Anil's Ghost (16 page)

Sarath’s glasses were on his nose. He looked at her.

‘Do you understand me?’

‘Not really. You want to touch him?’

‘Just tell him not to move, okay?’

As soon as Sarath entered his work space, Ananda threw a cloth over the head. There was a brief conversation, then hesitant monosyllabic agreement repeated after each of Sarath’s phrases. She walked in slowly and kneeled beside Ananda, but as soon as she touched him he jumped up.

She turned away in frustration.

‘Ne, ne!’
Sarath tried to explain once more. It took a while for them to arrange Ananda into exactly the same position he had been in.

‘Get him to keep it taut, as if he was working.’

Anil took hold of Ananda’s ankle in both hands. She pressed her thumbs into the muscle and cartilege, moved them up a few inches above his ankle bone. There was a dry laugh from Ananda. Then down to the heel again. ‘Ask him why he works like this.’ She was told by Sarath that he was comfortable.

‘It’s not comfortable,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the foot is relaxed. There’s stress. The ligament is being stretched against the bone. There will be a permanent bruise to it. Ask him.’

‘What?’

‘Ask him why he works this way.’

‘He’s a carver. That’s how he works.’

‘But does he usually squat like this?’

Sarath asked the question and the two men rattled back and forth.

‘He said he got used to squatting in the gem mines. The height down there is only about four feet. He was in them for a couple of years.’

‘Thank you. Please, will you thank him. . . .’

She was excited.

‘Sailor worked in a mine too. Come here, look at the strictures on the ankle bones of the skeleton—this is what Ananda has under his flesh. I
know
this. This was my professor’s area of specialty. See this sediment on the bone, the buildup. I think Sailor worked in one of the mines. We need to get a chart of the mines in this area.’

‘Are you talking about gem mines?’

‘It could be anything. Also, this is just one aspect of his life, the rest is very different. He must have done something more active before he broke his leg. So we have a story about him, you see. A man who was active, an acrobat almost, then he was injured and had to work in a mine. What other mines do they have around here?’

There followed two days of storms when they had to stay indoors. As soon as the bad weather ended, Anil borrowed Sarath’s cell phone, found an umbrella and went into a light rain. She clambered down a slope away from the trees and stalked across to the far edge of the paddy field, to where Sarath had told her there was the clearest reception.

She needed communication with the outside world. There was too much solitude in her head. Too much Sarath. Too much Ananda.

Dr. Perera at Kynsey Road Hospital answered the phone. It took a while for him to remember who she was, and he was startled to be told that she was speaking to him from a paddy field. What did she want?

She had wanted to talk to him about her father, knew she had been skirting the memory of him since her arrival on the island. She apologized for not calling and meeting him before she left Colombo. But on the phone Perera seemed muted and wary.

‘You sound sick, sir. You should take a lot of liquids. A viral flu comes like that.’

She would not tell him where she was—Sarath had warned her of that—and when he asked for the second time she pretended she could not hear, said, ‘Hello . . . hello? Are you there, sir?’ and hung up.

*

Anil moves in silence, the energy held back. Her body taut as an arm, the music brutal and loud in her head, while she waits for the rhythm to angle off so she can open her arms and leap. Which she does now, throwing her head back, her hair a black plume, back almost to the level of her waist. Throws her arms too, to hold the ground in her back flip, her loose skirt having no time to discover gravity and drop before she is on her feet again.

It is wondrous music to dance alongside—she has danced to it with others on occasions of joy and gregariousness, carousing through a party with, it seemed, all her energy on her skin, but this now is not a dance, does not contain even a remnant of the courtesy or sharing that is part of a dance. She is waking every muscle in herself, blindfolding every rule she lives by, giving every mental skill she has to the movement of her body. Only this will lift her backward into the air and pivot her hip to send her feet over her.

A scarf tied tight around her head holds the earphones to her. She needs music to push her into extremities and grace. She wants grace, and it happens here only on these mornings or after a late-afternoon downpour—when the air is light and cool, when there is also the danger of skidding on the wet leaves. It feels as if she could eject herself out of her body like an arrow.

