A Brother
In the operating rooms of the base hospitals in the North Central Province there were always four books in evidence: Hammon’s Analysis of 2,187 Consecutive Penetrating Wounds of the Brain in Vietnam; Gunshot Wounds by Swan and Swan; C. W. Hughes’s Arterial Repair During the Korean War; and Annals of Surgery. Doctors in the midst of an operation would have an orderly turn pages so they could skim the text while continuing surgery. After two weeks of fifteen-hour days they no longer needed assistance from books and moved with ease alongside wounds and suture techniques. But the medical texts remained, for future doctors in training.
In the doctors’ common room in a North Central Province hospital someone had left a copy of Elective Affinities among the other, more porous paperbacks. It remained there throughout the war, unread save by someone who might pick it up while waiting, consider its back-cover description, then replace it respectfully on the table with the others. These—a more popular gang that included Erle Stanley Gardner, Rosemary Rogers, James Hilton and Walter Tevis—were consumed in two or three hours, swallowed like sandwiches on the run. Anything to direct your thoughts away from a war.
The buildings that made up the hospital had been erected at the turn of the century. It had been managed in a lackadaisical way before the exaggeration of war. In the grass courtyard, signs from a more innocent time would last throughout the waves of violence. Half-dead soldiers who wished for sun and fresh air rested there and ate morphine tablets beside a BETEL CHEWING IS PROHIBITED sign.
The victims of ‘intentional violence’ had started appearing in March 1984. They were nearly all male, in their twenties, damaged by mines, grenades, mortar shells. The doctors on duty put down The Queen’s Gambit or The Tea Planter’s Bride and began arresting the haemorrhages. They removed metal and stone from lungs, sutured lacerated chests. In one of the hospital texts that the young doctor Gamini read was a sentence he became excessively fond of: In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary.
During the first two years of the war more than three hundred casualties were brought in as a result of explosions. Then the weapons improved and the war in the north-central province got worse. The guerrillas had international weaponry smuggled into the country by arms dealers, and they also had homemade bombs.
The doctors saved the lives first, then the limbs. There were mostly grenade injuries. An antipersonnel mine the size of an inkwell would destroy most of a person’s feet. Wherever there was a base hospital in the country, new villages sprang up nearby. There was a need for rehabilitation programmes, and the making of what came to be known as the ‘Jaipur Limb.’ In Europe a new artificial foot cost 2,500 pounds. Here the Jaipur Limb was made for 30 pounds—cheaper because Asian victims could walk without a shoe.
The hospital would run out of painkillers during the first week of any offensive. You were without self in those times, lost among the screaming. You held on to any kind of order—the smell of Savlon antiseptic that was used to wash floors and walls, the ‘children’s injection room’ with its nursery murals. The older purpose of a hospital continued alongside the war. When Gamini finished surgery in the middle of the night, he walked through the compound into the east buildings, where the sick children were. The mothers were always there. Sitting on stools, they rested their upper torso and head on their child’s bed and slept holding the small hands. There were not too many fathers around then. He watched the children, who were unaware of their parents’ arms. Fifty yards away in Emergency he had heard grown men scream for their mothers as they were dying. ‘Wait for me!’ ‘I know you are here!’ This was when he stopped believing in man’s rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one’s land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of those motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no worse and no better than the enemy. He believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.
Ten beds skirted the edge of the room, and in the centre was a nurse’s desk. Gamini loved the order of these closed wards. If he had a few free hours he avoided the doctors’ dormitory and came here to lie on one of the empty beds, so that even if he could not sleep he was surrounded by something he would find nowhere else in the country. He wanted a mother’s arm to hold him firm on the bed, to lie across his rib cage, to bring a cool washcloth to his face. He would turn to watch a child with jaundice bathed in the pale-blue light as if within a diorama. A blue light that was warm rather than clear, with a specific frequency. ‘Pass me a gentian. Give me a torch.’ Gamini wished to be bathed in it. The nurse looked at her watch and walked from her desk to wake him. But he was not asleep. He drank a cup of tea with her and then left the pediatric ward, which had its own woes. He reached out and touched the small Buddha in the niche of the wall as he passed it.
Crossing the open grass lot, Gamini returned to the war rooms, where there seemed little difference between pre-operative and post-operative patients. The only reasonable constant was that there would be more bodies tomorrow—post-stabbings, post–land mines. Orthopaedic trauma, punctured lungs, spinal cord injuries . . .
A few years earlier a story had gone around about a Colombo doctor—Linus Corea—a neurosurgeon in the private sector. He came from three generations of doctors, the family name was as established as the most permanent banks in the country. Linus Corea was in his late forties when the war broke out. Like most doctors he thought it was madness and unlike most he stayed in private practice; the Prime Minister was one of his clients, as was the leader of the opposition. He had his head massages at Gabriel’s at eight a.m. and saw his patients from nine till two, then golfed with a bodyguard at his side. He dined out, got home before curfew and slept in an air-conditioned room. He had been married for ten years and had two sons. He was a well-liked man; he was polite with everyone because it was the easiest way not to have trouble, to be invisible to those who did not matter to him. This small courtesy created a bubble he rode within. His gestures and politeness disguised an essential lack of interest or, if not that, a lack of time for others on the street. He liked photography. He printed his own pictures in the evening.
In 1987, while he was putting on a golf green, his bodyguard was shot dead and Dr. Linus Corea was kidnapped. They came out of the woods slowly, unconcerned about being seen by him. It meant it did not matter to them and that frightened him more than anything. He had been alone with the bodyguard. He stood beside the prone body and was surrounded by the men who had shot him from a distance of forty yards precisely through the correct point in the head. No thrashing around.
They spoke to him calmly in a made-up language, which again increased his anxiety. They hit him once and broke a rib to warn him to behave, and then they walked back to their car and drove away with him. For months no one knew where he had got to. The police, the Prime Minister, the head of the Communist Party were called in, and all were outraged. There was no communication from kidnappers wanting payment. It was the Colombo mystery of 1987, and offers of rewards were made throughout the press, none of which was answered.
