Anil's Ghost

Sarath

She arrived in early March, the plane landing at Katunayake airport before the dawn. They had raced it ever since coming over the west coast of India, so that now passengers stepped onto the tarmac in the dark.
By the time she was out of the terminal the sun had risen. In the West she’d read, The dawn comes up like thunder, and she knew she was the only one in the classroom to recognize the phrase physically. Though it was never abrupt thunder to her. It was first of all the noise of chickens and carts and modest morning rain or a man squeakily cleaning the windows with newspaper in another part of the house.
As soon as her passport with the light-blue UN bar was processed, a young official approached and moved alongside her. She struggled with her suitcases but he offered no help.

‘How long has it been? You were born here, no?’
‘Fifteen years.’
‘You still speak Sinhala?’
‘A little. Look, do you mind if I don’t talk in the car on the way into Colombo—I’m jet-lagged. I just want to look. Maybe drink some toddy before it gets too late. Is Gabriel’s Saloon still there for head massages?’
‘In Kollupitiya, yes. I knew his father.’
‘My father knew his father too.’
Without touching a single suitcase he organized the loading of the bags into the car. ‘Toddy!’ He laughed, continuing his conversation. ‘First thing after fifteen years. The return of the prodigal.’
‘I’m not a prodigal.’
An hour later he shook hands energetically with her at the door of the small house they had rented for her.
‘There’s a meeting tomorrow with Mr. Diyasena.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You have friends here, no?’
‘Not really.’

Anil was glad to be alone. There was a scattering of relatives in Colombo, but she had not contacted them to let them know she was returning. She unearthed a sleeping pill from her purse, turned on the fan, chose a sarong and climbed into bed. The thing she had missed most of all were the fans. After she had left Sri Lanka at eighteen, her only real connection was the new sarong her parents sent her every Christmas (which she dutifully wore), and news clippings of swim meets. Anil had been an exceptional swimmer as a teenager, and the family never got over it; the talent was locked to her for life. As far as Sri Lankan families were concerned, if you were a well-known cricketer you could breeze into a career in business on the strength of your spin bowling or one famous inning at the Royal–Thomian match. Anil at sixteen had won the two-mile swim race that was held by the Mount Lavinia Hotel.
Each year a hundred people ran into the sea, swam out to a buoy a mile away and swam back to the same beach, the fastest male and the fastest female fêted in the sports pages for a day or so. There was a photograph of her walking out of the surf that January morning—which The Observer had used with the headline ‘Anil Wins It!’ and which her father kept in his office. It had been studied by every distant member of the family (those in Australia, Malaysia and England, as well as those on the island), not so much because of her success but for her possible good looks now and in the future. Did she look too large in the hips?
The photographer had caught Anil’s tired smile in the photograph, her right arm bent up to tear off her rubber swimming cap, some out-of-focus stragglers (she had once known who they were). The black-and-white picture had remained an icon in the family for too long.

She pushed the sheet down to the foot of the bed and lay there in the darkened room, facing the waves of air. The island no longer held her by the past. She’d spent the fifteen years since ignoring that early celebrity. Anil had read documents and news reports, full of tragedy, and she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze. But here it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus—In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was.


Cave 14 was once the most beautiful site in a series of Buddhist cave temples in Shanxi province. When you entered, it looked as if huge blocks of salt had been carted away. The panorama of Bodhisattvas—their twenty-four rebirths—were cut out of the walls with axes and saws, the edges red, suggesting the wound’s incision.

‘Nothing lasts,’ Palipana told them. ‘It is an old dream. Art burns, dissolves. And to be loved with the irony of history—that isn’t much.’ He said this in his first class to his archaeology students. He had been talking about books and art, about the ‘ascendancy of the idea’ being often the only survivor.
This was the place of a complete crime. Heads separated from bodies. Hands broken off. None of the bodies remained—all the statuary had been removed in the few years following its discovery by Japanese archaeologists in 1918, the Bodhisattvas quickly bought up by museums in the West. Three torsos in a museum in California. A head lost in a river south of the Sind desert, adjacent to the pilgrim routes.
The Royal Afterlife.


On her second morning they asked Anil to meet with forensic students in Kynsey Road Hospital. It wasn’t what she was here for, but she agreed to it. She had not yet met Mr. Diyasena, the archaeologist selected by the government to be teamed with her in the Human Rights investigation. There had been a message that he was out of town and that he would contact her as soon as he returned to Colombo.
The first body they brought in was very recently dead, the man killed since she had flown in. When she realized it must have happened during her early-evening walk in the Pettah market, she had to stop her hands from trembling. The two students looked at each other. She never usually translated the time of a death into personal time, but she was still working out what hour it was in London, in San Diego. Five and a half hours. Thirteen and a half hours.
‘Is this your first corpse, then?’ one of them asked.
She shook her head. ‘The bones in both arms are broken.’ Here it was, in front of her already.
She looked up at the young men. These were students who had not yet graduated, young enough to be appalled. It was the freshness of the body. It was still someone. Usually the victims of a political killing were found much later. She dipped each of the fingers in a beaker of blue solution so she could check for cuts and abrasions.
‘About twenty years old. Dead twelve hours. Do you agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
They seemed nervous, even afraid.
‘What are your names again?’
They told her.
‘The important thing is to say out loud what your first impressions are. Then rethink them. Admit you can make mistakes.’ (Should she be lecturing them?) ‘If you are wrong the first time, redraw the picture. Maybe you can catch what was overlooked. . . . How did they break the arms without damaging the fingers? It’s strange. Your hands go up to protect yourself. Usually the fingers get damaged.’
‘Maybe he was praying.’
She stopped and looked up at the student who had spoken.
The next corpse brought in had flail fractures on the rib cage. It meant he had fallen from a great height—at least five hundred feet—before hitting the water belly-down. The air knocked out of the body. It meant a helicopter.

She woke early the next morning in her rented house on Ward Place and walked into the darkness of the garden, following the sound of koha birds busy with their claims and proclamations. She stood there drinking her tea. Then walked to the main road as a light rain began. When a three-wheeler taxi stopped by her she slipped into it. The taxi fled away, squeezing itself into every narrow possibility of the dense traffic. She held on to the straps tightly, the rain at her ankles from its open sides. The bajaj was cooler than an air-conditioned car, and she liked the throaty ducklike sound of the horns.
Those first days in Colombo it seemed she always found herself alone when the weather broke. The touch of rain on her shirt, the smell of dust in the wetness. Clouds would suddenly unlock and the city would turn into an intimate village full of people acknowledging the rain and yelling to one another. Or there would be an uncertain acceptance of the rain in case it was only a brief shower.
Years before her parents had given a dinner party. They had set up the long table in their parched and dry garden. It was the end of May but the drought had gone on and on and still there was no monsoon. Then, towards the end of the meal, the rains began. Anil woke in her bedroom to the change in the air, ran to her window and looked out. The guests were scurrying under the thickness of the downpour, carrying antique chairs into the house. But her father and the woman he was beside continued to sit at the table, celebrating the break in seasons, as earth turned to mud around them. Five minutes, ten minutes, they sat and talked, she thought, just to make sure it was not a passing shower, to make sure the rain would keep coming down.
Ducklike horns.
The rain swept across Colombo as her bajaj proceeded via a shortcut, towards the Archaeological Offices. Lights were coming on here and there in the small shops. She leaned forward. ‘Some cigarettes, please.’ They swerved to a halt against the pavement and the driver yelled towards a shop. A man came into the rain with three different kinds of cigarettes and she picked out the Gold Leaf package and paid him. They took off again.
Suddenly Anil was glad to be back, the buried senses from childhood alive in her. The application she had made to the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, when a call had gone out for a forensic anthropologist to go to Sri Lanka, had originally been halfhearted. She did not expect to be chosen, because she had been born on the island, even though she now travelled with a British passport. And it seemed somewhat unlikely that human rights specialists would be allowed in at all. Over the years complaints from Amnesty International and other civil rights groups had been sent to Switzerland and resided there, glacierlike. President Katugala claimed no knowledge of organized campaigns of murder on the island. But under pressure, and to placate trading partners in the West, the government eventually made the gesture of an offer to pair local officials with outside consultants, and Anil Tissera was chosen as the Geneva organization’s forensic specialist, to be teamed with an archaeologist in Colombo. It was to be a seven-week project. Nobody at the Centre for Human Rights was very hopeful about it.

As she entered the Archaeological Offices she heard his voice.
‘So—you are the swimmer!’ A broad-chested man in his late forties was approaching her casually, with his hand out. She hoped this wasn’t Mr. Sarath Diyasena, but it was.
‘The swimming was a long time ago.’
‘Still . . . I may have seen you at Mount Lavinia.’
‘How?’
‘I went to school at St. Thomas’s. Right there. Of course I’m a bit older than you are.’
‘Mr. Diyasena . . . let’s not mention swimming again, okay? A lot of blood under the bridge since then.’
‘Right. Right,’ he said in a drawl she would become familiar with, a precise and time-stalling mannerism in him. It was like the Asian Nod, which included in its almost circular movement the possibility of a no. Sarath Diyasena’s ‘Right,’ spoken twice, was an official and hesitant agreement for courtesy’s sake but included the suggestion that things were on hold.
She smiled at him, wanting to get over the fact that they had managed to clash in their first few sentences. ‘A true pleasure to meet you. I’ve read several of your papers.’
‘Of course I’m in the wrong era for you. But I know most of the locations at least. . . .’
‘Do you think we can get a breakfast?’ she asked as they walked towards his car.
‘Are you married? Got a family?’
‘Not married. Not a swimmer.’
‘Right.’