Sarath sees her from the dining room window. He watches a person he has never seen. A girl insane, a druid in moonlight, a thief in oil. This is not the Anil he knows. Just as she, in this state, is invisible to herself, though it is the state she longs for. Not a moth in a man’s club. Not the carrier and weigher of bones—she needs that side of herself too, just as she likes herself as a lover. But now it is herself dancing to a furious love song that can drum out loss, ‘Coming In from the Cold,’ dancing the rhetoric of a lover’s parting with all of herself. She thinks she is most sane about love when she chooses damning gestures against him, against herself, against them together, against eros the bittersweet, consumed and then spat out in the last stages of their love story. Her weeping comes easy. It is for her in this state no more than sweat, no more than a cut foot she earns during the dance, and she will not stop for any of these, just as she would not change herself for a lover’s howl or sweet grin, then or anymore.

She stops when she is exhausted and can hardly move. She will crouch and lean there, lie on the stone. A leaf will come down. Its click of applause. The music continues furious like blood moving for a few more minutes in a dead man. She lies under the sound and witnesses her brain coming back, lighting its candle in the dark. And breathes in and breathes out and breathes in and breathes out.

O
n the weekend, while they were in the front garden of the
walawwa,
Ananda sat down beside them and talked to Sarath in Sinhala.

‘He has finished the head,’ Sarath said, not even turning towards her but still watching Ananda’s face. ‘Apparently, he says, it’s done. If there are any problems with it I suggest we don’t complain, he’s badly drunk. Save whatever hesitations. Or he might disappear on us.’

She said nothing and the two men continued speaking, the dusk settling around them within the sound of the frogs. She got up and strolled towards the twangings and croaks. She was lost in the antiphonies until she felt Sarath’s hand on her shoulder.

‘Come. Let’s see it now.’

‘Before he passes out? Yes, yes.
No
criticism.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I humour him. I humour you. When do I get my turn?’

‘I don’t think you like being humoured.’

‘A favour then, sometime.’

In the courtyard a torch of twigs was stuck into the earth. Sailor’s head was on a chair. Nothing else, only the two of them and the presence of the head.

The firelight set the face in movement. But what affected her—who felt she knew every physical aspect about Sailor, who had been alongside him now in his posthumous life as they travelled across the country, who had slept in a chair all night while he lay on the table in the Bandarawela rest house, who knew every mark of trauma from his childhood—was that this head was not just how someone possibly looked, it was a specific person. It revealed a distinct personality, as real as the head of Sarath. As if she was finally meeting a person who had been described to her in letters, or someone she had once lifted up as a child who was now an adult.

She sat on the step. Sarath was walking towards the head and then walking backwards, away from it. Then he would turn, as if to catch it unawares. She just watched it point-blank, coming to terms with it. There was a serenity in the face she did not see too often these days. There was no tension. A face comfortable with itself. This was unexpected coming from such a scattered and unreliable presence as Ananda. When she turned she saw that he had gone.

‘It’s so peaceful.’ She spoke first.

‘Yes. That’s the trouble,’ Sarath said.

‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

‘I know. It’s what he wants of the dead.’

‘He’s younger-looking than I expected. I like the look on him. What do you mean by that? “What he wants of the dead”?’

‘We have seen so many heads stuck on poles here, these last few years. It was at its worst a couple of years ago. You’d see them in the early mornings, somebody’s night work, before the families heard about them and came and removed them and took them home. Wrapping them in their shirts or just cradling them. Someone’s son. These were blows to the heart. There was only one thing worse. That was when a family member simply disappeared and there was no sighting or evidence of his existence or his death. In 1989, forty-six students attending school in Ratnapura district and some of the staff who worked there disappeared. The vehicles that picked them up had no number plates. A yellow Lancer had been seen at the army camp and was recognized during the roundup. This was at the height of the campaign to wipe out insurgent rebels and their sympathizers in the villages. Ananda’s wife, Sirissa, disappeared at that time. . . .’