Eight months after Linus Corea’s disappearance, his wife was alone in the house with their two children when a man came to the door and handed her a letter from her husband. The man stepped inside. The note was simple. It said: If you wish to see me again, come with the children. If you do not wish to, I will understand.
She moved to the phone, and the man produced a gun. She stood there. To her left was a pool where some flowers floated in shallow water. All her valuables were upstairs. She stood there, the children busy in their rooms. It had not been a joyous marriage. Comfortable but not happy. Affections on the thin scale of things. But the letter, while it held his terseness, had a quality she would never have expected. It gave her a choice. It was laconically stated but it was there, graciously, with no strings. Later she thought that if it had not been for that she would not have gone. She muttered to the man. He spoke back to her in an invented language that she did not understand. Some of the news reports at the time of her husband’s disappearance had spoken of UFO kidnappings, and this strangely came to her mind now, there in her front hall.
‘We’ll come with you,’ she said again, out loud, and this time the man came towards her and gave her another letter.
This one was just as abrupt and said: Please bring these books. A list followed, eight titles. He told her where they could be found in his office. She told her sons to get a few extra clothes and shoes, but she packed nothing for herself. She carried only the books, and once they were outside the man directed them to an already humming car.
Linus Corea made his way to the tent in the dark and lay down on the cot. It was nine at night, and if they came they would be there in about five hours. He had told the men when it was most likely for her to be home alone. He needed to sleep. He had been working in the triage tent for close to six hours, so even with the brief nap after lunch he was exhausted.
He had been at the camp of the insurgents ever since they had picked him up in Colombo. They had got him a little after two in the afternoon and by seven he was in the southern hills. No one had spoken to him in the car, just the idiot language, a joke of theirs. What good it did he wasn’t sure. When he reached the camp they explained in Sinhala what they wanted him to do, which was to work as a doctor for them. Nothing more. It was not an intense conversation, he wasn’t threatened. They told him he could see his family in a few months. They said he could sleep now but in the morning he would have to work. A few hours later they woke him and said there was an emergency, and led him into the triage tent with a lantern and hung it on a hook above a half-dead body and asked him to operate on the skull in lamplight. The man was too far gone, still they asked him to operate. He himself was uncomfortable with his broken rib and whenever he leaned forward pain tore through him. Half an hour later the man died and they carried the lantern to another bed, where someone else who had been shot had been waiting in silence. He had to remove the leg above the knee, but the man lived. Linus Corea went back to sleep at two-thirty. At six a.m. they woke him again to begin work.
After a few days he asked them to get some smocks for him, some rubber gloves, some morphine. He gave them a list of things he needed, and that night they attacked a hospital near Gurutulawa and got the medical essentials and kidnapped a nurse for him. She too, strangely, did not complain about her fate, just as he hadn’t. Privately he was irritated, and tired of a world that necessitated this, but the device of courtesy that had been false in his other life continued. He thanked people for nothing much and he didn’t ask for anything unless it was badly needed. He became accustomed to this lack of need, was rather proud of it. If he wanted something—syringes, bandages, a book—he would write out a list and give it to them. Maybe a week later, maybe six weeks, he’d get them. The first hospital attack was the only one they planned just for him.
He did not know how long they would keep him so he began to teach the nurse everything he could about surgery. Rosalyn was about forty, very smart under her seeming complacency. He had her operating alongside him when they were overrun with wounded.
After the first month he admitted to himself that he didn’t miss his children or wife anymore, even that much of Colombo. Not that he was happy here, but being busy he was preoccupied.
There was no energy in him to be angry or insulted. Six till noon. Two hours off for lunch and sleep. Then he worked six more hours. If there was a crisis he worked longer. The nurse was always beside him. She wore one of the smocks that he had requested and was very proud of it, washing it out every evening so it would be clean in the morning.
It was just another day but to him it was his birthday. And he thought about that on his walk to the tent. He was fifty-one. The first birthday in the mountains. At noon the jeep swept by and he and the nurse were bundled in. They drove for some time and then he was blindfolded. Soon after, they pulled him from the vehicle. He gave up then. A lot of wind in his face. With his probing feet he sensed he was on a ledge. A cliff? He was pushed and he was flying in mid-air, falling, but before there was fear he hit water. Mountain cold. He was all right. He pulled off the blindfold and heard a cheer. The nurse, in her clothes, dove off the rock into the water beside him. The men dove in after that. They somehow knew about his birthday. From then on, a swim became a part of the day’s schedule, if there was time. He always thought of it before he fell asleep. It heightened his excitement about the oncoming day. The swim.
He was asleep when his family arrived. The nurse tried to wake him, but he was dead to the world. She suggested that the wife come into her tent with the two boys so he could sleep undisturbed, he had to be up in a few hours to work. At what? the wife said. He’s a doctor, the nurse said.
It was just as well. The drive had been arduous and she and the children were tired themselves. This was not the time to greet and talk. When they woke the next morning it was ten, and her husband had already been working for four hours. Had walked into their tent carrying his mug of tea, looked at them, and then had gone to work with the nurse. The nurse had told him she was surprised his wife was that young, and the doctor had laughed. In Colombo he would have reddened or become angry. He was aware this nurse could say anything to him.
So when his wife and children woke they were ignored. The nurse was gone, the soldiers they saw went their own way. The mother insisted they stay together, and they went searching around the compound like lost tourists till they found the nurse washing bandages outside a dirty tent.
Rosalyn came up to him and said something he did not catch and she repeated it, that his wife and children were by the tent entrance. He looked up, then asked her if she could take over, and she nodded. He walked away from the close focus of the tent work, passed people lying on the ground, towards his wife and the children. The nurse could see him almost bouncing with pleasure. When he came closer his wife saw the blood on his smock and she hesitated. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, lifting her into an embrace. She touched his beard, which he had forgotten he had grown. There were no mirrors and he hadn’t seen it.
‘You met Rosalyn?’
‘Yes. She helped us last night. You of course wouldn’t wake up.’
‘Mmm.’ Linus Corea laughed. ‘They keep me going.’ He paused, then said, ‘It’s my life.’
*
Whenever a bomb went off in a public place, Gamini stood at the entrance of the hospital, the funnel of the triage, and categorized the incoming victims, quickly assessing the state of each person—sending them to Intensive Care or to the operating theatre. This time there were women too, because it had been a street bomb. All survivors in the outer circle of the explosion came in within the hour. The doctors didn’t use names. Tags were put on the right wrist, or on a right foot if there was no arm. Red for Neuro, green for Orthopaedic, yellow for Surgery. No profession or race. He liked it this way. Names were recorded later if the survivors could speak, in case they died. Ten cc’s of sample blood were taken from each of the patients and attached to their mattresses, along with disposable needles that would be reused if they were needed.
The triage separated the dying from those who needed immediate surgery and those who could wait; the dying were given morphine tablets so time would not be spent on them. Distinguishing the others was more difficult. Street bombs, usually containing nails or ball bearings, could cut open an abdomen fifty yards from the explosion. Shock waves travelled past someone and the suction could rupture the stomach. ‘Something happened to my stomach,’ a woman would say, fearing she had been cut open by bomb metal, while in fact her stomach had flipped over from the force of passing air.
Everyone was emotionally shattered by a public bomb. Months later survivors would come into the ward saying they feared they might still die. For those on the periphery, the shrapnel and fragments that flew through their bodies, magically not touching any vital organs, were harmless because the heat of the explosion would sterilize the shrapnel. But what did harm was the emotional shock. And there was deafness or semi-deafness, depending on which way one’s head was turned on the street that day. Few could afford to have an eardrum reconstructed.
In these times of crisis junior staff members did the work of orthopaedic surgeons. Roads to larger medical centres were often closed because of mines, and helicopters were unable to travel in darkness. So all versions of trauma, all versions of burns, surrounded the trainees. There were only four neurosurgeons in the country: two brain surgeons in Colombo, one in Kandy and one in the private sector—but he had been kidnapped a few years earlier.
Meanwhile, far away in the south, there were other interruptions. Insurgents entered the Ward Place Hospital in Colombo and killed a doctor and two of his assistants. They had come looking for one patient. ‘Where is so and so?’ they had asked. ‘I don’t know.’ There was bedlam. After finding the patient, they pulled out long knives and cut him to pieces. Then they threatened the nurses and demanded they not come to work anymore. The next day the nurses returned, not in uniforms but in frocks and slippers. There were gunmen on the roof of the hospital. There were informers everywhere. But the Ward Place Hospital remained open.
There was little of that kind of politics in the base hospitals. Gamini and his assistants, Kasan and Monica, managed a quick nap in the doctors’ lounge when they could. Half the time curfews kept them from going home. Gamini wasn’t able to sleep, in any case. He hadn’t come down yet from the pills he had recently started taking, the adrenaline still in him though his brain and motor senses were exhausted, so he would walk outside into the night under the trees. There would be a few people smoking, relatives of the wounded. He had no wish for contact, there was just his blood racing. He came back inside and picked up a paperback and stared at a page as if it were a scene on another planet. Finally he would go again to the children’s ward to find a bed where he was a stranger and felt safer. A few mothers would look up with suspicion, concerned to protect their children from this unknown man, like hens, before recognizing him as the doctor who had come to the area two years before, who could never sleep, who climbed now onto a sheetless mattress and lay on his back, still, until his head fell to the left watching the blue light. When he was asleep the desk nurse unlaced his shoes and removed them. He snored loudly, and sometimes it woke the children.
He was thirty-four years old then. Things would get worse. By the time he was thirty-six, he was working in Accident Services Hospital in Colombo. ‘Gunshot Services,’ they called it. But he remembered the pediatric wards in the North Central Province, the blue light above that jaundiced child which somehow also comforted him, its specific frequency of 470 to 490 nanometres that all night kept breaking down the yellow pigment. He remembered the books, the four essential medical texts and the stories he never finished reading though he kept them in his hands for hours as he sat in the cane chair trying to rest, trying to come down to some kind of human order, but instead only darkness came down on him in the room, his eyes peering at the pages while his brain stared past them to the truth of their times.
It was one a.m. when Sarath and Anil arrived in the centre of Colombo, having driven through the city’s empty grey streets. As they got to Emergency Services, she said, ‘Is it okay? Us moving him like this?’
‘It’s okay. We’re taking him to my brother. With luck he’ll be somewhere there in Emergency.’
‘You have a brother here?’
Sarath parked and was still for a moment. ‘God, I’m exhausted.’
‘Do you want to stay here and sleep? I can take him in.’
‘It’s okay. I’d better talk to my brother anyway. If he’s there.’
Gunesena was asleep and they woke him and walked him between them into the building. Sarath spoke to someone at the desk and the three of them sat down to wait, Gunesena’s hands on his lap like a boxer’s. There was a daylight sense of work going on around Admissions, though everyone moved in slow motion and quietly. A man in a striped shirt came towards them and chatted with Sarath.
‘This is Anil.’
The man in the striped shirt nodded at her.
‘My brother, Gamini.’
‘Right,’ she said, flatly.
‘He’s my younger brother—he’s our doctor.’
There had been no touching between him and Sarath, not a handshake.
‘Come—’ Gamini helped Gunesena to his feet and they all followed him into a small room. Gamini unstoppered a bottle and began swabbing the man’s palms. She noticed he wasn’t wearing gloves, not even a lab coat. It looked as if he had just come from an interrupted card game. He injected the anaesthetic into the man’s hands.
‘I didn’t know he had a brother,’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘Oh, we don’t see much of each other. I don’t speak of him either, you know. We go our own way.’
‘He knew you were here, though, and what shift you were on.’
‘I suppose so.’
They were both intentionally excluding Sarath from their conversation.
‘How long have you been working with him?’ Gamini now asked.
She said, ‘Three weeks.’
‘Your hands—they are steady,’ Sarath said. ‘Have you recovered?’
‘Yes.’ Gamini turned to Anil. ‘I’m the family secret.’
He pulled the bridge nails from Gunesena’s anaesthetized hands. Then he washed them with Betalima, a crimson sudsing fluid that he squirted out of a plastic bottle. He dressed the wounds and talked quietly to his patient. He was very gentle, which for some reason surprised her. He pulled open a drawer, got another disposable needle and gave him a tetanus shot. ‘You owe the hospital two needles,’ he murmured to Sarath. ‘There’s a shop on the corner. You should get them while I sign out.’ He led Sarath and Anil out of the room, leaving the patient behind.
‘There are no beds left here tonight. Not for this level of injury. See, even crucifixion isn’t a major assault nowadays. . . . If you can’t take him home I’ll find someone to watch him while he sleeps out in Admissions—I’ll okay it, I mean.’
‘He can come with us,’ Sarath said. ‘If he wants I’ll get him a job as a driver.’
‘You better replace those needles. I’m going off duty soon. Do you want to eat? Along the Galle Face?’ He was talking again to Anil.
‘It’s two in the morning!’ Sarath said.
She spoke up. ‘Yes. Sure.’
He nodded at her.
Gamini pulled open the passenger-side door and got in beside his brother, which left Anil in the back seat with Gunesena. Well, she’d have a better view of both of them.
The streets were empty save for a silent patrol of military moving under the arch of trees along Solomon Dias Mawatha. They were stopped at a roadblock and asked for their passes. A half-mile beyond that they came to a food stall and Gamini got out and bought them all something to eat. On the road the younger brother looked thin as his shadow, feral.
They left Gunesena sleeping in the car and walked onto Galle Face Green and sat near the breakwater by the darkness of the sea. While Gamini unwrapped his spoils, Anil lit a cigarette. She was not hungry, but Gamini would in the next hour consume several packets of lamprais, a startling amount for someone she considered slight and bony. She noticed him palm a pill and swill it down with Orange Crush.
‘We get a lot like this one. . . .’
‘Nails in hands?’ She realized she sounded horrified.
‘Nowadays we get everything. It’s almost a relief to find a common builder’s nail as a weapon. Screws, bolts—they pack their bombs with everything to make sure you get gangrene from explosions.’
He unwrapped the leaf of another lamprais and ate with his fingers. ‘. . . Thank God it’s not a full moon. Poya days are the worst. Everyone thinks they can see. They go out and step on something. Are you the team working on the new skeletons?’
‘How do you know about that?’ She was suddenly tense.
‘It’s the wrong time for unburials. They don’t want results. They’re fighting a war on two sides now, the government. They don’t need more criticism.’
‘I understand that,’ Sarath said.
‘But does she?’ Gamini paused. ‘Just be careful. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s right. And too many people know about your investigation. There is always someone paying attention.’
There was a short silence. Then Sarath asked his brother what else he was doing.
‘Just sleep and work,’ Gamini yawned. ‘Nothing else. My marriage disappeared. All that ceremony—and then it evaporated in a couple of months. I was too intense then. I’m probably another example of trauma, you see. That happens when there is no other life. What the f*ck do my marriage and your damn research mean. And those armchair rebels living abroad with their ideas of justice—nothing against their principles, but I wish they were here. They should come and visit me in surgery.’
He leaned forward to take one of Anil’s cigarettes. She lit it and he nodded.
‘I mean, I know everything about blast weaponry. Mortars, Claymore mines, antipersonnel mines which contain gelignite and trinitrotoluen. And I’m the doctor! That last one results in amputations below the knee. They lose consciousness and the blood pressure falls. You do a tomography of the brain and brain stem, and it shows haemorrhages and edema. We use dexamethasone and mechanical ventilation for this—it means we have to open the skull up. Mostly it’s hideous mutilation, and we just keep arresting the haemorrhages. . . . They come in all the time. You find mud, grass, metal, the remnants of a leg and boot all blasted up into the thigh and genitals when the bomb they stepped on went off. So if you plan to walk in mined areas, it’s better to wear tennis shoes. Safer than combat boots. Anyway, these guys who are setting off the bombs are who the Western press calls freedom fighters. . . . And you want to investigate the government?’
‘There are innocent Tamils in the south being killed too,’ Sarath said. ‘Terrible killings. You should read the reports.’
‘I get the reports.’ Gamini laid his head back. It was resting against her thigh but he seemed unaware of this. ‘We’re all f*cked, aren’t we. We don’t know what to do about it. We just throw ourselves into it. Just no more high horses, please. This is a war on foot.’
‘Some of the reports . . .’ she said. ‘There are letters from parents who have lost children. Not something you can put aside, or get over in a hurry.’
She touched his shoulder. He brought his hand up for a moment and then his head slipped away and soon she saw he had fallen asleep. His skull, his uncombed hair, the weight of his tiredness on her lap. Sleep come free me. The words of a song in her head, she could not find the tune that went with it. Sleep come free me. . . . She would remember later that Sarath was looking out into the black shift of the sea.
Amygdala.
The name had sounded Sri Lankan when Anil first heard it. Studying at Guy’s Hospital in London, having cut tissue away to reveal a small knot of fibres made up of nerve cells. Near the stem of the brain. The professor standing beside her gave her the word for it. Amygdala.
‘What does it mean?’
‘Nothing. It’s a location. It’s the dark aspect of the brain.’
‘I don’t—’
‘A place to house fearful memories.’
‘Just fear?’
‘We’re not too certain of that. Anger too, we think, but it specializes in fear. It is pure emotion. We can’t clarify it further.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well—is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? Or fear if we commit a crime? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body.’
‘As in dreams.’
‘As in dreams,’ he agreed. ‘Though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don’t know we have.’
‘So it’s something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from a knot in another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past.’
He paused before speaking again, surprised at the degree of her interest. ‘I don’t think we know yet how similar the knots are, or if there are essential patterns. I’ve always liked those nineteenth-century novels where brothers and sisters in different cities could feel the same pains, have the same fears. . . . But I digress. We don’t know, Anil.’
‘It sounds Sri Lankan, the name.’
‘Well, check its derivation. It doesn’t sound scientific.’
‘No. Some bad god.’
She remembers the almond knot. During autopsies her secret habit of detour is to look for the amygdala, this nerve bundle which houses fear—so it governs everything. How we behave and make decisions, how we seek out safe marriages, how we build houses that we make secure.
Driving with Sarath once. He asked, ‘Is your tape recorder off?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘There are at least two unauthorized places of detention in Colombo. One of the locations is off Havelock Road in Kollupitiya. Some of those picked up are there for a month, but the torture itself doesn’t last that long. Most can be broken within an hour. Most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen.’
‘Is your tape recorder off?’ he had said. ‘Yes, it’s off.’ And only then had he talked.
‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear. . . .’
Anil’s name—the one she’d bought from her brother at the age of thirteen—had another stage to go through before it settled. By the time Anil was sixteen, she was taut and furious within the family. Her parents brought her to an astrologer in Wellawatta in an attempt to mollify these aspects of her nature. The man wrote down her birth hour and date, subtracted and fractioned them, considered her neighbouring stars and, not realizing the involved commerce behind it, said the problem resided in her name. Her tempestuousness could be harnessed with a name change. Unknown to him was the deal that had involved Gold Leaf cigarettes and rupees. He spoke with a voice that approached serenity and wisdom in the small cubicle, behind whose curtain other families waited in the hall hoping to overhear gossip and family history. What they heard were loud insistent refusals from the girl. The astrologer-soothsayer had eventually compromised his solution down to a simple appendage—the addition of an e, so she would be Anile. It would make her and her name more feminine, the e would allow the fury to curve away. But she refused even this.
Looking back, she could see her argumentativeness was only a phase. There is often a point in a person’s life where there is bodily anarchy: young boys whose hormones are going mad, young girls bouncing like a shuttlecock in the family politics between a father and a mother. Girls and their dad, girls and their mum. It was a minefield in one’s teens, and it was only when the relationship between her parents broke down completely that she calmed and sailed, or essentially swam, through the next four years.
The family wars continued to reside in her, and hadn’t left her when she went abroad to study medicine. In the forensic labs she made it a point to distinguish female and male traits as clearly as possible. She witnessed how women were much more easily discombobulated by the personal slights of a lover or husband; but they were better at dealing with calamity in professional work than men. They were geared to giving birth, protecting children, steering them through crisis. Men needed to pause and dress themselves in coldness in order to deal with a savaged body. In all her training in Europe and America she saw that again and again. Women doctors were more confident in chaos and accident, calmer in dealing with the fresh corpse of an old woman, a young beautiful man, small children. The times Anil would slip into woe were when she saw a dead child in clothes. A dead three-year-old with the clothes her parents had dressed her in.
We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn’t take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries. In Sri Lanka one is surrounded by family order, most people know every meeting you have during the day, there is nothing anonymous. But if I meet a Sri Lankan elsewhere in the world and we have a free afternoon, it doesn’t necessarily happen, but each of us knows all hell could break loose. What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?’
Anil is talking to Sarath, who in his path from youth to manhood, she suspects, remained held within parental principles. He, she is sure, obeyed while not necessarily believing the rules. He would not have known the realities of sexual freedom available to him, though his head might have loafed through anarchy. He, she suspects, is a shy man, in that sense of lacking the confidence to approach and proposition. In any case, she knows they both come from a society that has involved hazardous intrigues of love and marriage and an equally anarchic system of planetary influence. Sarath told her about the henahuru in his family during a rest-house meal. . . .
To be born under a certain star made people unsuitable as marriage partners. A woman born with Mars in the Seventh House was ‘malefic.’ Whoever she married would die. Meaning, in the minds of Sri Lankans, she would in essence be responsible for his death, she would kill him.
Sarath’s father, for instance, had two brothers. The older brother married a woman their family had known for years. He was dead within two years of a harsh fever, during which she nursed him day and night. There had been one child. The woman’s grief and retreat from the world at this death were terrible. The second brother was called upon by the family to bring her back into the world, for the sake of the boy. He brought the child gifts, insisted on taking mother and son on his vacations up-country, and eventually he and the woman, the former wife of his brother, fell in love. In many ways it was a greater and more subtle love than had existed in the first marriage. The intention of passion and sharing had not been there at the start. The woman had been brought back into the world. There was gratefulness towards the younger and good-looking brother. So when, during a car ride, the fragment of desire emerged with her first laughter in a year, it must have seemed a betrayal of his former motive, which was simply generous concern for his brother’s widow. They married, he cared for his brother’s child. They had a daughter, and within a year and a half he too fell ill and died in the arms of his wife.
It turned out, of course, that the woman was malefic. The only one she could have married safely was a man with the same star pattern. Thus any man born under such a star was sought after by such women. Men who were malefic also had to marry a woman with the same star, but it was believed that women in this state were considerably more dangerous than men. When a malefic man married a nonmalefic woman, she did not necessarily die. But if a woman did, the man would always die. She was henahuru, literally ‘a pain in the neck.’ Though more dangerous.
Ironically, Sarath, the son of the third brother, born some years later and having no connection with the wife of the first two brothers, was born with Mars in the Seventh House. ‘My father married the woman he fell in love with,’ Sarath says. ‘He did not even consult her stars. I was born. My brother was born. I heard the story years later. I saw it as just an old wives’ tale, random celestial positioning. Such beliefs seem a medieval comfort. I could say, for instance, that during the years I studied abroad I had Jupiter in my head and it helped me pass my exams. And when I returned, Venus replaced it and I fell in love. Venus is sometimes not good, it can make you frivolous in judgement. But these are not beliefs I hold.’
‘Neither do I,’ she says. ‘We do it to ourselves.’
Anil had come out of her first class at Guy’s Hospital in London with just one sentence in her exercise book: The bone of choice would be the femur.
She loved the way the lecturer had stated it, offhand, but with the air of a pompatus. As if this piece of information were the first rule needed before they could progress to greater principles. Forensic studies began with that one thighbone.
What surprised Anil as the teacher delineated the curriculum and the field of study was the quietness of the English classroom. In Colombo there was always a racket. Birds, lorries, fighting dogs, a kindergarten’s lessons of rote, street salesmen—all their sounds entered through open windows. There was no chance of an ivory tower existing in the tropics. Anil wrote Dr. Endicott’s sentence down and a few minutes later underlined it with her ballpoint in the hushed quiet. For the rest of the hour she just listened and watched the lecturer’s mannerisms.
It was while studying at Guy’s that Anil found herself in the smoke of one bad marriage. She was in her early twenties and was to hide this episode from everyone she met later in life. Even now she wouldn’t replay it and consider the level of damage. She saw it more as some contemporary fable of warning.
He too was from Sri Lanka, and in retrospect she could see that she had begun loving him because of her loneliness. She could cook a curry with him. She could refer to a specific barber in Bambalapitiya, could whisper her desire for jaggery or jakfruit and be understood. That made a difference in the new, too brittle country. Perhaps she herself was too tense with uncertainty and shyness. She had expected to feel alien in England only for a few weeks. Uncles who had made the same journey a generation earlier had spoken romantically of their time abroad. They suggested that the right remark or gesture would open all doors. Her father’s friend Dr. P. R. C. Peterson had told the story of being sent to school in England as an eleven-year-old. On the first day he was called a ‘native’ by a classmate. He stood up at once and announced to the teacher, ‘I’m sorry to say this, sir, but Roxborough doesn’t know who I am. He called me a “native.” That’s the wrong thing to do. He is the native and I’m the visitor to the country.’
But acceptance was harder than that. Having been a mild celebrity in Colombo because of her swimming, Anil was shy without the presence of her talent, and found it difficult to enter conversations. Later, when she developed her gift for forensic work, she knew one of the advantages was that her skill signalled her existence—like a neutral herald.
In her first month in London she’d been constantly confused by the geography around her. (What she kept noticing about Guy’s Hospital was the number of doors!) She missed two classes in her first week, unable to find the lecture room. So for a while she began arriving early each morning and waited on the front steps for Dr. Endicott, following him through the swing doors, stairways, grey-and-pink corridors, to the unmarked classroom. (She once followed him and startled him and others in the men’s bathroom.)
She seemed timid even to herself. She felt lost and emotional. She murmured to herself the way one of her spinster aunts did. She didn’t eat much for a week and saved enough money to phone Colombo. Her father was out and her mother was unable to come to the phone. It was about one in the morning and she had woken her ayah, Lalitha. They talked for a few minutes, until they were both weeping, it felt, at the far ends of the world. A month later she fell within the spell of her future, and soon-to-be, and eventually ex-, husband.
It seemed to her he had turned up from Sri Lanka in bangles and on stilts. He too was a medical student. He was not shy. Within days of their meeting he focussed his wits entirely on Anil—a many-armed seducer and note writer and flower bringer and telephone-message leaver (he had quickly charmed her landlady). His organized passion surrounded her. She had the sense that he had never been lonely or alone before meeting her. He had panache in the way he could entice and choreograph the other medical students. He was funny. He had cigarettes. She saw how he mythologized their rugby positions and included such things in the fabric of their conversations until they were familiar touchstones—a trick that never left any of them at a loss for words. A team, a gang, that was in fact only two weeks deep. They each had an epithet. Lawrence who had thrown up once on the Underground, the siblings Sandra and Percy Lewis whose family scandals were acknowledged and forgiven, Jackman of the wide brows.
He and Anil were married quickly. She briefly suspected that for him it was another excuse for a party that would bond them all. He was a fervent lover, even with his public life to choreograph. He certainly opened up the geography of the bedroom, insisting on lovemaking in their nonsoundproof living room, on the wobbly sink in the shared bathroom down the hall, on the boundary line quite near the long-stop during a county cricket match. These private acts in an almost public sphere echoed his social nature. There seemed to be no difference for him between privacy and friendship with acquaintances. Later she would read that this was the central quality of a monster. Still, there was considerable pleasure on both their parts during this early period. Though she realized it was going to be crucial for her to come back to earth, to continue her academic studies.
When her father-in-law visited England he swept them up and took them out to dinner. The son was for once quiet, and the father attempted to persuade them to return to Colombo and have his grandchildren. He kept referring to himself as a philanthropist, which appeared to give him a belief that he was always on higher moral ground. As the dinner progressed she felt that every trick in the Colombo Seven social book was being used against her. He objected to her having a full-time career, keeping her own name, was annoyed at her talking back. When she described classroom autopsies during the trifle, the father had been outraged. ‘Is there nothing you won’t do?’ And she had replied, ‘I won’t go to crap games with barons and earls.’
The next day the father lunched alone with his son, then flew back to Colombo.
At home the two of them fought now over everything. She was suspicious of his insights and understanding. He appeared to spend all his spare energy on empathy. When she wept, he would weep. She never trusted weepers after that. (Later, in the American Southwest, she would avoid those television shows with weeping cowboys and weeping priests.) During this time of claustrophobia and marital warfare, sex was the only mutual constant. She insisted on it as much as he. She assumed it gave the relationship some normality. Days of battle and f*ck.
The disintegration of the relationship was so certain on her part that she would never replay any of their days together. She had been fooled by energy and charm; he had wept and burrowed under her intelligence until she felt she had none left. Venus, as Sarath would say, had been in her head, when it should have been the time of Jupiter.
She would return from the lab in the evenings and be met by his jealousy. At first this presented itself as sexual jealousy, then she saw it was an attempt to limit her research and studies. It was the first handcuff of marriage, and it almost buried her in their small flat in Ladbroke Grove. After she escaped him she would never say his name out loud. If she saw his handwriting on a letter she never opened it, fear and claustrophobia rising within her. In fact, the only reference to the era of her marriage she allowed into her life was Van Morrison’s ‘Slim Slow Slider’ with its mention of Ladbroke Grove. Only the song survived. And only because it referred to separation.