‘The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies—one in the north, two in the south—using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are. I am just an archaeologist. This pairing by your commission and the government was not my idea—a forensic pathologist, an archaeologist, odd pairing, if you want my opinion. What we’ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerrilla separatists. Murders committed by all sides.’
‘I couldn’t tell who was worst. The reports are terrible.’
He ordered another tea and looked at the food that had arrived. She had specifically asked for curd and jaggery. When they were finished he said, ‘Come. I’ll take you to the ship. Let me show you where we will work. . . .’

The Oronsay, a passenger liner in the old days of the Orient Line, had been gutted of all valuable machinery and luxury furnishings. It had once travelled between Asia and England—from Colombo to Port Said, sliding through the narrow-gauge waters of the Suez Canal and journeying on to Tilbury Docks. By the 1970s it made just local trips. The rooms of tourist class were broken apart to become a cargo hold. Tea, fresh water, rubber products and rice replaced difficult passengers, save for a few souls, such as nephews of shareholders of the shipping line looking for work and adventure. It remained a ship of the Orient, a vessel that could survive the heat of Asia, that still contained the smells of salt water, rust and oil, and the waft of tea in cargo.
For the last three years the Oronsay had been berthed permanently in an unused quay at the north end of Colombo harbour. The grand ship had now become essentially part of the land and was being used by Kynsey Road Hospital as a storage and work area. With limited lab space in the hospitals in Colombo, a section of the transformed liner was to be Sarath and Anil’s base.
They left Reclamation Street and walked up the gangplank.

She struck a match, and in the dark hold, light focussed and spilled up her arm. She saw the cotton thread of ‘protection’ on her left wrist, and then the match went out. In the month since the raksha bandhana had been tied on during a friend’s pirith ceremony it had lost its rose colour. When she pulled on a rubber glove in the laboratory, the thread was even paler under it, as if within ice.
Next to her Sarath turned on a torch he had located during the flare of her match, and they both moved forward behind the spoke of twitching light, towards the metal wall. When they reached it he banged hard with the flat of his hand and they heard movement in the room beyond, the scurrying of rats. He banged again, and again there were sounds of movement. She murmured, ‘Like a man and a woman scrambling out of bed when his wife comes home,’ then stopped. Anil didn’t know him well enough to taunt the structure of marriages. She was about to add, Honey, I’m home.
Honey, I’m home, she would say, crouching beside a corpse to ascertain the hour of death. The phrase came out caustic or tender, depending on her mood, mostly in a whisper as she put her hand out and held her palm a millimetre over the flesh to take in its body heat. Its. Not his or hers anymore.
‘Bang it once more,’ she asked him.
‘I’ll use the claw hammer.’ This time the metallic noise echoed into the dark space, and when it died down everything became silent.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘I’ll light a sulphur lamp.’ But Anil had worked in night quarries alongside sulphur brightness, or in basements made naked by it. The porous light revealed a large room, the remnants of a toppled saloon counter in the corner, behind which she later would find a chandelier. This was to be their storage space and work lab, claustrophobic, the odour of Lysol in the air.
She noticed Sarath had already begun using the space to store some of his archaeological findings. There were rock and bone fragments wrapped in clear plastic all over the floor, crates roped tight. Well, she hadn’t come here to deal with the Middle Ages.
He was saying something she could not hear, while unlocking boxes, bringing out the results of a recent dig.
‘. . . mostly sixth century. We think it was a sacred grave for monks, near Bandarawela.’
‘Were any skeletons found?’
‘So far three of them. And some fossilized wood pots of the same period. Everything fits into the same time pattern.’
She pulled her gloves on and lifted an old bone to test the weight. The dating seemed right.
‘The skeletons were wrapped in leaves, then cloth,’ he told her. ‘Then stones were placed on top of them, which slid down later through the rib cage into the chest area.’
Years after a body was buried there would be a small shift on the surface of the earth. Then a falling of that stone into the space left by decayed flesh, as if signalling the departure of a spirit. This was a ceremony of nature that always affected her. As a child in Kuttapitiya Anil had once stepped on the shallow grave of a recently buried chicken, her weight driving the air in the dead body out through its beak—there was a muffled squawk, and she’d leapt back with fear, her soul jostled, then clawed earth away, terrified she would see the creature blink. But it was dead, sand in its eyes. Anil was still haunted by what had occurred that afternoon. She had buried it once more and walked backwards away from the grave.
Now she picked a fragment of bone from the detritus pile and rubbed it. ‘This is from the same place? It doesn’t seem sixth-century.’
‘All this material comes from the monks’ burial midden, in the government archaeological preserve. Nobody else gets in.’
‘But this bone—it doesn’t come from that time.’
He had stopped what he was doing and was watching her.
‘It’s a government-protected zone. The skeletons were interred in natural hollows near the Bandarawela caves. Skeletons and loose bones. It’s unlikely you’d find anything from another era.’
‘Can we go there?’
‘I suppose so. Let me try and get a permit.’

They climbed back up onto the deck of the ship, into sunlight and noise. They could hear powerboats in the main channel of Colombo harbour, megaphones shouting out over the crowded waterways.


On her first weekend, Anil borrowed a car and drove to a village a mile beyond Rajagiriya. She parked by a lot tucked away behind trees, so small she could not believe a house existed there. Large speckled leaves of crotons spilled into the courtyard. There seemed to be no one at home.
The day after she arrived in Colombo Anil had sent a letter but there had been no reply. So she didn’t know if this would be a wasted trip, whether the silence meant acceptance or the address she had was extinct. She knocked, then looked through the bars of the window, turning around quickly as she heard someone come out onto the porch. Anil could hardly recognize the tiny aged woman. They stood facing each other. Anil stepped forward to embrace her. Just then a young woman walked out and watched them without a smile. Anil was aware of the stern eyes that were taking in this sentimental moment.
When Anil leaned back the old woman was weeping; she put her hands out and ran them over Anil’s hair. Anil held her arms. There was a lost language between them. She kissed Lalitha on both cheeks, having to bend down to her because she was small and frail. When Anil let go, the old woman seemed stranded and the young woman—who was she?—stepped forward and led her to a chair, then left. Anil sat next to Lalitha and held her hand in silence, feeling an ache in herself. There was a large framed photograph on the table beside them, and Lalitha picked it up and passed it to Anil. Lalitha at fifty, and her ne’er-do-well husband, and her daughter, who held two babies in her arms. Her finger pointed to one of the babies and then into the darkness of the house. So the young woman was her granddaughter.
The young woman brought out a tray of sugar biscuits and tea, and for the next while the granddaughter talked in Tamil to Lalitha. Anil could understand only a few words when it was spoken, relying mostly on the manner of speech to understand what they were saying. She’d once said something to a stranger who had met her sentence with a blank stare, and had then been told that because of her lack of tone the listener didn’t understand the remark. He could not tell if it was a question, a statement or a command. Lalitha seemed embarrassed to be talking in Tamil and was whispering. The granddaughter, who barely looked at Anil after the first shaking of hands, was speaking loudly. She looked at Anil and said in English, ‘My grandmother wants me to take a picture of the two of you. To remember that you came here.’
She left once more, then returned with a Nikon and asked them to move closer to each other. She said something in Tamil and took one picture before Anil was quite ready. One seemed to be enough. She was certainly confident.
‘Do you live here?’ Anil asked.
‘No. This is my brother’s house. I work in the refugee camps up north. I try to come down every other weekend, so my brother and his wife can get away. How old were you when you last saw my grandmother?’
‘I was eighteen. I’ve been away since then.’
‘You have parents here?’
‘They’re dead. And my brother left. Just my father’s friends are still here.’
‘Then you don’t have any connection, do you?’
‘Just Lalitha. In a way she was the one who brought me up.’ Anil wanted to say more, to say that Lalitha was the only person who taught her real things as a child.
‘She brought all of us up,’ the granddaughter said.
‘Your brother, what does he—’
‘He’s quite a famous pop singer!’
‘And you work in the camps . . .’
‘Four years now.’
When they turned back to her, they saw Lalitha had fallen asleep.

She entered Kynsey Road Hospital and in the main hall found herself surrounded by hammering and yelling. They were breaking up the concrete floors in order to put down new tiles. Students and faculty rushed past her. No one appeared to be concerned that these sounds might be terrifying or exhausting to patients brought in to have wounds dressed or receive stabilizing drugs. Even worse was the voice of the senior medical officer, Dr. Perera, yelling to doctors and assistants, calling them devils for not keeping the building clean. It was so continuous, this yelling, that it seemed to go unheard by most who worked there.
He was a short, thin man, and he had probably only one ally in the building, a young woman pathologist, who, not realizing his reputation, had come to him for help once and thus, by startling him, was befriended. The rest of his colleagues in the building distanced themselves with a tidal wave of anonymous memos and posters. (One poster announced that he was wanted in Glasgow for murder.) Perera’s defense was that the staff was undisciplined, lazy, foolish, unclean and wrongheaded. It was only when he spoke in public that he switched to intellectual and subtle arguments about politics and its link to forensic pathology. His milder twin somehow seemed to have smuggled himself onto the stage.
Anil had heard one of his talks on her second night in Colombo and had been surprised that there were people with his opinions in positions of authority. But now, in the hospital, where she had come to use some equipment, she met the roving snapping dog that was the other side of his nature. She stood there openmouthed while exhausted staff, personnel and workmen and ambling patients veered away from Perera, creating a zone between themselves and this Cerberus.
A young man came up to her.
‘You are Anil Tissera, no?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You won the scholarship to America.’
She didn’t say anything. The foreign celebrity was being pursued.
‘Can you give a small talk, thirty minutes, on poisoning and snakebite?’
They probably knew just as much about snakebite as she did, and she was sure that this choice of subject was intentional—to level the playing field between the foreign-trained and the locally trained.
‘Yes, all right. When?’
‘Tonight?’ the young man said.
She nodded. ‘You contact me at lunch and tell me where.’ She was saying this as she swerved past Dr. Perera.
‘You!’
She turned to face the infamous senior medical officer.
‘You’re the new one, no? Tissera?’
‘Yes, sir. I heard your speech two nights ago. I’m sorry I—’
‘Your father was . . . this thing . . . right?’
‘What . . .’
‘Your father was Nelson K. Tissera?’
‘Yes.’
‘I worked with him at Spittel’s Hospital.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘Look at those padayas. Look—the rubbish here in the halls. This is a hospital, no? Bloody bastards, like a latrine. You are busy now?’
She was busy though she could have changed her plans. She was eager to speak to Dr. Perera and reminisce about her father, but she wanted to do so when he was decaffeinated, calm and alone, not in the midst of a fury. ‘I’ve got a government appointment, I’m afraid, sir. But I’m in Colombo for a while. I hope we can meet.’
‘Your dress is Western, I see.’
‘It’s a habit.’
‘You’re the swimmer, no?’
She walked away, nodding exaggeratedly.


