders and shards the size of a knuckle. This distinguishing took place in the worst of the May monsoons, so fragments of rock would be tossed into square pools of water.

Ananda brought in some of the villagers to work, ten more men. It was safer to be seen working for a project like this, otherwise you could be pulled into the army or you might be rounded up as a suspect. He got more of the village involved, women as well as men. If they volunteered, he put them to work. They had to be there by five in the morning and they packed it in by two in the afternoon, when Ananda Udugama had his own plans for the day.

The women distinguished the stones, which slid wet from their hands into the grid. It rained for more than a month. When the rain stopped, the grass steamed around them and they could finally hear one another and began to talk, their clothes dry in fifteen minutes. Then the rain would come again and they were back within its noise, silent, solitary in the crowded field, the wind banging and loosening a corrugated roof, trying to unpeel it from a shed. The distinguishing of the stones took several weeks, and by the time the dry season came most of the limbs had been assembled. There was now one arm, fifty feet long, an ear. The legs still safe in the field of bees. They began to move the sections towards each other in the cicada grass. Engineers came and with a twenty-foot drill burrowed through the soles of the feet and moved up the limbs of the body, till there was a path for metal bones to be poured in, tunnels between the hips and torso, between the shoulders and neck to the head.

During the months of assembly, Ananda had spent most of his time on the head. He and two others used a system of fusing rock. Up close the face looked quilted. They had planned to homogenize the stone, blend the face into a unit, but when he saw it this way Ananda decided to leave it as it was. He worked instead on the composure and the qualities of the face.

On the horizon the other statue of the Buddha rose gradually into the sky, while Ananda’s reconstruction stretched out along a sandy path. The path sloped, the head remaining the lowest part of the body-essential for the final stage of knitting it together.

Five cauldrons of boiling iron hissed under the slight rainfall. The men brought out the prepared corrugated troughs and poured the iron along them and watched it disappear into the feet of the statue, the red metal sliding into the path drilled within the body-giant red veins slipping down the hundred-foot length. When it hardened it would lock all the limbs together. Then it rained again, this time for two days, and the village workers were sent home. Everyone left the site.

Ananda sat in a chair next to the head. He looked up at the sky, into the source of the storm. They had built a walk ledge ten feet off the ground with bamboo. Now this forty-five-year-old man got up and climbed up onto the ledge to look down at the face and torso, which held inside it the cooling red iron.