Saw you early this morning
With your brand-new boy and your Cadillac . . .
She would sing along hoping that he did not also join in with his sentimental heart, wherever he was.
You’ve gone for something,
And I know you won’t be back.
Otherwise the whole marriage and divorce, the hello and good-bye, she treated as something illicit that deeply embarrassed her. She left him as soon as their term at Guy’s Hospital was over, so he could not locate her. She had plotted her departure for the end of term to avoid the harassment he was fully capable of; he was one of those men with time on his hands. Cease and desist! she had scrawled formally on his last little whining billet-doux before mailing it back to him.
She emerged with no partner. Cloudless at last. She was unable to bear the free months before she could begin classes again, before she could draw her studies close to her, more intimately and seriously than she had imagined possible. When she did return she fell in love with working at night, and sometimes she couldn’t bear to leave the lab, just rested her happily tired dark head on the table. There was no curfew or compromise with a lover anymore. She got home at midnight, was up at eight, every casebook and experiment and investigation alive in her head and reachable.
Eventually she heard he’d returned to Colombo. And with his departure there was no longer any need to remember favourite barbers and restaurants along the Galle Road. Her last conversation in Sinhala was the distressed chat she’d had with Lalitha that ended with her crying about missing egg rulang and curd with jaggery. She no longer spoke Sinhala to anyone. She turned fully to the place she found herself in, focussing on anatomical pathology and other branches of forensics, practically memorizing Spitz and Fisher. Later she won a scholarship to study in the United States, and in Oklahoma became caught up in the application of the forensic sciences to human rights. Two years later, in Arizona, she was studying the physical and chemical changes that occurred in bones not only during life but also after death and burial.
She was now alongside the language of science. The femur was the bone of choice.
Anil stood in the Archaeological Offices in Colombo. She moved down the hall from map to map. Each one depicted an aspect of the island: climate, soil, plantation, humidity, historical ruins, birds, insect life. Traits of the country like those of a complex friend. Sarath was late. When he arrived they would load up the jeep.
‘. . . Don’t know much en-tomology,’ she sang, looking at the map of mines—a black scattering of them like filaments. She glanced at herself reflected vaguely in the map’s glass. She was in jeans, sandals and a loose silk shirt.
If she were working in America she would probably be listening to a Walkman while sawing off slim rings of bone with the microtone. This was an old tradition among the people she’d worked with in Oklahoma. Toxicologists and histologists always insisted on rock and roll. You stepped in through the airtight door and some heavy metal would be bumping and thrashing through the speakers, while Vernon Jenkins, who was thirty-six years old and weighed ninety pounds, studied lung tissue mounted on a slide. Around him it could have been civil war at the Fillmore. Next door was the Guard Shack, where people entered to identify dead relatives and friends, unaware of the music because of the airtight room, unaware of the shorthand descriptions circulating over the transistor headset intercoms: ‘Bring up the Lady in the Lake.’ ‘Bring up the by-herselfer.’
She loved their rituals. The people in the lab would traipse into the greenroom at lunchtime with their thermoses and sandwiches and watch The Price Is Right, all of them in awe at this other civilization, as if only they—working in a building where the dead outnumbered the living—were in a normal world.
It was in Oklahoma, within a month of her arrival, that they established the F*ck Yorick School of Forensics. This was not just a principle of necessary levity but the name of their bowling team. Wherever she worked, first in Oklahoma, then in Arizona, her cohorts ended the evenings with beer in one hand, a cheese taco in the other, cheering or insulting teams and scuffing along the edges of the bowling alleys in their shoes from the planet Andromeda. She had loved the Southwest, missed being one of the boys, and was now light-years beyond the character she had been in London. They would go through a heavy day’s work load, then drive to the wild suburban bars and clubs on the outskirts of Tulsa or Norman, with Sam Cooke in their hearts. In the greenroom a list was tacked up of every bowling alley in Oklahoma with a liquor license. They ignored job offers that came from dry counties. They snuffed out death with music and craziness. The warnings of carpe diem were on gurneys in the hall. They heard the rhetoric of death over the intercom; ‘vaporization’ or ‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.
Meanwhile, bright tungsten bulbs gave the labs a clear optic light, the music in Toxicology was perfect for sit-ups and stretches when you found your neck and back had become tense from close-focus work. And around her was a quick good-old-boy debate and an explanation of a dead body in a car.
‘When’d they report her missing?’
‘She’s been gone, lo, these five or six years.’
‘She drove into the lake, Clyde. She already had to stop the car once to open a gate. She’d been drinking. Her husband said she just took the dog and left.’
‘No dog in the car?’
‘No dog in the car. I wouldn’t have missed a Chihuahua, though it was full of mud. Her bones had demineralized. Car lights were on. Skip the photo, Rafael.’
‘So—when she opened the gate she let the dog free. She already had a plan. It’s a by-herselfer. When the car started filling up, she lost it and climbed into the back seat. That’s where she was found. Right?’
‘She should have knocked off her husband. . . .’
‘He could have been a saint.’
Anil would always love the clatter and verbal fling of pathologists.
She had arrived in Colombo directly from working in sparse high-tech desert towns of the American Southwest. Although her last location, Borrego Springs, hadn’t seemed, at the start, enough of a real desert to satisfy her. Too many cappuccino bars and clothing shops on the main street. But after a week she was comfortable in what was really a narrow strip of civilization, a few mid-twentieth-century luxuries surrounded by the starkness of the desert. The beauty of the place was subtle. In the southwestern deserts you needed to look twice at emptiness, you needed to take your time, the air like ether, where things grew only with difficulty. On the island of her childhood she could spit on the ground and a bush would leap up.
The first time Anil had gone into the desert, her guide had a water-mist bottle attached to his belt. He gestured her over, sprayed the thin leaves of a plant and pulled her head down towards it. She inhaled the smell of creosote. The plant spilled this toxic quality when it rained, to keep away anything that tried to grow too near it—and so reserved the small area around it for its own water supply.