Sarath was reading her postcard upside down as he sat across the desk from her. An unconscious curiosity on his part. He was a man used to cuneiform, faded texts in stone. Even in the shadowed light of the Archaeological Offices this was an easy translation for him.
The sound in the offices was mostly that of the careful pecking of typewriters. Anil had been given the desk by the copy machine, around which there was a permanent tone of complaint, for it never worked properly.
‘Gopal,’ Sarath said, slightly louder than usual, and one of his assistants came to his desk.
‘Two teas. Bullmilk.’
‘Yessir.’
Anil laughed.
‘It’s a Wednesday. Your malaria pill.’
‘Took it.’ She was surprised by Sarath’s concern.
The tea arrived with the condensed milk already in it. Anil picked up her cup and decided to push it.
‘To the comfort of servants. A vainglorious government. Every political opinion supported by its own army.’
‘You talk like a visiting journalist.’
‘I can’t ignore those facts.’
He put his cup down. ‘Look, I don’t join one side or the other. If that’s what you mean. As you said, everyone has an army.’
She picked up the postcard and spun it between her thumbs. ‘Sorry. I feel tired. I’ve spent all morning going through reports at the Civil Rights Movement office. There’s nothing hopeful there. Do you want to have dinner later?’
‘I cannot.’
She waited for some explanation but nothing more came from him. Just his eyes darting to a map on the wall, to the picture of the bird on her postcard. While he continued to tap his pencil against the desk.
‘Where’s that bird from?’
‘Oh . . . nowhere.’ She could close down too.

An hour later they were running through rain and were fully wet by the time they climbed into the car. He drove her to Ward Place and kept the car idling under the portico as she collected her things from the back seat. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, and closed the door.
Once inside, Anil emptied her bag onto the table to find the postcard. Rereading her girlfriend Leaf’s message from America made her feel better. Some communication from the West. She went into the kitchen, her mind circling around Sarath once more. She had been working with him for several days and she still had no handle on him. He was high up in the state-sponsored Archaeological Department, so how much a part of the government was he? Was he its ear and eye while assigned to aid her in the Human Rights investigation and report? In that case whom was she working for?
Forensic work during a political crisis was notorious, she knew, for its three-dimensional chess moves and back-room deals and muted statements for the ‘good of the nation.’ In the Congo, one Human Rights group had gone too far and their collection of data had disappeared overnight, their paperwork burned. As if a city from the past had been reburied. The investigative team, which included Anil in a lowly role as a programme assistant, had nothing left to do but get on a plane and go home. So much for the international authority of Geneva. The grand logos on letterheads and European office doors meant nothing where there was crisis. If and when you were asked by a government to leave, you left. You took nothing with you. Not a slide tray, not a piece of film. At the airport, while they searched her clothing, she’d sat almost naked on a stool.
One postcard from Leaf. One American bird. She pulled some cutlets and a beer out of the fridge. There would be a book to read, a shower to take. Later she might go to Galle Face Green and have a drink at one of the newer hotels, watch the drunk members of a touring English cricket team sing karaoke.
Was the partner assigned to her neutral in this war? Was he just an archaeologist who loved his work? The day before, on a road trip out of Colombo, he had shown her a few temples and then, passing some of his students working in a historic area, had joyfully joined them and was soon collecting slivers of mica, telling them where they were likely to find fragments of iron in the ground, as if he were a gifted and natural finder of things. Most of what Sarath wished to know was in some way linked to the earth. She suspected he found the social world around him irrelevant. His desire, he had told her, was to write a book someday about a city in the south of the island that no longer existed. Not a wall of it remained, but he wanted to tell the story of that place. It would emerge out of this dark trade with the earth, his knowledge of the region in chronicles—its medieval business routes, its presence as a favourite monsoon town of a certain king, as revealed in poems that celebrated the city’s daily life. He’d quoted a few lines from one of the poems which his teacher, a man named Palipana, had taught him.
That was Sarath at his most expressive, almost enthusiastic, one evening after a crab dinner in Mount Lavinia. He stood by the surf drawing the shape of the city with his hands, sketching it in the dark air. Through the imaginary lines she could see the waves, their curl and roll, like his sudden excitement moving towards her.


There were police officers all over the train. The man got on carrying a bird cage with a mynah in it. He walked through carriages, glancing at other passengers. There were no seats left and he sat on the floor. He was wearing a sarong, sandals, a Galle Road T-shirt. It was a slow train, travelling through rock passes, then emerging into sudden vistas. He knew that a mile or so before they got to Kurunegala there would be a tunnel and the train would curve into the dark claustrophobia of it. A few windows would remain open—they needed fresh air, though it meant the noise would be terrible. Once past the tunnel, back into sunlight, they would be getting ready to disembark.
He stood just as the train went into darkness. For a few moments there was the faint muddy light of the bulbs and then they went out. He could hear the bird talking. Three minutes of darkness.
The man moved quickly to where he remembered the government official was, beside the aisle. In the darkness he yanked him forward by his hair and wrapped the chain around his neck and began strangling him. He counted the seconds to himself in the darkness. When the man’s weight fell against him he still didn’t trust him, didn’t release his hold on the chain.
He had a minute left. He stood and lifted the man into his arms. Keeping him upright, he steered him towards the open window. The yellow lights flickered on for a second. He might have been a tableau in somebody’s dream.
He jerked the official off the ground and pushed him through the opening. The buffet of wind outside flung the head and shoulders backwards. He pushed him farther and then let go and the man disappeared into the noise of the tunnel.


While Anil was working with the forensic team in Guatemala, she’d flown into Miami to meet Cullis. She arrived exhausted, her face and body drawn out. Dysentery, hepatitis, dengue fever, they were all going around. She and her team were eating in the villages where they were exhuming bodies; they had to eat the food they were given because it was the only way the villages could participate—by cooking for them. ‘You pray for beans,’ she murmured to Cullis, removing the work clothes she still had on—she had rushed to catch the last plane out—then climbing into her first hotel bath in months. ‘You avoid the seviche. If you have to eat it you throw up somewhere privately, as quick as you can.’ She stretched out in the miracle of a foam bath, a tired smile towards him, glad to have reached him. He knew that exhausted and focussed look, the drawl of her slurring voice as she told her stories.
‘I never actually dug before. I’m usually just in the labs. But we were doing exhumations in the field. Manuel, he gave me a brush and a chopstick and said break up the ground and brush it away. We got five skeletons the first day.’
He was on the edge of the tub watching her, closed eyes, away from the world. She’d cut her hair short. She was much thinner. He could see she had fallen even more in love with her work. Tired out but also refreshed by it.
She leaned forward and pulled the plug out, lay back again to feel the water disappear around her. Then she stood on the tiles, her body passive as he pressed the towel against her dark shoulders.
‘I know the name of several bones in Spanish,’ she boasted. ‘I know some Spanish. Omóplato is this. Shoulder blade. Maxilar—your upper jaw bone. Occipital—the bone at the back of the skull.’ She was slurring words, as if counting backwards with anaesthetic in her. ‘You’ve got a mixed bag of characters working on those sites. Big-shot pathologists from the States who can’t reach for salt without grabbing a woman’s breast. And Manuel. He is part of that community, so he has less protection than the others like us. He told me once, When I’ve been digging and I’m tired and don’t want to do any more, I think how it could be me in the grave I’m working on. I wouldn’t want someone to stop digging for me. . . . I always think of that when I want to quit. I’m sleepy, Cullis. Can hardly talk. Read me something.’
‘I’ve written a piece on Norwegian snakes.’
‘No.’
‘A poem, then.’
‘Yes. Always.’
But Anil was already asleep, with a smile on her face.
Cúbito. Omóplato. Occipital. Cullis wrote the names into his notebook, sitting at the table across the room from her. She was deep in the white linen bed. Her hand moving constantly, as if brushing earth away.

She woke at about seven in the morning, the room dark and hot, and slid naked from the large bed where Cullis was still dreaming. She already missed the labs. Missed the thrill that got knocked into her when they snapped lights on over the aluminum tables.
The Miami bedroom had the atmosphere of a boutique, with its embroidered pillows and carpeting. She entered the bathroom and washed her face, ran some cold water through her hair, wide awake. She climbed into the shower and turned it on but after a minute came out with an idea. Not bothering to dry herself, she unzipped her travelling bag and pulled from it the large, outdated videocamera she had brought with her to Miami to get a new microphone part installed. It was a secondhand television camera that the forensic team used, a remnant from the early eighties. She used it on sites and was accustomed to its weight and its weaknesses. She inserted a cassette and hoisted it onto her wet shoulder. Switched it on.
She began with the room, then returned to the bathroom and filmed herself waving briefly into the mirror. A close-up of the texture of the towels, a close-up of the shower water still running. She stood on the bed and shot down at Cullis’s sleeping head, his left arm out to where she had been all night beside him. Her pillow. Back to Cullis, his mouth, his lovely ribs, back off the bed onto floor level, the camera steady, down to his ankles. Walked backwards to take in their clothes on the floor, and then to the table to his notebook. Close-up on his writing.
She removed the cassette from the machine and buried it under some clothes in his suitcase. She packed the camera in her bag, then got back into bed beside him.

They were lying in bed, in the sunlight. ‘I can’t imagine your childhood,’ he said. ‘You are a complete stranger to me. Colombo. Is the place languid?’
‘It’s languid indoors. Frenetic outside.’
‘You don’t go back.’
‘No.’
‘A friend of mine went to Singapore. All that air-conditioning! He said it was like being stuck in Selfridges for a week.’
‘I suspect people in Colombo would love it to be Selfridges.’
Their life together was best in these brief quiet times, lazily, postcoitally conversing. To him she was clear and funny and beautiful, to her he was married, always interesting, permanently defensive. Two out of three was not good.

They had met on another occasion, in Montreal. Anil was there for a convention, and Cullis had run into her in a hotel lobby quite by chance.
‘I’m sneaking away,’ she said. ‘Enough!’
‘Have dinner with me.’
‘I’ve got plans. I promised myself this evening with a group of friends. Join us. We’ve had days and days of papers. I promise you the worst meal in Montreal if you come with me.’
They drove through the suburbs.
‘Do you speak French?’ he asked.
‘No. Just English. I can write some Sinhala.’
‘Is that your background?’
A no-name plaza appeared on the side of the highway, and she parked beneath the blinking lights of a Bowlerama. ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘In the West.’
Cullis was introduced to seven other anthropologists, who looked him over carefully and considered his posture to assess whether he would be useful on their team. They seemed to come from all over the world. Having flown to Montreal from Europe and Central America, they had escaped another slide show and were now, like Anil, ready for bowling. Bad red wine from a machine dribbled into small paper cups like the ones dentists offered and was being consumed by them at great speed, along with chips and vinegar and canned hummus. A paleontologist organized the computer-scoring panels, and within ten minutes these forensic celebrities, probably the only non-French-speakers in the Bowlerama, were goblinlike in their bowling shoes, and indeed raucous. There was competitive cheating. There was the dropping of bowling balls onto the parquet lanes. Cullis did not wish for his dead body ever to be touched by such incompetents, who committed so many foot faults. More and more, as the contest progressed, he and Anil rushed to each other to give hugs of congratulations. He felt light in his speckled shoes, he flung the ball without aiming and knocked over what sounded like a bucketful of nails. She came over and kissed him, tentatively but precisely on the back of the neck. They left the arcade in each other’s arms.
‘Must be something in the hummus. Was that real hummus?’
‘Yes.’ She laughed.
‘A known aphrodisiac . . .’
‘I’ll never sleep with you if you say you don’t like The Artist Formerly Known As. . . . Kiss me here. Do you have a difficult middle name I have to learn?’
‘Biggles.’
‘Biggles? As in Biggles Flies East and Biggles Wets His Bed?’
‘Yes, that Biggles. My dad grew up on his books.’
‘I never wanted to marry a Biggles. I always wanted to marry a tinker. I love that word. . . .’
‘Tinkers don’t have wives. Not if they are true tinkers.’
‘You’ve got a wife, don’t you?’

*

In the ship’s lab in the harbour, one night, working alone, she cut herself badly with a surgical blade, slicing the flesh along her thumb. She poured Dettol over it and taped it, then decided to go to the hospital on the way home; she didn’t want it infected—there were those rats always in the hold, scurrying perhaps over the instruments when she and Sarath were not there. She was tired and hailed a late-night bajaj that dropped her off at Emergency Services.
There were about fifteen souls sitting or lying on the long benches. Now and then a doctor strolled in, signalled for the next patient and went off with him. She was there for more than an hour and in the end gave up, because more and more injured were coming in off the street and her wound began to seem insignificant in comparison. But that wasn’t why she left. A man wearing a black coat walked in and sat down among them, blood on his clothes. He remained there in silence, waiting for someone to help him, not bothering to pick up a number like the rest of them. Eventually there were three empty spaces on the bench and he stretched out, took off his black coat and used it as a pillow, but he couldn’t sleep and his open eyes stared across the room at her.
His face was red and wet from the blood on the coat. He sat up, pulled a book out of his pocket and began reading very fast, turning pages, taking it in quickly. He swallowed a tablet and lay down again and this time dropped off, his circumstances and surroundings lost to him. A nurse approached him and touched him on the shoulder; when he didn’t move she kept her hand there. Anil was to remember all this very well. He got up then, pocketed the book, and touched one of the other patients and disappeared with him. He was a doctor. The nurse picked up the coat and took it away. That was when Anil left. If she couldn’t tell who was who in a hospital, what chance did she have?


The National Atlas of Sri Lanka has seventy-three versions of the island—each template revealing only one aspect, one obsession: rainfall, winds, surface waters of lakes, rarer bodies of water locked deep within the earth.
The old portraits show the produce and former kingdoms of the country; contemporary portraits show levels of wealth, poverty and literacy.
The geological map reveals peat in the Muthurajawela swamp south of Negombo, coral along the coast from Ambalangoda to Dondra Head, pearl banks offshore in the Gulf of Mannar. Under the skin of the earth are even older settlements of mica, zircon, thorianite, pegmatite, arkose, topaz, terra rossa limestone, dolomite marble. Graphite near Paragoda, green marble at Katupita and Ginigalpelessa. Black shale at Andigama. Kaolin, or china clay, at Boralesgamuwa. Plumbago graphite—veins and flakes of it—graphite of the greatest purity (ninety-seven percent carbon), which would be mined in Sri Lanka for one hundred and sixty years, especially during the World Wars, six thousand pits around the country, the main mines at Bogala, Kahatagaha and Kolongaha.
Another page reveals just bird life. The twenty species of bird out of the four hundred native to Sri Lanka, such as the blue magpie, the Indian blue chat, the six families of the bulbul, the pied ground thrush with its fading hoot, the teal, the shoveller, ‘false vampires,’ pintail snipes, Indian coursers, pale harriers in the clouds. On the reptile map are locations of the green pit viper pala-polanga, which in daylight, when it cannot see well, attacks blindly, leaping to where it thinks humans are, fangs bared like a dog, leaping again and again towards a now hushed and fearful quietness.
Sea-locked, the country lives under two basic monsoon systems—the Siberian High during the northern hemisphere winter and the Mascarene High during the southern hemisphere winter. So the northeast trades come between December and March, while the southeast trades travel in from May to September. During the other months mild sea winds approach the land during the day and reverse their direction during the night.
There are pages of isobars and altitudes. There are no city names. Only the unknown and unvisited town of Maha Illupalama is sometimes noted, where the Department of Meteorology once, in the 1930s, in what now seems a medieval time, compiled and recorded winds and rainfall and barometric pressure. There are no river names. No depiction of human life.


Kumara Wijetunga, 17. 6th November 1989. At about 11:30 p.m. from his house.
Prabath Kumara, 16. 17th November 1989. At 3:20 a.m. from the home of a friend.
Kumara Arachchi, 16. 17th November 1989. At about midnight from his house.
Manelka da Silva, 17. 1st December 1989. While playing cricket, Embilipitiya Central College playground.
Jatunga Gunesena, 23. 11th December 1989. At 10:30 a.m. near his house while talking to a friend.
Prasantha Handuwela, 17. 17th December 1989. At about 10:15 a.m. close to the tyre centre, Embilipitiya.
Prasanna Jayawarna, 17. 18th December 1989. At 3:30 p.m. near the Chandrika reservoir.
Podi Wickramage, 49. 19th December 1989. At 7:30 a.m. while walking along the road to the centre of Embilipitiya town.
Narlin Gooneratne, 17. 26th December 1989. At about 5:00 p.m. at a teashop 15 yards from Serena army camp.
Weeratunga Samaraweera, 30. 7th January 1990. At 5:00 p.m. while going for a bath at Hulandawa Panamura.

The colour of a shirt. The sarong’s pattern. The hour of disappearance.
Inside the Civil Rights Movement offices at the Nadesan Centre were the fragments of collected information revealing the last sighting of a son, a younger brother, a father. In the letters of anguish from family members were the details of hour, location, apparel, the activity. . . . Going for a bath. Talking to a friend . . .
In the shadows of war and politics there came to be surreal turns of cause and effect. At a mass grave found in Naipattimunai in 1985, bloodstained clothing was identified by a parent as that worn by his son at the time of his arrest and disappearance. When an ID card was found in a shirt pocket, the police called an immediate halt to the unburial, and the following day the president of the Citizens’ Committee—who had brought the police to the location—was arrested. The identity of others in this grave in the Eastern Province—how they died, who they were—was never discovered. The warden of an orphanage who reported cases of annihilation was jailed. A human rights lawyer was shot and the body removed by army personnel.
Anil had been sent reports collected by the various human rights groups before leaving the United States. Early investigations had led to no arrests, and protests from organizations had never reached even the mid-level of police or government. Requests for help by parents in their search for teenagers were impotent. Still, everything was grabbed and collected as evidence, everything that could be held on to in the windstorm of news was copied and sent abroad to strangers in Geneva.
Anil picked up reports and opened folders that listed disappearances and killings. The last thing she wished to return to every day was this. And every day she returned to it.
There had been continual emergency from 1983 onwards, racial attacks and political killings. The terrorism of the separatist guerrilla groups, who were fighting for a homeland in the north. The insurrection of the insurgents in the south, against the government. The counterterrorism of the special forces against both of them. The disposal of bodies by fire. The disposal of bodies in rivers or the sea. The hiding and then reburial of corpses.
It was a Hundred Years’ War with modern weaponry, and backers on the sidelines in safe countries, a war sponsored by gun- and drug-runners. It became evident that political enemies were secretly joined in financial arms deals. ‘The reason for war was war.’


Sarath drove into the high altitudes, climbing east towards Bandarawela, where the three skeletons had been found. He and Anil had left Colombo several hours earlier and were now in the mountains.
‘You know, I’d believe your arguments more if you lived here,’ he said. ‘You can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave.’
‘You want me to censor myself.’
‘I want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you’ll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame.’
‘You have a hang-up about journalists, don’t you.’
‘That’s how we get seen in the West. It’s different here, dangerous. Sometimes law is on the side of power not truth.’
‘I just feel I’ve been cooling my heels ever since I got here. Doors that should be open are closed. We’re here to supposedly investigate disappearances. But I go to offices and I can’t get in. Our purpose here seems to be the result of a gesture.’ Then she said, ‘That small piece of bone I found, the first day in the hold, you knew it wasn’t old, didn’t you?’
Sarath said nothing. So she continued. ‘When I was in Central America there was a villager who said to us: When soldiers burned our village they said this is the law, so I thought the law meant the right of the army to kill us.’
‘Be careful what you reveal.’
‘And who I would reveal it to.’
‘That too, yes.’
‘I was invited here.’
‘International investigations don’t mean a lot.’
‘Was it difficult getting the permit for us to work in the caves?’
‘It was difficult.’

She had been taping his remarks about archaeology in this part of the island. Now the conversation strayed onto other subjects, and she eventually asked him about the ‘Silver President’—the populace’s nickname for President Katugala because of his shock of white hair. What was Katugala really like? Sarath was silent. Then his hand reached over and took the tape recorder from her lap. ‘Is your tape recorder off?’ He made sure it was switched off and only then answered her question. The last time she had used the machine was at least an hour earlier; it lay there forgotten by her. But he hadn’t forgotten.
They turned off the road and stopped at a rest house, ordered lunch and sat outside above a deep valley.
‘Look at that bird, Sarath.’
‘A bulbul.’
She put herself into the position of the bird as it took off, and was suddenly vertiginous, realizing how high they were above the valley, the landscape like a green fjord beneath them. In the distance the open plain was bleached white, resembling the sea.
‘You know birds, do you?’
‘Yes. My wife knew them well.’
Anil said nothing, waiting for him to say more or to formally digress from the subject. But he stayed in his silence.
‘Where is your wife?’ she asked finally.
‘I lost her a few years ago, she did—She killed herself.’
‘Jesus. I’m so sorry, Sarath. I’m so . . .’
His face had become vague. ‘She had left me a few months before.’
‘I’m sorry I asked. I always ask, I’m too curious. I drive people mad.’

Later, in the van, to break the longer silence. ‘Did you know my father? You’re how old?’
‘Forty-nine,’ Sarath said.
‘I’m thirty-three. Did you know him?’
‘I’ve heard of him. He was quite a bit older.’
‘I kept hearing my dad was a ladies’ man.’
‘I heard that too. If someone’s charming they say that.’
‘I think it was true. I just wish I had been older—to learn things from him. I wish I’d had that.’
‘There was a monk,’ Sarath said. ‘He and his brother were the best teachers in my life—and it was because they taught me when I was an adult. We need parents when we’re old too. I would meet him once or twice a year when he came to Colombo, and he’d somehow help me become simpler, clearer to myself. Nārada was a great laugher. He would laugh at your foibles. An ascetic. He stayed in a little room in a temple when he was in town. I’d visit him for a coffee, he sat on the bed, I sat on the one chair he’d bring in from the hall. Talking archaeology. He’d written a few pamphlets in Sinhala, but his brother, Palipana, was the famous one in that field, though there never seemed to be any jealousy between them. Nārada and Palipana. Two brilliant brothers. Both of them were my teachers.
‘Most of the time Nārada lived near Hambantota. My wife and I would go down to visit. You walked over hot dunes and came upon the commune for unemployed youth he’d set up by the sea.
‘We were all shaken by his murder. He was shot in his room while sleeping. I’ve had friends die who were my age, but I miss that old man more. I suppose I was expecting him to teach me how to be old. Anyway, once a year, on the anniversary of his death, my wife and I would cook the food he was especially fond of and drive south to the village he’d lived in. We were always closest on that day. And it made him eternal—“persistent” might be a better word—you felt he was there with the boys in the commune who loved the mallung and the condensed-milk desserts he was partial to.’
‘My parents died in a car crash after I left Sri Lanka. I never got a chance to see them again.’
‘I know. I heard your father was a good doctor.’
‘I should have been a doctor, but I swerved off into forensics. Didn’t want to be him at that time in my life, I guess. Then I didn’t want to come back here after my parents died.’

She was asleep when he touched her arm.
‘I see a river down there. Shall we have a swim?’
‘Here?’
‘Just down that hill.’
‘Oh, yes. I’d love to. Yes.’ They pulled towels out of their bags and clambered down.
‘I’ve not done this for years.’
‘It will be cold. You’re in the mountains, two thousand feet up.’
He was leading the way, more sprightly than she expected. Well, he’s an archaeologist, she thought. He got to the river and disappeared behind a rock to change. She yelled, ‘Just taking my dress off!’ to be sure he wouldn’t come back. ‘I’ll wear my underclothes.’ Anil was conscious of how dark it was around her on this slope of the forest, then saw they would be able to swim farther down to a pool full of sunlight.
When she reached the water, he was already swimming, looking up at the trees. She took two steps forward on the sharp stones and dove in with a belly flop. ‘Ah, a professional,’ she heard him drawl.

The brightness on her skin caused by the river’s coldness stayed with her during the last leg of the drive—small bumps of flesh on her forearm, the subliminal hairs upright. They had walked up the slope into the heat and light and she stood by the van drying her hair, beating it gently with her hands. She rolled her wet underclothes into the towel and wore just her dress as they travelled into the mountains.
‘At this altitude you get headaches,’ Sarath said. ‘There’s one good hotel in Bandarawela but we’ll stop and set up a work space at a rest house instead, what do you say? That way we can keep our equipment and findings with us.’
‘That monk you told me about. Who killed him?’
Sarath went on as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘And we’ll want to be near the site. . . . There was a rumour that Nārada’s murder was organized by his own novice, that it was not a political killing as most thought at first. Those days you didn’t know who was killing who.’
Anil said, ‘But you do now, don’t you?’
‘Now we all have blood on our clothes.’

They walked with the owner through the rest house and Sarath selected three rooms.
‘The third room is full of mildew, but we’ll take the bed out and get the walls painted tonight. Turn it into an office and lab. This okay?’ She nodded and he turned back to the manager with instructions.


In 1911, prehistoric remains were discovered in the Bandarawela region and hundreds of caves and rock shelters began to be explored. Remains of cranial and dental fragments were found, as old as any in India.
It was here, within a government-protected archaeological preserve, that skeletons had once again been found, outside one of the Bandarawela caves.
During their first few days there, Sarath and Anil recorded and removed ancient debris—freshwater and arboreal gastropods, bone fragments of birds and mammals, even fish bones from distant eras of the sea. The region felt timeless. They found charred epicarps of wild breadfruit that still grew in the region, even now, twenty thousand years later.
Three almost complete skeletons had been found. But a few days later, while excavating in the far reaches of a cave, Anil discovered a fourth skeleton, whose bones were still held together by dried ligaments, partially burned. Something not prehistoric.

‘Listen,’ she said (they were in the rest house looking at the body), ‘there are trace elements you can find in bones—mercury, lead, arsenic, even gold—that don’t belong to them, they seep in from the surrounding soil. Or they can move from the bones into the adjacent soil. These elements are always passing into and out of bones, whether they are in coffins or not. Well, in this skeleton, there are traces of lead all over him. But there is no lead in this cave where we found him, the soil samples show none. Do you see? He must have been buried somewhere else before. Someone took precautions to make sure the skeleton was not discovered. This is no ordinary murder or burial. They buried him, then later moved him to an older gravesite.’
‘Burying a body and then moving it is not necessarily a crime.’
‘It’s a probable crime, no?’
‘Not if we find a reason.’
‘All right. Look. Use that pen and move it along the bone. That way you can see the twist in the bone clearly. It’s not as straight as it should be. There’s also transverse cracking, but we’ll leave that for now, just more proof.’
‘Of what?’
‘Twisting happens to bones that get burned when they are “green,” that is, flesh-covered. An old body whose flesh withered away with time and then was burned later on—that’s the pattern with most of the Bandarawela skeletons. This one was barely dead, Sarath, when they tried to burn him. Or worse, they tried to burn him alive.’
She had to wait a long time for him to say something. In the freshly painted room at the rest house, the four cafeteria tables each held a skeleton. They had labelled the bodies TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR. The one she was talking about was Sailor. They faced each other across the table.
‘Can you imagine how many bodies must be buried all over the island?’ he finally asked. He was not denying anything she had said.
‘This is a murder victim, Sarath.’
‘A murder . . . Do you mean any murder . . . or do you mean a political murder?’
‘It was found within a sacred historical site. A site constantly under government or police supervision.’
‘Right.’
‘And this is a recent skeleton,’ she said firmly. ‘It was buried no more than four to six years ago. What’s it doing here?’
‘There are thousands of twentieth-century bodies, Anil. Can you imagine how many murders—’
‘But we can prove this, don’t you see? This is an opportunity, it’s traceable. We found him in a place that only a government official could get into.’
He was tapping his pen on the wooden arm of the chair as she talked.
‘We can do palynology tests to identify the type of pollen that fused to the bone, on those parts of him that were not burned. Only the arms and some ribs were burned. Do you have a copy of Wodehouse’s Pollen Grains?’
‘In my office,’ he said quietly. ‘We need to test for soil extracts.’
‘Can you find a forensic geologist?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No one else.’
They had been whispering in the dark for almost half an hour since she had walked from the skeleton at the fourth table and given Sarath’s shoulder a little tug, saying, ‘I have to show you something.’ ‘What?’ ‘This thing. Listen. . . .’
They covered Sailor and taped the plastic. ‘Let’s lock up,’ he said. ‘I promised to take you to that temple. In an hour it’s the best time to see it. We’ll catch the dusk drummer.’
Anil didn’t like the abrupt switch to something aesthetic. ‘You think it’s safe?’
‘What do you want to do? Take it wherever you go? Don’t worry about anything. These will be fine here.’
‘It’s . . .’
‘Leave it.’
She thought she’d say it right out. At once. ‘I don’t really know, you see, which side you are on—if I can trust you.’
He began to speak, stopped, then spoke slowly. ‘What would I do?’
‘You could make him disappear.’
He moved out of his stillness and walked to the wall and turned on three lights. ‘Why, Anil?’
‘You have a relative in the government, don’t you?’
‘I do have one, yes. I hardly ever see him. Perhaps he can help us.’
‘Perhaps. Why did you turn on the light?’
‘I need to find my pen. What—did you think it was a signal to someone?’
‘I don’t know where you stand. I know . . . I know you feel the purpose of truth is more complicated, that it’s sometimes more dangerous here if you tell the truth.’
‘Everyone’s scared, Anil. It’s a national disease.’
‘There are so many bodies in the ground now, that’s what you said . . . murdered, anonymous. I mean, people don’t even know if they are two hundred years old or two weeks old, they’ve all been through fire. Some people let their ghosts die, some don’t. Sarath, we can do something. . . .’
‘You’re six hours away from Colombo and you’re whispering—think about that.’
‘I don’t want to go to the temple now.’
‘That’s fine. You don’t have to. I’ll go. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll turn out the lights,’ he said.


We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed.’ Words about a man buried forever in a prison. El Hombre de la Máscara de Hierro. The Man in the Iron Mask. Anil needed to comfort herself with old friends, sentences from books, voices she could trust. ‘This is the dead-room,’ said Enjolras. Who was Enjolras? Someone in Les Misérables. A book so much a favourite, so thick with human nature she wished it to accompany her into the afterlife. She was working with a man who was efficient in his privacy, who would never unknot himself for anyone. A paranoid is someone with all the facts, the joke went. Maybe this was the only truth here. In this rest house near Bandarawela with four skeletons. You’re six hours away from Colombo and you’re whispering—think about that.
In her years abroad, during her European and North American education, Anil had courted foreignness, was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the highways around Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad. (Even now her brain held the area codes of Denver and Portland.) And she had come to expect clearly marked roads to the source of most mysteries. Information could always be clarified and acted upon. But here, on this island, she realized she was moving with only one arm of language among uncertain laws and a fear that was everywhere. There was less to hold on to with that one arm. Truth bounced between gossip and vengeance. Rumour slipped into every car and barbershop. Sarath’s daily path as a professional archaeologist in this world, she guessed, involved commissions and the favours of ministers, involved waiting politely for hours in their office lobbies. Information was made public with diversions and subtexts—as if the truth would not be of interest when given directly, without waltzing backwards.
She loosened the swaddling plastic that covered Sailor. In her work Anil turned bodies into representatives of race and age and place, though for her the tenderest of all discoveries was the finding, some years earlier, of the tracks at Laetoli—almost-four-million-year-old footsteps of a pig, a hyena, a rhinoceros and a bird, this strange ensemble identified by a twentieth-century tracker. Four unrelated creatures that had walked hurriedly over a wet layer of volcanic ash. To get away from what? Historically more significant were other tracks in the vicinity, of a hominid assumed to be approximately five feet tall (one could tell by the pivoting heel impressions). But it was that quartet of animals walking from Laetoli four million years ago that she liked to think about.
The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adja-cent to the extreme actions of nature or civilization. She knew that. Pompeii. Laetoli. Hiroshima. Vesuvius (whose fumes had asphyxiated poor Pliny while he recorded its ‘tumultuous behaviour’). Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives. A dog in Pompeii. A gardener’s shadow in Hiroshima. But in the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection for the self. They held on to just the coloured and patterned sarong a missing relative last slept in, which in normal times would have become a household rag but now was sacred.
In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures who fought would consume themselves. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.
And who was this skeleton? In this room, among these four, she was hiding among the unhistorical dead. To fetch a dead body: what a curious task! To cut down the corpse of an unknown hanged man and then bear the body of the animal on one’s back . . . something dead, something buried, something already rotting away? Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.


Anil bolted the door and went looking for the owner of the rest house. She requested a light dinner, then ordered a shandy and walked out onto the front verandah. There were no other guests, and the rest-house owner followed her.
‘Mr. Sarath—he always comes here?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes, madame, when he comes to Bandarawela. You live in Colombo?’
‘In North America, mostly. I used to live here.’
‘I have a son in Europe—he wishes to be an actor.’
‘I see. That’s good.’
She stepped off the polished floor of the porch into the garden. It was the politest departure from her host she could make. She didn’t feel like hesitant small-talk this evening. But once she reached the red darkness of the flamboyant tree she turned.
‘Did Mr. Sarath ever come here with his wife?’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘What was she like?’
‘She’s very nice, madame.’
A nod for proof, then a slight tilt of his head, a J stroke, to suggest possible hesitance in his own judgement.
‘Is?’
‘Yes. Madame?’
‘Even though she is dead.’
‘No, madame. I asked Mr. Sarath this afternoon and he said she is well. Not dead. He said she said to give me her wishes.’
‘I must have been mistaken.’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘She comes with him on his trips?’
‘Sometimes she comes. She does radio programmes. Sometimes his cousin comes. He’s a minister in the government.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘No, madame. I think he came only once. Is prawn curry all right?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’

To avoid further conversation, during her meal she pretended to be looking over her notes. She thought about Sarath’s marriage. It was difficult to imagine him as a married man. She was already used to him in the role of a widower, with a silent presence around him. Well, she thought, night falls and you need company. A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.
After dinner she returned to the room where the skeletons were. She didn’t want to sleep yet. She didn’t want to think about the minister who had come with Sarath to Bandarawela. The dim lights didn’t give her enough voltage to read by so she found an oil lamp and lit it. Earlier, she had come across the rest house’s one-shelf library. Agatha Christie. P. G. Wodehouse. Enid Blyton. John Masters. The usual suspects in any Asian library. She had read most of them as a child or as a teenager. Instead she leafed through her own copy of Bridges’s World Soils. Anil knew Bridges like the back of her hand, but she was processing the text now towards her present situation, and as she read she sensed she was leaving the others, the four skeletons, in the darkness.
She was in the chair, her head down towards her thighs, fast asleep, when Sarath woke her.

.  .  .

He touched her shoulder, then pulled the earphones off her hair and put them on his head, pressing the start button to hear cello suites that sewed everything together as he walked around the room.
A swallow, as if she were coming up for air.
‘You didn’t lock the door.’
‘No. Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s here. I arranged for a breakfast. It’s already late.’
‘I’m up.’
‘There’s a shower out back.’
‘I don’t feel good. I’m coming down with something.’
‘If we have to we can break the journey back to Colombo.’
She went out carrying her Dr. Bronner’s, with which she travelled all over the world. The anthropologist’s soap! She was still half asleep in the shower. Her toes nestled against a piece of rough granite, cold water gushing down onto her hair.
She washed her face, rubbing the peppermint soap on her closed eyelids, then rinsing it off. When she looked over the plantain leaves at shoulder level into the distance she could see the blue mountains beyond, the out-of-focus world, beautiful.
But by noon she was encased in a terrible headache.

*

She was feverish in the back seat of the van, and Sarath decided to stop halfway back to Colombo. Whatever sickness she had was like an animal in her, leading her from sudden shivers to sweat.
Then, sometime past midnight, she was in a room that was on the edge of the sea. She had never liked the south coast around Yala, not as a child, not now. The trees appeared to have been grown only for the purpose of shade. Even the moon seemed like a compound light.
At dinner she had been delirious, almost in tears. Sarath appeared to be a hundred miles away across the table. One of them was shouting unnecessarily. She was hungry but couldn’t chew, not even her favourite prawn curry. She just kept spooning the soft lukewarm dhal into her mouth, then drinking lime juice. In the afternoon she had woken to a thumping noise. She managed to climb out of bed and looked down the open-air passageway and saw monkeys disappearing around the far corner of the hall. She believed what she saw. She took capsules every four hours to keep away headaches. This was sunstroke or dengue fever or malaria. When they got back to Colombo she would have tests done. ‘It’s the sun,’ Sarath murmured. ‘I’ll buy you a bigger hat. I’ll buy you a bigger hat. I’ll buy you a bigger hat.’ He was always whispering. She kept saying, What? What? Could hardly bother to say it. Were there monkeys? Monkeys were stealing towels and swimming trunks off the laundry lines during the afternoons while everyone slept. She prayed the hotel wouldn’t turn off the generator. She couldn’t face the thought of no fan or shower to cool her down. All that worked was the telephone. She was expecting a call in the night.
When dinner was over she took the carafe of lime juice and ice to her room and fell asleep immediately. She woke at eleven and took more pills to blanket the headache she knew would return soon. Clothes wet from perspiration. To perspire. To aspire. Discuss. The fan was hardly moving, air didn’t even reach her arms. Where was Sailor? She hadn’t thought about him. She rolled over in the dark and dialed Sarath’s room number. ‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Sailor.’
‘He’s safe. In the van. Remember?’
‘No, I—Is that safe?’
‘It was your idea.’
She hung up, making certain the phone was cradled properly, and lay there in the dark. Wanting air. When she opened the curtains she saw light spraying off the compound pole. There were people on the dark sand preparing boats. If she turned on the lamp she would look like a fish in an aquarium to them.
She left her room. She needed a book to keep her awake till the phone call came. In the alcove she stared at the shelves for a while, grabbed two books and scurried back to her room. In Search of Gandhi, by Richard Attenborough, and a life of Frank Sinatra. She drew the curtains, turned on the light and peeled off her damp clothes. In the shower she put her hair under the cold water and leaned against a corner of the stall, just letting the coolness lull her. She needed someone, Leaf perhaps, to sing along with her. One of those dialogue songs they were always singing together in Arizona . . .
She dragged herself out and sat at the foot of the bed, wet. She was hot but couldn’t open the curtains. It would have meant putting on clothes. She began reading. When she got bored she switched to the other book, and was soon carrying a larger and larger cast of characters in her head. The light was bad. She remembered Sarath had told her the one essential thing he always took on any trip out of Colombo was a sixty-watt bulb. She crawled across the bed and called him. ‘Can I use your lightbulb? It’s a rotten light here.’
‘I’ll bring it.’

They taped down sheets from the Sunday Observer so the pages covered the floor. You have the felt pen? Yes. She began removing her clothes, her back to him, then lay down next to the skeleton of Sailor. She was wearing just her red knickers, silk ones she usually put on with irony. She hadn’t imagined them for public consumption. She looked up at the ceiling, her hands on her breasts. Her body felt good against the hard floor, the coolness of the polished concrete through the newspaper, the same firmness she had felt as a child sleeping on mats.
He was using the felt marker to trace her shape. You will have to put your arms down for a moment. She could feel the pen move around her hands and alongside her waist, then down her legs, both sides, so he linked the blue lines at the base of her heels.
She rose out of the outline, turned back and saw he had drawn outlines of the four skeletons as well.

There was a knocking and she roused herself. She hadn’t moved. All evening she kept discovering herself stilled, unable to think. Even reading she’d gotten entangled sleepily in the arms of paragraphs that wouldn’t let her go. Something about the phrasing of Ava Gardner’s complaint about Sinatra held her. Wrapped in a sheet she opened the door. Sarath passed her the bulb and disappeared from sight. He had been in a shirt and sarong. She was going to ask him to . . . She pulled the table to the centre of the room, switched the light off. She used the sheet to unscrew the hot bulb. She feared wild electricity somewhere in the wire. She could hear the noise of the waves outside. With effort she lifted her head and screwed the bulb Sarath had brought into the socket. Everything was suddenly heavy and slowed down.
She lay flat on the bed, cold once more, shivering, a moan in her mouth. She rummaged through her bag and found two small bottles of scotch she had taken from the plane. Sarath had taken off her clothes and traced her outline. Had he done that?
The telephone rang. It was America. A woman’s voice.
‘Hello? Hello? Leaf? God it’s you! You got my message.’
‘You’ve picked up an accent already.’
‘No, I— Is this a legal call?’
‘Your voice is all up and down.’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you okay, Anil?’
‘I’m sick. It’s very late. No, no. It’s fine. I’ve been waiting for you. It’s just I’m sick and it makes me feel even further away from everybody. Leaf? Are you well?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me. How well?’
There was silence. ‘I’m not remembering. I’m forgetting your face.’
Anil could hardly breathe. She turned from the phone to wipe her cheek on the pillow. ‘Are you there? Leaf?’ She heard the noise of great distances on the line between them. ‘Is your sister with you?’
‘My sister?’ Leaf said.
‘Leaf, listen, remember—who killed Cherry Valance?’
Crackle and silence as she held the phone tight to her ear.
In the next room Sarath had his eyes open, unable to escape the sound of Anil’s weeping.

*

Sarath reached his hand across the breakfast plates and held Anil’s wrist. His thumb on her pulse. ‘We’ll get to Colombo this afternoon. We can work on the skeleton in the ship lab.’
‘And keep the skeleton with us, whatever happens,’ she said.
‘We keep all four. A unit. A disguise. We claim they’re all ancient. Your fever is down.’
She pulled her hand away. ‘I’ll remove a chip from Sailor’s heel—to have a private ID.’
‘If we take more pollen and earth samples, we can find out where he was buried first. Then do the study on the boat.’
‘There’s a woman who has been working on pupae around here,’ Anil said. ‘I read an article. I’m sure she was from Colombo. It was a very good junior thesis.’
He looked at her quizzically. ‘Don’t know. Try the young faculty when you’re at the hospital.’
They sat facing each other in silence.
‘I said to my girlfriend Leaf before I came here, Perhaps I’ll meet the man who is going to ruin me. Can I trust you?’
‘You have to trust me.’

They were at the Mutwal docks in Colombo by early evening. She helped him carry the four skeletons into the lab on board the Oronsay.
‘Take tomorrow off,’ he said. ‘I have to find more equipment, so I’ll need a day.’
Anil remained on the ship after he left, wanting to work for a while. She walked down the stairs and entered the lab, picked up the metal pole they kept by the door and began banging on the walls. Scurrying. Eventually the darkness was silent. She struck a match and walked with it held out in front of her. She pulled down the lever of the generator and soon there was a shaky hum and electricity emerged slowly into the room.
She sat there watching him. The fever was starting to leave and she was feeling lighter. She began to examine the skeleton again under sulphur light, summarizing the facts of his death so far, the permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy. One forearm broken. Partial burning. Vertebrae damage in the neck. The possibility of a small bullet wound in the skull. Entrance and exit.
She could read Sailor’s last actions by knowing the wounds on bone. He puts his arms up over his face to protect himself from the blow. He is shot with a rifle, the bullet going through his arm, then into the neck. While he’s on the ground, they come up and kill him.
Coup de grace. The smallest, cheapest bullet. A .22’s path that her ballpoint pen could slide through. Then they attempt to set fire to him and begin to dig his grave in this burning light.


Anil entered Kynsey Road Hospital and passed the sign by the chief medical officer’s door.

Let conversations cease.
Let laughter flee.
This is the place where Death
Delights to help the living.

It was printed in Latin, Sinhala and English. Once in the laboratory, where she worked now and then in order to use better equipment, she could relax, alone in the large room. God, she loved a lab. The stools always had a slight rake so you sat in a lean. There would always be that earnest tilt forward. On the perimeter, along the walls, were the bottles that held beet-coloured liquids. She could walk around the table watching a body from the corner of her eye, then sit on the stool and time would be forgotten. No hunger or thirst or desire for a friend or lover’s company. Just an awareness of someone in the distance hammering a floor, banging through ancient concrete with a mallet as if to reach the truth.
She stood against the table and it nestled into her hipbones. She slid her fingers along the dark wood to feel for any grain of sand, any chip or crumb or stickiness. In her solitude. Her arms dark as the table, no jewellery except the bangle that would click as she lay her wrist down gently. No other sound as Anil thought through the silence in front of her.
These buildings were her home. In the five or six houses of her adult life, her rule and habit was always to live below her means. She had never bought a house and kept her rented apartments sparse. Though in her present rooms in Colombo there was a small pool cut into the floor for floating flowers. It was a luxury to her. Something to confuse a thief in the dark. At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.
She knew herself to be, and was known to others as, a determined creature. Her name had not always been Anil. She had been given two entirely inappropriate names and very early began to desire ‘Anil,’ which was her brother’s unused second name. She had tried to buy it from him when she was twelve years old, offering to support him in all family arguments. He would not commit himself to the trade though he knew she wanted the name more than anything else.
Her campaign had caused anger and frustration within the household. She stopped responding when called by either of her given names, even at school. In the end her parents relented, but then they had to persuade her irritable brother to forfeit his second name. He, at fourteen, claimed he might need it someday. Two names gave him more authority, and a second name suggested perhaps an alternative side to his nature. Also there was his grandfather. Neither of the children had in fact known the grandfather whose name it had been. The parents threw their hands up and finally the siblings worked out a trade between them. She gave her brother one hundred saved rupees, a pen set he had been eyeing for some time, a tin of fifty Gold Leaf cigarettes she had found, and a sexual favour he had demanded in the last hours of the impasse.
After that she allowed no other first names on her passports or school reports or application forms. Later when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that name and the joy of getting it that she remembered most. Everything about the name pleased her, its slim, stripped-down quality, its feminine air, even though it was considered a male name. Twenty years later she felt the same about it. She’d hunted down the desired name like a specific lover she had seen and wanted, tempted by nothing else along the way.

Anil recalled the nineteenth-century air of the city she had left behind. The prawn sellers holding out their wares to passing traffic on Duplication Road, the houses in Colombo Seven painted that meticulous flat white. This was where the old money and the politically powerful lived. ‘Heaven . . . Colombo Seven . . .’ her father would sing, to the tune of ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ as he let Anil thread his cuff links into his shirtsleeves while he dressed for dinner. There was always this whispering pact between them. And she knew that no matter what time he returned home from dances or other engagements or emergency operations, he would drive her to her dawn swimming practice the next morning, through the empty streets towards the Otters Club. On the drive home they would pause at a stall for a bowl of milk and sugar hoppers, each wrapped in a shiny page from an English magazine.
Even during the monsoon months, at six in the morning she would run from the car through heavy rain and dive into the pocked water and swim her heart out for an hour. Just ten girls and the coach, the noise of the rain clattering on the tin roofs of cars, on the hard water and the taut rubber bathing caps as the swimmers sloshed, turned and emerged again, while a handful of parents read the Daily News. All real effort and energy when she was a kid seemed to have happened by seven-thirty in the morning. She kept that habit in the West, studying for two or three hours before going off to classes at medical school. In some ways her later obsessive tunneling toward discovery was similar to that underwater world, where she swam within the rhythm of intense activity, as if peering through time.
So in spite of Sarath’s suggestion the day before that she sleep in, Anil had breakfasted and was already on her way to Kynsey Road Hospital by six in the morning. The eternal prawn sellers were there on the side of the road, holding out last night’s catch. The smell of hemp idled in the air from ropes lit outside cigarette stalls. She had always veered towards this smell as a child, loitered beside it. Suddenly, and she didn’t know why, she recalled the schoolgirls of Ladies’ College on a balcony looking down at the boys from St. Thomas’s, cads all of them, singing as many verses as they could of ‘The Good Ship Venus’ before the matron chased them off the grounds.

It was on the Good Ship Venus—
By Christ, you should have seen us.
The figurehead was a whore in bed
Astride a rampant penis.

The girls, normally as secure in their school as women within the bounds of courtly love, had thus been startled at the age of twelve and thirteen by this strange choreography, but had no desire to stop listening. It was not until Anil was twenty and in England that she heard the song again. And there—at a post–rugby match party—it seemed a more natural context, in tune with the male braying around her. But the trick of the boys of St. Thomas’s had been to hold up sheet music, and at first the song had sounded like a carol, with trills and descants and preverbal humming, and in this way they had fooled the matron, who was not really listening to anything but the tone. It was only the girls of the fourth and fifth forms who heard every word.

The captain’s name was Mugger,
A dirty-minded bugger.
He wasn’t fit to shovel shit
From one deck to another.

Anil was fond of that verse, and its neatly packed rhyme slid back into her mind at odd moments. She loved songs of anger and judgement. So at six a.m., walking towards the hospital, she tried to recall the other verses to ‘The Good Ship Venus,’ singing the first out loud. The rest she was less certain about, and played them on her lips, a faux tuba. ‘One of the greats,’ she muttered to herself. ‘One of the crucial ones.’

The trainee in Colombo who had written about pupae research turned out to be working in one of the offices off the postmortem lab. It had taken Anil some time to remember the name, but she now found Chitra Abeysekera typing an application form, the paper limp from the humidity of the room. She was standing as she typed, wearing a sari, with what seemed a portable office beside her—two large cardboard boxes and one metal case. They contained research notes, lab specimens, petri dishes and test tubes. The metal case held growing bugs.
The woman looked up at her.
‘Am I disturbing . . . ?’ Anil looked down at the four lines the woman had just typed. ‘Why don’t you take a break and let me type it for you?’
‘You’re the woman from Geneva, right?’ The face was disbelieving.
‘Yes.’
Chitra looked at her hands and they both laughed. Her skin was covered with cuts and bites. They could probably slip easily into a beehive and come out with plunder.
‘Just tell me what to say.’
Anil sidled up and, as Chitra spoke, did a quick edit, adding adjectives, improving her request for funds. Chitra’s blunt description of her project would not have gone far. Anil gave it the necessary drama and turned Chitra’s list of abilities into a more suggestive curriculum vitae. When they finished she asked if Chitra would like to get something to eat.
‘Not the hospital cafeteria,’ Chitra said helpfully. ‘The cook moonlights in the postmortem labs. You know what I’d like? Chinese air-conditioned. Let’s go to Flower Drum.’

There were three businessmen eating at the restaurant, but otherwise it was empty.
‘Thank you for the application help,’ Chitra said.
‘It’s a good project. It’ll be important. Can you do all that here? Do you have facilities?’
‘I have to do it here . . . the pupae . . . the larvae. The tests have to be done in this temperature. And I don’t like England. I’ll go to India sometime.’
‘If you need help, contact me. God, I’d forgotten what cool air feels like. I might just move in here. I want to talk to you about your research.’
‘Later, later. Tell me what you like about the West.’
‘Oh—what do I like? Most of all I think I like that I can do things on my own terms. Nothing is anonymous here, is it. I miss my privacy.’
Chitra looked totally uninterested in this Western virtue.
‘I have to be back by one-thirty,’ she said, and ordered chow mein and a Coke.

The cardboard box with test tubes was open and Chitra was prodding a larva under the microscope. ‘This is two weeks old.’ She tweezered it out and placed it in a tray holding a piece of human liver, which Anil assumed must have been obtained illegally.
‘It’s necessary,’ Chitra said, aware of Anil’s gaze, trying to be casual about it. ‘A little got removed before someone was buried, a small favour. There is an important difference in the speed of growth when insects feed on this as opposed to organs from an animal.’ She dropped the rest of the liver into a picnic cooler, pulled out her charts and spread them over the central table. ‘So tell me how I can help you. . . .’
‘I’ve got a skeleton, partially burned. Can one still pick up information about pupae from it?’
Chitra covered her mouth and burped, as she had been doing continually since the meal. ‘It helps if it is in situ.’
‘That’s the problem. I’ve got earth from the location where we found it, but we think it was moved. We don’t know the first location. I’ve got earth only from the last site.’
‘I could look at the bone. Some insects are attracted to bone, not flesh.’ Chitra smiled at her. ‘So there might be pupae remains from the first location. We could reduce the site possibilities by knowing the type of insect. It’s strange, it’s just those first couple of months when bone attracts some creatures.’
‘Unusual.’
‘Mmm,’ Chitra said, as if eating chocolate. ‘Some butterflies also go to bone for moisture. . . .’
‘Can I show you some of the bone?’
‘I go up-country tomorrow for a few days.’
‘Then later tonight? Is that all right?’
‘Mmm.’ Chitra sounded unconcerned, preoccupied with a clue, a timing on one of her charts. She turned from Anil to an array of insects, then selected one of the right plumpness and age with her forceps.


That night within the ship’s hold Sarath poured plastic that had been dissolved in acetone into a shallow dish, and brought out the camel-hair brush he would use on the bones. A diffuse light, the hum of the generator around him.
He moved to the lab table where a skeleton lay, picked up the alligator-clip lamp—the one source of focussed bright light here—and walked with it and the long cord, still lit, to a cupboard at the far end of the deep room. He opened it, poured himself three-quarters of a tumbler of arrack from a bottle and walked back to the skeleton.
The four skeletons from Bandarawela, revealed now to the air, would soon begin to weaken.
He loosened a new tungsten-carbide needle from its plastic container and attached it to a hand pick and began cleaning the bones of the first skeleton, drilling free the fragments of dirt. Then he turned on a slim hose and let it hover over each bone, air nestling into the evidence of the trauma as if he were blowing cool breath from a pursed mouth onto a child’s burn. He dipped the camel-hair brush into the dish and began painting a layer of protective plastic over the bones, moving down the spine and ribs. After that he carried the alligator-clip lamp to the second table and started on the second skeleton. Then the third. When he came to Sailor’s table he turned the heel bone sideways to find the centimetre-deep chip Anil had furrowed out of the calcaneus.
Sarath stretched and walked out of the light into the darkness, his hands out feeling for the arrack bottle, which he brought back with him to Sailor under the cone of light. It was about two in the morning. When he’d coated all four skeletons, he made notes on each of them and photographed three from anterior and lateral views.
He drank as he worked. The smell of the plastic was now strong in the room. There was no opening for fresh air. He unlocked the doors noisily and climbed up with the bottle of arrack onto the deck. Colombo was dark with curfew. It would be a beautiful hour to walk or cycle through it. The fraught quietness of the roadblocks, the old trees a panoply along Solomon Dias Mawatha. But in the harbour around him there was activity, the light from a tug rolling in the water, the white beams from tractors moving crates on the quay. Three or four a.m. He would lock up and sleep on the ship for the rest of the night.
The hold was still full of the smell of plastic. He pulled out a tied bundle of beedis from a drawer and lit one, then inhaled its rich mortal thirty-two rumours of taste. Picked up the clip lamp and walked over to Sailor. He still had to photograph him. Okay, do it now, he said to himself, and took two shots, anterior and lateral. He stood there as the Polaroids developed, waving them in the air. When Sailor’s image was fully revealed he put the pictures in a brown envelope, sealed and addressed it, and dropped it into his coat pocket.
The three other skeletons had no skulls. But Sailor had a skull. Sarath put the half-smoked beedi on the metal sink and leaned forward. With a scalpel he cut apart the ligaments that attached the skull to the neck vertebrae, and separated it. He brought the skull to his desk. The burning hadn’t reached the head, so the frontal, orbital and lacrimal plates were smooth, the knit marks on the skull tight. Sarath wrapped it in plastic and placed it in a large shopping bag that said ‘Kundanmal’s.’ He returned and photographed Sailor without the skull, twice, lateral and anterior.
He was aware now more than anything that he and Anil needed help.