‘My God.’

‘He told me only recently.’

‘I . . . I feel ashamed.’

‘It’s been three years. He still hasn’t found her. He was not always like this. The head he has made is therefore peaceful.’

Anil rose and walked back into the dark rooms. She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda’s wife in every aspect of it. She sat down in one of the large cane chairs in the dining room and began weeping. She could not face Sarath with this. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see the rectangular shape of a painting and beside it Ananda standing still, looking through the blackness at her.

W
ho were you crying for? Ananda and his wife?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Ananda, Sailor, their lovers. Your brother working himself to death. There’s only a mad logic here, no resolving. Your brother said something, he said, “You’ve got to have a sense of humour about all this—otherwise it makes no sense.” You must be in hell if you can seriously say things like that. We’ve become medieval. I saw your brother once before that night in the hospital with Gunesena. I’d cut myself badly and gone to Emergency Services to get some stitches. Your brother was there in a black coat and he was covered in blood, covered in blood reading a paperback. I’m sure now it was Gamini. I thought he looked familiar when I saw him with you. I thought he was a patient, part of an attempted murder. Your brother’s on speed, isn’t he?’

‘He’s been on various things. I don’t know now.’

‘He’s so thin. Someone needs to help him.’

‘He embraces it, what he does to himself. He’s reached a balance with it.’

‘What are you going to do with the head?’

‘He might have come from one of these villages. I can see if anyone recognizes it.’

‘Sarath, you can’t do this. You said . . . these are communities that lost people. They’ve had to deal with beheaded bodies.’

‘What’s our purpose here? We’re trying to identify him. We have to start somewhere.’

‘Please don’t do this.’

.  .  .

He had been standing, listening to them speaking in English in the courtyard. But now he faced her, not knowing that the tears were partly for him. Or that she realized the face was in no way a portrait of Sailor but showed a calm Ananda had known in his wife, a peacefulness he wanted for any victim.

She would have turned on a light but she had noticed Ananda never stepped into electrically lit areas. He worked always with flare torches in his room if it was too overcast. As if electricity had betrayed him once and he would not trust it again. Or maybe he was of that generation of battery lovers unaccustomed to official light. Just batteries or fire or moon.

He moved two steps forward and with his thumb creased away the pain around her eye along with her tears’ wetness. It was the softest touch on her face. His left hand lay on her shoulder as tenderly and formally as the nurse’s had on Gamini that night in the emergency ward, which was why, perhaps, she recalled that episode to Sarath later. Ananda’s hand on her shoulder to quiet her while the other hand came up to her face, kneaded the skin of that imploded tension of weeping as if hers too was a face being sculpted, though she could tell that wasn’t in his thoughts. This was a tenderness she was receiving. Then his other hand on her other shoulder, the other thumb under her right eye. Her sobbing had stopped. Then he was not there anymore.

In all of her time with Sarath, she realized, he had hardly touched her. With Sarath she felt simply
adjacent.
Gamini’s shaking her hand in the night hospital, his sleeping head on her lap that one night had been more personal. Now Ananda had touched her in a way she could recollect no one ever having touched her, except, perhaps, Lalitha. Or perhaps her mother, somewhere further back in her lost childhood. She slipped into the courtyard and saw Sarath still there facing the image of Sailor. He would already know as she did that no one would recognize the face. It was not a reconstruction of Sailor’s face they were looking at.

O
nce she and Sarath had entered the forest monastery in Arankale and spent a few hours there. A corrugated overhang was nailed into the rock of a cave entrance to keep out sun and rain. Beyond was a curved road of sand to a bathing pool. A monk swept his way along the path for two hours each morning and removed a thousand leaves. By late afternoon another thousand leaves and light twigs had fallen upon it. But at noon its surface was as clear and yellow as a river. To walk this sand path was itself an act of meditation.