Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

He was there again the next morning. It was still raining, then it suddenly stopped, and the heat began to draw out steam from the earth and the statue. Ananda kept pulling off and drying his wired-together spectacles. He was on the platform most of the time now, wearing one of the Indian cotton shirts Sarath had given him some years back. His sarong was heavy and dark from the rain.

He stood over what they had been able to re-create of the face. It was a long time since he had believed in the originality of artists. He had known some of them in his youth. You slipped into the old bed of the art, where they had slept. There was comfort there. You saw their days of glory, then their days of banishment. He had always liked them and their art more during their years of banishment. He himself did not create or invent faces anymore. Invention was a sliver. Still, all the work he had done in organizing the rebuilding of the statue was for this. The face. Its one hundred chips and splinters of stone brought together, merged, with the shadow of bamboo lying across its cheek. All its life until now the statue had never felt a human shadow. It had looked over these hot fields towards green terraces in the distant north. It had seen the wars and offered peace or irony to those dying under it. Now sunlight hit the seams of its face, as if it were sewn roughly together. He wouldn’t hide that. He saw the lidded grey eyes someone else had cut in another century, that torn look in its great acceptance; he was close against the eyes now, with no distance, like an animal in a stone garden, some old man in the future. In a few days the face would be in the sky, no longer below him as he walked on this trestle, his shadow moving across the face, the hollows holding rain so he could lean down and drink from it, as if a food, a wealth. He looked at the eyes that had once belonged to a god. This is what he felt. As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.

It was the evening before the Nētra Mangala ceremony of the new Buddha statue and offerings were being brought from the nearby villages. The figure stood upright, high above the fires, as if leaning into the darkness. By three in the morning the chants had altered into the recitation of slokas alongside quiet drums. Ananda could hear the recitations of the Kosala-bimba-varnanāva, could also hear the night insects chirping beside the paths of light that radiated from the statue, like spokes into the fields, leading to bonfires where children and mothers slept or sat waiting for morning. The drummers returned from their performance sweating in the cold dark, their feet lit by the oil lamps as they came along the paths.

The work on the statues had ended days apart, so there seemed suddenly to be two figures-one of scarred grey rock, one of white plaster-standing now in the open valley a half-mile away from each other.

Ananda was sitting in a teak chair, being dressed and painted. He was to perform the eye ceremony on the new statue. The darkness around him had removed centuries of history. In the time of the old kings, such as Parakrama Bahu, when only kings performed the ceremony, there would have been temple dancers who danced and sang the Melodies, as if this were heaven.

It was almost four-thirty when the men pulled two long bamboo ladders out of the dark fields and within the ring of bonfires lifted them against the statue. When the sun rose it would be seen that they rested on the giant figure’s shoulders. Ananda Udugama and his nephew were already climbing the ladders up into the night. Both were robed, Ananda with a turban of fine silk on his head. Both carried cloth satchels.

In the coldness of the world, halfway up, it seemed that only the fires below connected him to earth. Then, looking into the dark, he could see the dawn prizing itself up out of the horizon, emerging above the forest. The sun lit the green bamboo of the ladder. He could feel its partial warmth on his arms, saw it light the brocade costume he wore over Sarath’s cotton shirt-the one he had promised himself he would wear for this morning’s ceremony. He and the woman Anil would always carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena.

He reached the head a few minutes before the precise hour for the eye ceremony. His nephew was there, waiting for him. Ananda had climbed this ladder a day earlier and so knew he would be most comfortable and efficient two rungs from the top. He used a sash to tie himself to the ladder and then his nephew passed him the chisels and brushes. Below them the drumming stopped. The boy held up the metal mirror so that it reflected the blank stare of the statue. The eyes unformed, unable to see. And until he had eyes-always the last thing painted or sculpted-he was not the Buddha.

Ananda began to chisel. He used a coconut husk to clean the grit from the large trough he had cut, which to those below would be only a delicate line of expression. There was no talking between him and the boy. Every now and then he would lean forward into the ladder and put his arms down to let the blood back into them. But the two worked at a fast pace, because soon there would be the harshness of sunlight.

He was working on the second eye, sweating within the brocade costume though it was still just dawn heat. Only the sash held him safe on the ladder. There was plaster dust everywhere-on the cheeks and shoulders of the statue’s head, on Ananda’s clothes, on the boy. Ananda was very tired. As if all his blood had magically entered into this body. Soon, though, there would be the evolving moment when the eyes, reflected in the mirror, would see him, fall into him. The first and last look given to someone so close. After this hour the statue would be able to witness figures only from a great distance.

The boy was watching him. Ananda nodded to acknowledge he was all right. They still did not speak. He had probably about another hour to go.

The noise of his hammering stopped and there was just the wind around them, its tugs and gusts and whistles. He handed the tools to his nephew. Then he drew from a satchel the colours for the eye. He looked past the vertical line of cheek into the landscape. Pale greens, dark greens, bird movement and their nearby sounds. It was the figure of the world the statue would see forever, in rainlight and sunlight, a combustible world of weather even without the human element.

The eyes, like his at this moment, would always look north. As would the great scarred face half a mile away, which he had helped knit together from damaged stone, a statue that was no longer a god, that no longer had its graceful line but only the pure sad glance Ananda had found.

And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wing, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagola and skirting to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud. There was a girl moving in the forest. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him. Grasses being burned, bamboo, the smell of petrol and grenade. The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat. The face open-eyed in the great rainstorms of May and June. The weather formed in the temperate forests and sea, in the thorn scrub behind him in the southeast, in the deciduous hills, and moving towards the burning savanna near Badulla, and then the coast of mangroves, lagoons and river deltas. The great churning of weather above the earth.

Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him here. The eyes he had cut and focussed with his father’s chisel showed him this. The birds dove towards gaps within the trees! They flew through the shelves of heat currents. The tiniest of hearts in them beating exhausted and fast, the way Sirissa had died in the story he invented for her in the vacuum of her disappearance. A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared.