Anil's Ghost

The Grove of Ascetics

The epigraphist Palipana was for a number of years at the centre of a nationalistic group that eventually wrestled archaeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans. He had made his name translating Pali scripts and recording and translating the rock graffiti of Sigiriya.
The main force of a pragmatic Sinhala movement, Palipana wrote lucidly, basing his work on exhaustive research, deeply knowledgeable about the context of the ancient cultures. While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia.
The 1970s had witnessed the beginning of a series of international conferences. Academics flew into Delhi, Colombo and Hong Kong for six days, told their best anecdotes, took the pulse of the ex-colony, and returned to London and Boston. It was finally realized that while European culture was old, Asian culture was older. Palipana, by now the most respected of the Sri Lankan group, went to one such gathering and never went to another. He was a spare man, unable to abide formality and ceremonial toasts.
The three years Sarath spent as a student of Palipana’s were the most difficult of his academic life. All archaeological data proposed by a student had to be confirmed. Every rock cuneiform or carving had to be drawn and redrawn onto the pages of journals, in sand, on blackboards, until it was a part of dreams. Sarath had thought of Palipana during the first two years as someone mean with praise and mean (rather than spare) in the way he lived. He seemed incapable of handing out compliments, would never buy anyone a drink or a meal. His brother, Nārada, who had no car and was always cadging rides, at first appeared similar, but was generous with time and friendship, generous with his laughter. Palipana always seemed to be saving himself for the language of history. He was vain and excessive only in how he insisted on having his work published a certain way, demanding two-colour diagrams on good paper that would survive weather and fauna. And it was only when a book was completed that his terrierlike focus would shift away from a project, so he could go empty-handed into another era or another region of the country.
History was ever-present around him. The stone remnants of royal bathing pools and water gardens, the buried cities, the nationalistic fervour he rode and used gave him and those who worked with him, including Sarath, limitless subjects to record and interpret. It appeared he could divine a thesis at any sacred forest.
Palipana had not entered the field of archaeology until he was middle-aged. And he had risen in the career not as a result of family contacts but simply because he knew the languages and the techniques of research better than those above him. He was not an easily liked man, he had lost charm somewhere in his youth. He would discover among his students over the years only four dedicated protégés. Sarath was one of them. By the time Palipana was in his sixties, however, he had fought with each of them. Not one of the four had forgiven him for their humiliations at his hands. But his students continued to believe two things—no, three: that he was the best archaeological theorist in the country, that he was nearly always right, and that even with his fame and success he continued to live a life-style more minimal than any of them. Perhaps this was the result of being the brother of a monk. Palipana’s wardrobe was, apparently, reduced to two identical outfits. And as he grew older he linked himself less and less with the secular world, save for his continuing vanity regarding publication. Sarath had not seen him for several years.

During these years Palipana had been turned gracelessly out of the establishment. This began with his publication of a series of interpretations of rock graffiti that stunned archaeologists and historians. He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century. The work was applauded in journals abroad and at home, until one of Palipana’s protégés voiced the opinion that there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts. They were a fiction. A group of historians was unable to locate the runes Palipana had written about. No one could find the sentences he had quoted and translated from dying warriors, or any of the fragments from the social manifestos handed down by kings, or even the erotic verses in Pali supposedly by lovers and confidants of the court mentioned by name but never quoted in the Cūlava?sa.
The detailed verses Palipana had published seemed at first to have ended arguments and debates by historians; they were confirmed by his reputation as the strictest of historians, who had always relied on meticulous research. Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world. Though perhaps it was more than a trick, less of a falsehood in his own mind; perhaps for him it was not a false step but the step to another reality, the last stage of a long, truthful dance.
But no one admired this strange act. Not his academic followers. Not even protégés like Sarath, who had been consistently challenged by his mentor during his academic years for crimes of laxness and inaccuracy. The gesture, ‘Palipana’s gesture,’ was seen as a betrayal of the principles on which he had built his reputation. A forgery by a master always meant much more than mischief, it meant scorn. Only when seen at its most innocent could it be regarded as an autobiographical or perhaps chemical breakdown.

The graffiti at the great rock fortress of Sigiriya was located on an overhang at the first quarter-mile mark of ascent. Older than the more famous paintings of goddesslike women on the Mirror Wall, it had been cut into the rock most probably in the sixth century. The faded moth-coloured writings had always been a magnet and a mystery for historians—they were enigmatic statements with no context—and Palipana himself had studied them and worried over them for fifteen years of his life. As a historian and a scientist he approached every problem with many hands. He was more likely to work beside a stonemason or listen to a dhobi woman washing clothes at a newly discovered rock pool than with a professor from the University of Peradeniya. He approached runes not with a historical text but with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills. His eyes recognized how a fault line in a rock wall might have insisted on the composure of a painted shoulder.
Having studied languages and text until he was forty, he spent the next thirty years in the field—the historical version already within him. So that approaching a site Palipana knew what would be there—whether a distinct pattern of free-standing pillars in a clearing or a familiar icon drawn on a cave wall high above. It was a strange self-knowledge for someone who had always been humble in his assumptions.
He spread his fingers over every discovered rune. He traced each letter on the Stone Book at Polonnaruwa, a boulder carved into a rectangle four feet high, thirty feet long, the first book of the country, laid his bare arms and the side of his face against this plinth that collected the heat of the day. For most of the year it was dark and warm and only during the monsoons would the letters be filled with water, creating small, perfectly cut harbours, as at Carthage. A giant book in the scrub grass of the Sacred Quadrangle of Polonnaruwa, chiselled with letters, bordered by a frieze of ducks. Ducks for eternity, he whispered to himself, smiling in the noon heat, having pieced together what he had picked up in an ancient text. A secret. His greatest joys were such discoveries, as when he found the one dancing Ganesh, possibly the island’s first carved Ganesh, in the midst of humans in a frieze at Mihintale.
He drew parallels and links between the techniques of stonemasons he met with in Matara and the work he had done during the years of translating texts and in the field. And he began to see as truth things that could only be guessed at. In no way did this feel to him like forgery or falsification.
Archaeology lives under the same rules as the Napoleonic Code. The point was not that he would ever be proved wrong in his theories, but that he could not prove he was right. Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water, they allowed a leap from treetop to treetop. The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unprovable truth emerged.
However much he himself had stripped worldly goods and social habits from his life, even more was taken from him in reaction to his unprovable theories. There was no longer any respect accorded to his career. But he refused to give up what he claimed to have discovered, and made no attempt to defend himself. Instead he retreated physically. Years earlier, on a trip with his brother, he had found the remaining structures of a forest monastery, twenty miles from Anuradhapura. So now, with his few belongings, he moved there. The rumour was that he was surviving in the remnants of a ‘leaf hall,’ with little that was permanent around him. This was in keeping with the sixth-century sect of monks who lived under such strict principles that they rejected any religious decoration. They would adorn only one slab with carvings, then use it as a urinal stone. This was what they thought of graven images.
He was in his seventies, his eyesight worrying him. He still wrote in cursive script, racing the truth out of himself. He was thin as a broom, wore the same cotton trousers bought along the Galle Road, the same two plum-coloured shirts, spectacles. He still had his dry, wise laugh that seemed, to those who knew them both, the only biological connection he had with his brother.
He lived in the forest grove with his books and writing tablets. But for him, now, all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain. Though as he worked he was conscious that the paper itself that held these histories was aging fast. It was insect-bitten, sun-faded, wind-scattered. And there was his old, thin body. Palipana too now was governed only by the elements.

*

Sarath drove with Anil north beyond Kandy, into the dry zone, searching for Palipana. There was no way the teacher could be told they were coming, and Sarath had no idea how they would be greeted—whether they would be spurned or grudgingly acknowledged. By the time they reached Anuradhapura they were in the heat of the day. They drove on and within an hour were at the entrance to the forest. They left the car and walked for twenty minutes along a path that snaked between large boulders, then opened unexpectedly into a clearing. There were abandoned stone-and-wood structures strewn in front of them—the dry remnants of a water garden, slabs of rock. There was a girl sifting rice, and Sarath went towards her and spoke with her.
The girl boiled water for tea over a twig fire and the three of them sat on a bench and drank it. The girl still had said nothing. Anil assumed Palipana was asleep in the darkness of a hut, and a while later an old man came out of one of the structures in a sarong and shirt. He went around to the side, pulled up a bucket from a well and washed his face and arms. When he returned he said, ‘I heard you talking, Sarath.’ Anil and Sarath both stood, but Palipana made no further gesture towards them. He just stood there. Sarath bent down and touched the old man’s feet, then led him to the bench.
‘This is Anil Tissera. . . . We’re working together, analyzing some skeletons that were found near Bandarawela.’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you do, sir?’
‘A most beautiful voice.’
And Anil suddenly realized he was blind.
He reached out and held her forearm, touching the skin, feeling the muscle underneath; she sensed he was interpreting her shape and size from this fragment of her body.
‘Tell me about them—how ancient?’ He let go of her.
Anil looked quickly at Sarath, who gestured to the forest around them. Who was the old man going to tell?
Palipana’s head kept tilting, as if trying to catch whatever was passing in the air around him.
‘Ah—a secret against the government. Or perhaps a government secret. We are in the Grove of Ascetics. We are safe here. And I am the safest secret-holder. Besides, it makes no difference to me whose secret it is. You already know that, don’t you, Sarath? Otherwise you would not have come all this way for help. Is that not correct?’
‘We need to think something through, perhaps to find someone. A specialist.’
‘As you can tell, I am unable to see anymore, but bring what you have over to me. What is it?’
Sarath went to his bag beside the twig fire, removed the plastic wrapping, and walked over and put the skull in Palipana’s lap.

Anil watched the old man as he sat in front of them, calm and still. It was about five in the evening and without the harsh sunlight the rock outcrops around them were now pale and soft. She became aware of the quieter sounds around them.
‘Bell and other archaeologists thought this place the location of a secular summer palace when he came upon it in the nineteenth century. But the Cūlava?sa describes the establishment of forest-dwelling fraternities—by monks who opposed rituals and luxuries.’
Palipana gestured to his left without moving his head. Of the five structures in the clearing, he was living in the simplest one, built against a rock outcrop, with a contemporary leaf roof.
‘They were not really poor, but they lived sparsely—you know the distinction between the gross material world and the “subtle” material world, don’t you? Well, they embraced the latter. Sarath has no doubt told you about the elaborate urinal stones. He always enjoyed that detail.’
Palipana pursed his lips. There was a tinge of dry humour to his expression and she supposed it was the closest he came to a smile.
‘We are safe here, but of course history teaches. During the reign of Udaya the Third, some monks fled the court to escape his wrath. And they came into the Grove of Ascetics. The king and the Uparaja followed them and cut their heads off. Also recorded in the Cūlava?sa is the population’s reaction to this. They became rebellious, “like the ocean stirred by a storm.” You see, the king had violated a sanctuary. There were huge protests all over the kingdom, all because of some monks. All because of a couple of heads . . .’
Palipana fell silent. Anil watched his fingers, beautiful and thin, moving over the outlines of the skull Sarath had given him, his long fingernails at the supraorbital ridge, within the orbital cavities, then cupping the shape as if warming his palms on the skull, as if it were a stone from some old fire. He was testing the jaw’s angle, the blunt ridge of its teeth. She imagined he could hear the one bird in the forest distance. She imagined he could hear Sarath’s sandals pacing, the scrape of his match, the sound of the fire roasting the tobacco leaf as Sarath smoked his beedi a few yards away. She was sure he could hear all that, the light wind, the other fragments of noise that passed by his thin face, that glassy brown boniness of his own skull. And all the while the blunt eyes looked out, piercing whatever caught them. His face was immaculately shaved. Had he done that, or was it the girl?
‘Tell me what you think—you.’ He turned his head in Anil’s direction.
‘Well . . . We’re not in full agreement. But we both know the skeleton this skull comes from is contemporary. It was found in a cache of nineteenth-century bones.’
‘But the pedicle on the back of the neck was recently broken,’ the old man said.
‘He—’
‘I did that,’ Sarath said. ‘Two days ago.’
‘Without my permission,’ she said.
‘Sarath always does what he does for a reason, he is not a random man. He travels in mid-river, always.’
‘A visionary decision while drunk, we are calling it for now,’ she said as calmly as she could.
Sarath looked between them, at ease with this wit.
‘Tell me more. You.’ He turned his head towards her again.
‘My name is Anil.’
‘Yes.’
She saw Sarath shaking his head and grinning. She ignored Palipana’s question and gazed into the darkness of the structure he lived in.
They were not surrounded by verdant landscape. Ascetics always chose outcrops of living rock and cleared the topsoil away. There was just the roof of thatch and palm. His leaf hall. Old pissed-off ascetics.
Still, it was calm here. Cicadas noisy and invisible. Sarath had told her that the first time he visited a forest monastery he had not wanted to leave. He had guessed that his teacher in exile would select one of the leaf halls that ringed Anuradhapura, a traditional home for monks. And Palipana had said once how he wished to be buried in this region.
Anil walked past the old man and stood by the well, looking down into it. ‘Where is she going?’ she heard Palipana say, no real annoyance in his voice. The girl came out of the house with some passion fruit juice and cut guava. Anil drank from a glass quickly. Then she turned to him.
‘It’s likely he was buried twice. What’s important is that the second time it was in a restricted area—accessible only to the police or the army or some high-level government officials. Someone at Sarath’s level, for example. No one else has access to such places. So this doesn’t seem a crime by an average citizen. I know that murders are sometimes committed during a war for personal reasons, but I don’t think a murderer would have the luxury of burying a victim twice. The skeleton this head is part of was found by us in a cave in Bandarawela. We need to discover if we’re talking about a murder committed by the government.’
‘Yes.’
‘The trace elements on Sailor’s bones do not—’
‘Who is Sailor?’
‘Sailor is a name we have given the skeleton. The trace elements of soil in his bones do not match the soil where we found him. We don’t necessarily agree about the exact bone age, but we are certain he was buried somewhere else first. That is, he was killed and then buried. Then he was dug up, moved to a new location and buried again. Not only do the trace elements of soil not match, but we suspect the pollen that adhered to him before he was buried comes from a totally different region.’
‘Wodehouse’s Pollen Grains . . .’
‘Yes, we used that. Sarath has located the pollen to two possible places, one up near Kegalle and another in the Ratnapura area.’
‘Ah, an insurgent area.’
‘Yes. Where many villagers disappeared during the crisis.’
Palipana stood and held out the skull for one of them to take. ‘It’s cooler now, we can have supper. Can you stay the night?’
‘Yes,’ Anil said.
‘I will help Lakma cook, we cook the meals together—while you both rest, perhaps.’
‘I’d like a well bath,’ she told him. ‘We’ve been on the road since five this morning. Is that all right?’
Palipana nodded.

Sarath went into the darkness of the leaf hall and lay down on a floor mat. He seemed exhausted from the long drive. Anil returned to the car and pulled two sarongs out of her bag, then walked back to the clearing. She undressed by the well, unstrapped her watch and got into the diya reddha cloth, and dropped the bucket into the depths. There was a hollow smash far below her. The bucket sank and filled. She jerked the rope so the bucket flew up, and caught the rope near the handle. Now she poured the cold water over herself and its glow entered her in a rush, refreshing her. Once more she dropped the bucket into the well and jerked it up and poured it over her hair and shoulders so the water billowed within the thin cloth onto her belly and legs. She understood how wells could become sacred. They combined sparse necessity and luxury. She would give away every earring she owned for an hour by a well. She repeated the mantra of gestures again and again. When she had finished she unwrapped the wet cloth and stood naked in the wind and the last of the sunlight, then put on the dry sarong. She bent over and beat the water off her hair.
Sometime later she woke and sat up on the bench. She heard splashing and turned to see Palipana at the well, the girl pouring water over his naked body. He stood facing Anil, his arms straight down. He was thin, like some lost animal, some idea. Lakma kept pouring water over him, and they were both gesturing and laughing now.


At five-fifteen in the morning those who had woken in the dark had already walked a mile, left the streets and come down into the fields. They had blown out the one lantern among them and now moved confidently in the darkness, their bare feet in the mud and wet grass. Ananda Udugama was used to the dark paths. He knew they would soon come upon the scattering of sheds, the mounds of fresh earth, and the water pump and the three-foot-diameter hole in the ground that was the pit head.
With the dark-green light of morning around them the men appeared to float over the open landscape. They could hear and almost see the birds that shot out of the fields with life in their mouths. They began stripping off their vests. They were all gem-pit workers. Soon they would be under the earth, on their knees digging into walls, feeling for any hardness of stone or root or gem. They would move in the underground warrens, sloshing barefoot in mud and water, combing their fingers into the wet clay, the damp walls. Each shift was six hours long. Some entered the earth in darkness and emerged in light, some returned to dusk.
Now the men and women stood by the pump. The men doubled their sarongs and retied them at the waist, hung their vests on the beams of the shed. Ananda took a mouthful of petrol and sprayed it onto the carburetor. When he pulled the cord, the motor jumped to life, thudding against the earth. Water began pouring out of a hose. They heard another motor start up half a mile away. In the next ten minutes the dawn landscape became visible, but by then Ananda and three others had disappeared down a ladder into the earth.
Before the men went down, seven lit candles were lowered in a basket through the three-foot-diameter hole, forty feet below into the darkness by rope. The candles gave light as well as a warning in case the air was unsafe. At the base of the pit, where the candles rested, were three tunnels that disappeared into deeper darkness where the men would go.
Alone now on the surface the women began arranging the silt baskets and within fifteen minutes they heard the whistles and started pulling baskets of mud from below. By the time there was full light in the fields the entire flat region of Ratnapura district was sputtering into life as pumps drained water from the pits and the women used it to flush mud free from what had been sent up in the search for anything of value.
The men in the earth worked in a half-crouch, damp with sweat and tunnel water. If someone cut an arm or a thigh with a digging blade the blood looked black in the tunnel light. When candles smoked out because of the ever-present moisture, the men would lie there in the water, while the digger closest to the entrance would drag himself through darkness and send the candles up to the dry daylight of the pit head to be lit and returned.
At noon Ananda’s shift was over. He and the men with him climbed the ladder and paused ten feet below the surface to accustom themselves to the glare, then continued and stepped out onto the fields. Helped by the women, they moved to the mound where they could be hosed off, beginning with hair and shoulders, the water jetting onto their almost naked bodies.
They dressed and began their walk home. By three in the afternoon, in the village where he lived with his sister and brother-in-law, Ananda was drunk. He would roll off the pallet he had been put on, would move in his familiar half-crouch out the door and piss in the yard, unable to stand or even look up to be aware who might be watching him.


In the leaf hall, shade-filled and muted in colour, the only bright object Anil was conscious of was Sarath’s wristwatch. There were two rolled mats and a small table where Palipana still wrote, in spite of blindness, in large billowing script that was half language, half pageantry—the borders between them blurred. This was where he sat most mornings while his thoughts circled and then were caught in the dark room.
The girl placed a cloth on the floor, and they sat around it and leaned towards their food, eating with their fingers. Sarath remembered how Palipana used to travel around the country with his students, how he would eat in silence, listening to them, and suddenly expose his opinions in a twenty-minute monologue. So Sarath had eaten his first meals in silence, never putting forward a theory. He was learning the rules and methods of argument the way a boy watching a sport from the sidelines learns timing and skills with his still body. If the students ever assumed something, their teacher would turn on them. They had trusted him because of his severity, because he was incorruptible.
You, Palipana would say, pointing. Never using anyone’s name, as if that were immaterial to the discussion or search. Just, When was this rock cut? The missing letter? The name of the artificer who drew that arm?
They would travel on side roads, stay at third-rate rest houses, drag chiselled slabs from brush into sunlight, and at night draw maps of courtyards and palace sites based on the detritus of pillars and archways they had seen during the day.
‘I removed the head for a reason.’
Palipana’s hand kept moving towards the bowl.
‘Have some brinjals, this is my pride. . . .’
Sarath knew that Palipana’s interruptions at moments like this meant he was eager. It was a little taunt. The reality of life versus a concept.
‘I photographed the skeleton with and without the head for a record. Meanwhile we’ll continue analyzing the skeleton—its soil traces, palymology. The brinjals are very good. . . . Sir, you and I work on ancient rocks, fossils, rebuild dried-up water gardens, concern ourselves with why an army moved into the dry zone. We can identify an architect by his habit of building winter and summer palaces. But Anil lives in contemporary times. She uses contemporary methods. She can cut a cross-section of bone with a fine saw and determine the skeleton’s exact age at death that way.’
‘How is that?’
Sarath said nothing in order that Anil would answer. She used her food-free hand to emphasize her method. ‘You put the cross-section of bone under a microscope. It’s got to be one-tenth of a millimetre—so you can see the blood-carrying canals. As people get older, the canals, channels really, are broken up, fragmented, more numerous. If we can get hold of such a machine, we can guess any age this way.’
‘Guess,’ he muttered.
‘Five-percent margin of error. I’d guess that the person whose skull you inspected was twenty-eight years old.’
‘How certain . . .’
‘More certain than what you could know feeling the skull and the brow ridges and measuring the jaw.’
‘How wonderful.’ He turned his head to her. ‘What a wonder you are.’
She flushed with embarrassment.
‘I suppose you can tell how old a geezer like me is too, with a piece of bone.’
‘You’re seventy-six.’
‘How?’ Palipana was disarmed. ‘My skin? Nails?’
‘I checked the Sinhala encyclopaedia before we left Colombo.’
‘Ah. Yes, yes. You’re lucky you got hold of an old edition. I’m erased from the new one.’
‘Then we will have to build a statue of you,’ Sarath said, a bit too gracefully.
There was an awkward silence.
‘I’ve lived around graven images all my life. I don’t believe in them.’
‘Temples have secular heroes too.’
‘So you removed the head. . . .’
‘We don’t know yet the year he was murdered. Ten years ago? Five years ago? More recently? We don’t have the equipment to discover that. And given the circumstances of where he was buried, we can’t ask for such assistance.’
Palipana was silent, sitting with his head down, his arms crossed. Sarath continued. ‘You have reconstructed eras simply by looking at runes. You’ve used artists to re-create scenes from just paint fragments. So. We have a skull. We need someone to re-create what he might have looked like. One way to discover when he was twenty-eight is to have someone identify him.’
No one moved. Even Sarath was looking down now. He went on. ‘But we don’t have a specialist or knowledge of how to do it. That’s why I brought the skull here. For you to tell us where to go, what to do. It is something we have to do quietly.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
Palipana stood, so they all did, and walked out of the leaf hall into the night. They were treating his sudden movements the way they would have given a dog rein. The four of them walked to the pokuna and stood by the dark water. Anil kept thinking of Palipana’s sightlessness in this landscape of dark green and deep gray. The stone steps and rock nestled into the inclines of earth just as the fragments of brick and wood nestled against rock. These bones of an old settlement. It felt to Anil as if her pulse had fallen asleep, that she was moving like the slowest animal in the world through grass. She was picking up intricacies of what was around them. Palipana’s mind was probably crowded with such things, in his potent sightlessness. I will not want to leave this place, she thought, remembering that Sarath had said the same thing to her.
‘Do you know the tradition of Nētra Mangala?’ He was asking them in a murmur, as if thinking aloud. Palipana raised his right hand and pointed it to his own face. He seemed to be talking to her more than to Sarath or the girl.
‘Nētra means “eye.” It is a ritual of the eyes. A special artist is needed to paint eyes on a holy figure. It is always the last thing done. It is what gives the image life. Like a fuse. The eyes are a fuse. It has to happen before a statue or a painting in a vihara can become a holy thing. Knox mentions it, and later on Coomaraswamy. You’ve read him?’
‘Yes, but I don’t remember.’
‘Coomaraswamy points out that before eyes are painted there is just a lump of metal or stone. But after this act, “it is thenceforward a God.” Of course there are special ways to paint the eye. Sometimes the king will do it, but it is better when done by a professional artificer, the craftsman. Now of course we have no kings. And Nētra Mangala is better without kings.’

Anil and Sarath and Palipana and the girl had reached and now sat within the square wooden structure of an ambalama, an oil lamp at the centre of it. The old man had gestured towards it and said they could talk there perhaps, even sleep within it this night. It was a structure of wood, with no walls and a high ceiling. Travellers or pilgrims used its shade and coolness during the day. At night it was simply a skeletal wooden form open to the dark, its few beams creating an idea of order. A structure built on rock. A home of wood and boulders.
It was almost dark, and they could smell the air that came towards them over the water of the pokuna, could hear the rustling of unseen creatures. Each evening Palipana and the girl walked from their forest clearing to sleep in the ambalama. He could relieve himself off the edge of the platform without having to wake the girl to lead him somewhere. He would lie there conscious of the noises from the surrounding ocean of trees. Farther away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war.
The girl was to his left, Sarath to his right, the woman across from him. He knew the woman was now standing up, either looking towards him or beyond, towards the water. He had also heard the splash. Some water creature on this calm night. There was a turkey vulture coming out of the trees. Between him and the woman—on the rock, beside the ochre lamp—was the skull they had brought with them.
‘There was one man who painted eyes. He was the best I knew. But he stopped.’
‘Painting eyes?’
He heard the fresh curiosity in her voice.
‘There is a ceremony to prepare the artificer during the night before he paints. You realize, he is brought in only to paint the eyes on the Buddha image. The eyes must be painted in the morning, at five. The hour the Buddha attained enlightenment. The ceremonies therefore begin the night before, with recitations and decorations in the temples.
‘Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence. Later he will be honoured with gifts. Lands or oxen. He enters the temple doors. He is dressed like a prince, with jewellery, a sword at his waist, lace over his head. He moves forward accompanied by a second man, who carries brushes, black paint and a metal mirror.
‘He climbs a ladder in front of the statue. The man with him climbs too. This has taken place for centuries, you realize, there are records of this since the ninth century. The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him—so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation. Around him the mantras continue. May thou become possessed of the fruits of deeds. . . . May there be an increase on earth and length of days. . . . Hail, eyes!
‘His work can take an hour or less than a minute, depending on the essential state of the artist. He never looks at the eyes directly. He can only see the gaze in the mirror.’

Anil was standing on the wood ledge that she would later sleep on, thinking of Cullis. Where he might be. No doubt in the arms of his busy marriage. She would avoid thinking of him there. He had not allowed her much room in that world, and her view of him had always been a partially blindfolded one.
‘Why don’t you let go, Cullis? Let’s stop. Why carry on? After two years I still feel like your afternoon date.’
She was beside him on the bed. Not touching him. Just needing to look into his eyes, to talk. He reached out and clutched her hair with his left hand.
‘Whatever happens, don’t let go of me,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ She pulled her head back but he would not release her.
‘Let go!’
He held on to her.
She knew where it was. She reached back and her fingers grabbed it, and she swung the small knife he had been cutting an avocado with earlier in a sure arc and stabbed it into the arm holding her. There was an escape of breath from him. Ahhh. All emphasis on the h’s. She could almost see the letters coming out of him in the darkness, and the stem of the weapon in his arm muscle.
She looked at his face, his grey eyes (they were always bluer in daylight), and saw the softness he had accepted into his looks during his forties disappear, suddenly go. The face taut, his emotion open. He was weighing everything, this physical betrayal. Her right hand was still curled around the knife, not quite touching it, grazing it.
They looked at each other, neither of them giving in. She wouldn’t step back from her fury. When she pulled back this time he released her wet dark hair out of his fingers. She rolled away and picked up the telephone. Carrying it into the light of the bathroom she dialed a taxi. She turned to him. ‘Remember this is what I did to you in Borrego Springs. You can make a story out of it.’
Anil dressed in the bathroom, put on makeup, and returned to the bedroom. She switched on all the lights so nothing, no piece of clothing, would escape her while she repacked her bag. Then she switched the lights off and sat and waited. He was on the twin bed, not moving. She heard the taxi draw up and sound its horn.
When she walked to the cab she could feel that her hair was still damp. The car took off under the Una Palma Motel sign. Their romance had been a long intimacy that had existed mostly in secrecy, the good-bye was quick and fatal, though in the taxi to the bus station she put a hand to her breast and felt her heart thumping, as if blurting out the truth.

She had one arm up, holding on to the rafter above her head. She herself felt like a whip that could leap out and catch something in its long finger. Palipana faced the woman who had come with Sarath. Hail, eyes! He said it again. Sarath was conscious of her pale arm in the light of the oil lamp as he listened to Palipana. ‘When he is finished, the painter of eyes is blindfolded and led out of the temple. The king would endow all those responsible with goods and land. All this is recorded. He defined boundaries for new villages—high and low lands, jungles and ponds. He directed the artificer to be allowed thirty amunu of seed-paddy, thirty pieces of iron, ten buffaloes from the fold and ten she-buffaloes with calves.’ Palipana’s conversation always seemed to include remembered phrases from historical texts.
‘She-buffaloes with calves,’ Anil said quietly to herself. ‘Seed-paddy . . . You were rewarded for the right things.’ But he heard her.
‘Well, kings also caused trouble in those days,’ he said. ‘Even then there was nothing to believe in with certainty. They still didn’t know what truth was. We have never had the truth. Not even with your work on bones.’
‘We use the bone to search for it. “The truth shall set you free.” I believe that.’
‘Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.’

There was a crackle of thunder far away, as if earth and trees were being torn and moved. The wooden ambalama felt like a raft or four-poster bed drifting in the black clearing. Perhaps they were not nestled on rock but unmoored, on a river. She was lying on the lip of the structure, on one of the sleeping platforms. She had woken and could hear Palipana turning every few minutes as if it was difficult for him to find the precise location and posture for sleep.
Anil turned back into her own privacy, to Cullis. She felt there was this physical line to him wherever he was on the planet, beyond ocean or storm, some frail telephone cord that one had to tug clear of branches or rocks deep in the sea. And did he hold the image of her stride from that room in Borrego? They had both hoped for a seven-bangled night. She’d decided when she left him that she would call later to make sure he had not given in to sleep, but the fury was still taut in her and she did not.
Sarath struck a match against the rock beside the ambalama. So it was not a river down there. Light flickered up and she smelled the smoke of his beedi. An insect chirped like the sound of a watch being wound, one of the inhabitants in this forest of ascetics. ‘There has always been slaughter in passion,’ she heard Palipana say.
In the dark he continued speaking: ‘Even if you are a monk, like my brother, passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of it, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat. My brother entered temple life. He escaped the world and the world came after him. He was seventy when he was killed by someone, perhaps someone from the time when he was breaking free—for that is the difficult stage, when you leave the world. I am the last of my siblings. For my sister too is dead. This girl is her daughter.’

A few years before, the girl Lakma had seen her parents killed. A week after their murder, the twelve-year-old child was taken to a government ward run by nuns, north of Colombo, that looked after children whose parents had been killed in the civil war. The shock of the murder of the girl’s parents, however, had touched everything within her, driving both her verbal and her motor ability into infancy. This was combined with an adult sullenness of spirit. She wanted nothing more to invade her.
She lay hidden there for over a month, silent, non-reacting, physically forced from her room to do exercises in sunlight. The nightmares continued for Lakma, who was unable to deal with the possible danger around her. A child who knew the falseness of the supposed religious security around her, with its clean dormitories and well-made beds. When Palipana, her only remaining relative, came to visit her he saw she was immune to any help in this place. Any sudden sound was danger to her. She would finger through every meal looking for insects or glass, would not sleep in the safety of her bed but hidden underneath it. It was the time of Palipana’s own crisis in his career, and his eyes were in the last stages of glaucoma. He had bundled her up and travelled by train up to Anuradhapura, the girl terrified during the whole journey, then brought her in a cart to the forest monastery, the leaf hall and ambalama, in the Grove of Ascetics. They slipped this way out of the world, not noticed by anyone—an old man, a twelve-year-old girl who was scared of the evidence of anything human, even of this person who had brought her into the dry zone.
He wished more than anything to deliver her from the inflicted isolation. Whatever skills she learned from her parents had been abandoned too deep within her. Palipana, the country’s great epigraphist, began to educate her on two levels—gave her the mnemonic skills of alphabet and phrasing, and conversed with her at the furthest edge of his knowledge and beliefs. All this occurred as his own vision darkened and he began to move slowly, with exaggerated gestures. (It was later, when he trusted the dark and the girl more, that his movement became minimal.)
He supposed he had always trusted her, in spite of her fury and rejection of the world. He weaved into her presence his conversations about wars and medieval slokas and Pali texts and language, and he spoke of how history faded too, as much as battle did, and how it could exist only with remembrance—for even the slokas on papyrus and bound ola leaves would be eaten by moths and silverfish, dissolved by rainstorms—how only stone and rock could hold one person’s loss and another’s beauty forever.
She took journeys with him—a two-day walk to a chapter house in Mihintale, climbing the 132 steps, clinging to this blind man with her fear when he insisted they go once by bus to Polonnaruwa so he could be in the presence of the Stone Book, his hands upon the ducks—that were for eternity—for the last time. They rode in bullock carts and he would sniff the air or hear the hum within the gum trees and know where he was, would know there was a half-buried temple nearby, and his lean body would be off the cart and she would follow him. ‘We are, and I was, formed by history,’ he would say. ‘But the three places I love escaped it. Arankale. Kaludiya Pokuna. Ritigala.’
So they journeyed south as far as Ritigala, getting rides in slow bullock carts, where she felt safer, and climbed the holy mountain for hours up through the hot forest alongside the noise of cicadas. They came upon the footpath that curved uphill in a giant S. They broke a small branch as the two of them entered the forest and dedicated that as an offering, and took nothing else from there.
Every historical pillar he came to in a field he stood beside and embraced as if it were a person he had known in the past. Most of his life he had found history in stones and carvings. In the last few years he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie.
He had deciphered the shallowly incised lines during lightning, had written them down during rain and thunder. A portable sulphur lamp or a thorn brushfire by the overhang of cave. The dialogue between old and hidden lines, the back-and-forth between what was official and unofficial during solitary field trips, when he spoke to no one for weeks, so that these became his only conversations—an epigraphist studying the specific style of a chisel-cut from the fourth century, then coming across an illegal story, one banned by kings and state and priests, in the interlinear texts. These verses contained the darker proof.
Lakma watched him and listened, never speaking, a silent amanuensis for his whispered histories. He blended fragments of stories so they became a landscape. It did not matter if she could not distinguish between his versions and the truth. She was safe, finally, with him, this man who was her mother’s elder brother. They slept on mats in the leaf hall in the afternoon, within the frames of the ambalama at night. As his vision left him he gave more and more of his life to her. The last days of his sight he spent simply gazing at her.
With his blindness she gained the authority he had been unable to give her. She rearranged the paths of the day. What she did in proximity to him was now a part of the invisible world. Her new semi-nakedness in a way represented her state of mind. She wore a sarong as a man would. Palipana would not see this, or her left hand on her pubis tugging the new hair or playing with it while he talked to her. The only governor to her manner was to do with his safety and comfort. She would bound over to him if he was walking towards a root. Every morning she wet his face with water she had boiled over a fire, and then shaved him. They were early risers and early sleepers, aligned to the sun and moon. She was with him this way for two years before the appearance of Sarath and Anil. With their arrival the girl stepped back, although by then they were invading what was her home more than Palipana’s. It was her pattern of the day that was broken. If Anil witnessed politeness or kindness in the old man, it was only in his hand gestures and murmurs to Lakma, just loud enough to be heard a step away, so Anil and Sarath were excluded from most of their conversation. In the late afternoon the girl sat between his legs, and his hands were in her long hair searching for lice with those thin fingers and combing it while the girl rubbed his feet. When he walked she steered him away from any obstacle in his path with a slight tug of the sleeve.

*

The girl would slip into the forest, nocturnal, still as bark, when Palipana died.
She would dress his nakedness with thambili leaves that were part of the decoration for death, sew his last notebooks into his clothes. She had already prepared a pyre for him on the edge of the pokuna, whose sound he loved—and now its flames shivered in the water of the lake. She had already cut one of his phrases into the rock, one of the first things he had said to her, which she had held on to like a raft in her years of fear. She had chiselled it where the horizon of water was, so that, depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements. Now she stood waist-deep in the water, cutting the Sinhala letters into the dark stone the way he had described the methods of artisans to her. He had once shown her such runes, finding them even in his blindness, and their marginalia of ducks, for eternity. So she carved the outline of ducks on either side of his sentence. In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears. It has already become an old legend. But the girl who stood waist-deep and cut it into rock in the last week of Palipana’s dying life and carried him into the water beside it and placed his hand against it in the slop of the water was not old. He nodded, remembering the words. And now he would remain by the water and each morning the girl undressed and climbed down against the wall of submerged rock and banged and chiselled, so that in the last days of his life he was accompanied by the great generous noise of her work as if she were speaking out loud. Just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake.
He had handed Lakma his old, weathered spectacles, and in the end, after she had sewn his notebooks into his clothing, she would take only this talisman of these glasses with her when she went into the forest.

*

But that night, with the two strangers on the ambalama, the girl could sense the restlessness of Anil, as clear to her as Sarath’s beedi brightening now and then in the dark. Palipana sat up and Lakma knew he would speak, as if there had been no half-hour pause.
‘The man I mentioned, the artist, there was tragedy in his life. Now he works in the gem pits, goes down into them four or five days a week. An arrack drinker, I’ve heard. It is not safe to be with him underground. Maybe he’s still there. He was the craftsman who painted eyes—as his father and grandfather did. An inherited talent, though I think he was the best of the three. I think he’s the one you should find. You will have to pay him.’
Anil said, ‘Pay him for what?’
‘To rebuild the head,’ Sarath murmured in the darkness.


They set out for Colombo the next day, although neither of them wished to leave the spell of the old man and his forest site. They waited for the cool of sundown and left when Palipana and the girl walked towards the ambalama to sleep. An hour south of Matale, the car took a corner and Sarath saw the lights of a truck coming towards them. He braked hard and the car shuddered and skidded on the macadam. Then he saw it was not moving; the truck was parked on the road facing them, its headlights on.
He released the brake and they drifted slowly forward. She had been asleep and now she put her head out the window. There was a man lying on the road in front of the truck. Spread-eagled on his back. The truck was immense above him, the glare of its lights shot beams ahead, but the man was below them in darkness. He was shirtless, his bare feet pointed up saucily, his arms out. Their fear was followed by the humour of it all. Everything was quiet around them as their car crept past. Not even a dog barking. No cicadas. The motor of the truck turned off.
‘Is he the driver?’ She whispered it, not wanting to break the silence.
‘This is how they sometimes sleep, take a short rest. Simply stop in the wrong lane, leave the lights on, and stretch out on the road for half an hour or so. Or he could just be drunk.’
They drove on, Anil now fully awake, leaning with her back to the door so she could face Sarath as he spoke, hardly audible in the wind rushing into the windows. As an archaeologist he always travelled on night roads, more since his wife died, he said. There would be two trips every week—up to Puttalam or to the south coast. He accompanied teams of students puttering along the bunds of prawn farms for ancient village sites or he went to oversee the restoration of a stone bridge in Anuradhapura.
They were just south of Ambepussa and would reach the outskirts of Colombo in an hour. ‘When I was young, my father took bets with us—how many drunks we’d see sleeping by trucks, how many dogs we’d pass. A bonus if we saw a dog with a sleeping man. Or sometimes it would be a group of three or four dogs in the moon shadow of a stilled night truck. He’d bet with us to keep himself awake as he drove. He loved to bet.’
After a long pause Sarath continued. ‘All his life he gambled. We didn’t realize this when we were children. He had an ordered business life, he was a respected lawyer. We were a stable family. But he loved gambling, and our fortunes went up and down.’
‘All you want when you’re a kid is certainty.’
‘Yes.’
‘When you met your wife, you were sure, were you . . . that you were both . . . ?’
‘I knew I loved her. But I was never certain of us, as a pair.’
‘Sarath, can you stop the car, please.’ She heard the slight hollow thump as his right foot slipped away from the accelerator. The car began to slow, not stopping. She was silent, staring ahead into the dark. He veered onto the shoulder and they sat in the dark purring vehicle.
‘You realize there were no dogs back there, by the truck.’
‘Yes. I thought that as soon as I spoke. There was something wrong.’
‘Perhaps it was a village of no dogs. . . . We have to go back.’ She took her eyes off the road and looked at him, and the car jerked loose into a half-circle and drove north again.

.  .  .

They reached the truck in twenty minutes. The man by the truck was alive but couldn’t move. He was almost unconscious. Someone had hammered a bridge nail into his left palm and another into his right, crucifying him to the tarmac. He was the driver of the truck and as Sarath and Anil approached him a terrified look appeared on his face. As if they were coming back to kill him or torture him further.
She held the man’s face between her hands while Sarath prized the nails from the tarmac, freeing his hands.
‘You have to leave the nails in for now,’ she said. ‘Don’t remove them.’
Sarath explained to the man that she was a doctor. They got a blanket out of the trunk and wrapped him in it and carried him to the back seat. There was nothing to drink besides an inch or two of cordial, which he quickly swallowed.

They were going south again. Every time she turned to see how the man was, his eyes were wide open looking at them. She told Sarath they needed saline solution. She saw a faint light ahead and put her hand on Sarath’s arm to get him to stop. The car pulled over quietly and he shut off the motor.
‘What village is this?’
‘Galapitigama. The village of beautiful women,’ he said, like a refrain. She looked at him. ‘Supposedly. McAlpine said so.’
She climbed out and walked to the door of a house behind which she could see light. She smelled tobacco. Sarath was beside her.
‘We want salt. Hot water. If not hot, then cold will have to do. A small bowl of it—we need to take the bowl with us.’
When the door opened they saw a room busy at knee level. There were seven men around the perimeter, rolling cigarettes, weighing batches of them on scales, packaging them with thin string. Illegal night work. They wore only cotton sarongs in the hot, closed room, which was windowless. Three lamps on the floor where the piles of beedis were stacked up. Everything had a brownness, an orangeness, from the contained weaving flame of the lights. All of the men were in checkered blue-green sarongs.
The bare-chested man who opened the door stared past them to the car, nervous at their possible authority. Sarath explained that they needed a pot of hot water and salt, then as an afterthought asked for some beedis, if they would be willing to sell them. At which the man laughed.
One of the other men went out through the far door while she and Sarath stood on the threshold, then he returned with salt in one hand and a small bowl in the other. Anil enclosed his wrist with her fingers and turned it so the salt clouded into the water.
This time she got into the back seat beside the truck driver. Sarath said something to him over his shoulder and the man tentatively gave her his left hand. Under the faint roof light Anil soaked a handkerchief in the saline solution and squeezed it onto his palm, the bridge nail still in it. Then the other hand, then back again to the first.
Sarath started the engine.
There were forests on either side of the empty road. The motor’s hum filled the quietness, a thread in this silent world, just her and Sarath and the wounded man. Now and then a village, now and then an unmanned roadblock where they had to slow down and twist through the eye of a needle. As they passed a streetlamp Anil saw that what she was squeezing into his palms was now bloody water. Still she didn’t stop, because the movement kept him calm and awake, kept him from drifting into shock. The mutual gestures—her pull, his giving—were becoming hypnotic to both.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Gunesena.’
‘Do you live near here?’
The man rolled his head slightly, a tactful yes and no, and Anil smiled. In an hour they were within the outskirts of Colombo, and later drove into the compound of Emergency Services.