She learned about agave, which had at least seven uses, among them its thorn as a needle, its fibres as thread. She saw cheese bushes, dyeweed, dead-man’s-fingers (a succulent you could eat only during one month of the year), smoke trees with their rare system of roots (an exact underground reflection of their size and shape above ground), and ocotillo, which dropped its leaves to preserve moisture. And plants whose colours seemed washed out and those that doubled their rich colours in twilight. She spent as little time as possible in the small house she shared on H Street. She was usually within the flat-roofed paleontology lab by seven-thirty with a coffee and a croissant. In the evenings she jeeped into the desert with her co-workers. There had been zebras here three million years before. Camels. All the usual browsers and grazers. She walked above the bones of these great defunct creatures, on atolls left from ocean days seven million years earlier. There was a slight flirtation as she brushed the hand of someone passing binoculars to her to search out a sparrow hawk.
Once again she discovered the passion for bowling among forensic anthropologists. Perhaps too much care during the day picking up fragments with tweezers or using whisper brushes made them want to hurl things around with six-drink abandon. There was no alley in Borrego Springs, so each night they’d clamber into a museum van and drive out of the valley into nearby hill towns. They brought their own ‘hammers’—specially weighted balls for competition bowling. All through these nights, in spite of the active jukebox in the Quonset hut, she kept singing a woeful song: Better days in jail, with your back turned towards the wall. . . . Though there was no sadness in her during this time. It was as if she was expecting the sadness of that song to reach her eventually, almost knowing there would be a conflict with Cullis when he arrived.
Lovers who read stories or look at paintings about love do so supposedly for clarity. But the more confusing and anarchic the story, the more those caught in love will believe it. There are only a few great and trustworthy love drawings. And in these works is an aspect that continues to remain unordered and private, no matter how famous they become. They bring no sanity, give just a blue tormented light.
The writer Martha Gellhorn had said, ‘The best relationship is with someone who lives five blocks away with a great sense of humour and who is preoccupied with his work.’ Well, that was her lover Cullis, though make it five states, make it five thousand miles. Make him married.
It seemed they loved each other most when they were apart. They were too careful when together, when the extremes of possible joy remained dangerous. She had been content in Borrego Springs with just their phone conversations. Women love distance, he’d said to her once.
What happened in Borrego Springs took place during their first night together. She needed to be at work early the next day: something unexpected had come up. A beautiful new tusk, but she didn’t tell him that. He had arrived a few hours earlier, having flown a thousand miles. His sullenness and annoyance at the change of weekend plans forced an old fury out of her. They had been singing their f*cking arias of romance with limits for too long.
She rose from the bed in Borrego and took a shower sitting on the edge of the bath, facing the rain of it. Her tight, furious wrists. Steam filled the room. A week before Cullis’s arrival she had booked a room for him, for them, at the Una Palma Motel. He was to come in on the eight-o’clock bus from the airport on a Friday night to coincide with her three-day weekend. Then they had unearthed the tusk.
Meeting him at the bus depot she gave him a carefully selected sprig of desert lavender, which he broke trying to insert into his buttonhole.
*
A good archaeologist can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel. If a bone had been grazed by any kind of stone, Sarath, she knew, could follow such grains of evidence to their likely origin. As she had taken the few fragments of the damaged section of Sailor’s skull and reconstructed it with a glue gun. But in Colombo she couldn’t locate half the equipment she and Sarath really needed, equipment they had in excess in America. It would be picks and shovels, strings and stones. She’d gone to Cargill’s department store and picked up a couple of shaving brushes and a whisk.
When Sarath finally arrived at the Archaeological Offices, he joined her by the wall maps. It was a few days after their evening on Galle Face Green with his brother. She had tried reaching Sarath the next day, but he seemed to have disappeared, gone to ground. In the meantime a package had come for her from Chitra, so during that first afternoon she consumed the entomologist’s badly typed notes, then pulled a road map out of her bag.
Now, on this Sunday morning, Sarath had called at dawn, apologizing not for the hour but for being away, out of touch. He’d asked her to meet him at the offices, ‘in an hour,’ he said. ‘You know how to get there? You go right from your place and fall into Buller’s Road.’
She’d hung up, looking at the luxury of the bed, and went off to shower.
‘I have samples from the first burial site,’ he said, ‘taken from the cranial cavities. Probably from a swamp. They buried him temporarily in wet earth. It makes sense. Less digging. They could have put him in a paddy field, then taken him later to the restricted area and hidden him there to disguise the fact that he was contemporary. Anyway, I think the original burial was in this general vicinity’—he pointed—‘Ratnapura district. That’s southeast from here. We need to check the water tables.’
‘Somewhere where there are fireflies,’ she said. And he looked at her with a blank face.
‘We can be more specific, we can make a smaller radius,’ she continued. ‘Fireflies. So not a busy settlement. Somewhere more open. Like a riverbank that people do not go to. Chitra, the entomologist I told you about—those marks that looked like freckles, she came to the boat and studied them and made notes. She has hundreds of charts of insect life on the island. She said it was pupae-encagle glue, from the “shout-and-die” cicadas—you find them in forest areas like Ritigala. Here—she drew a map for us of the possible places—they are all further south, which links with your soil results. Somewhere on the outskirts of Sinharaja Forest, maybe.’
‘On the north side of it,’ he said. ‘The soil on the other peripheries wouldn’t fit.’
‘Okay, then this stretch here.’
Sarath drew a rectangle with a red felt pen on the glass that covered the map. Weddagala to the west, Moragoda to the east. Ratnapura and Sinharaja.
‘Somewhere in here is a swamp or small lake, a pokuna in the forest,’ he said, clarifying.
‘Who else is there, I wonder.’
Since the Archaeological Offices were deserted, they took their time collecting whatever maps and books they needed. Sarath was walking in and out of the building, packing the jeep he had borrowed. She had no idea how long they would be away from Colombo, or where they would stay. Another of Sarath’s favourite rest houses perhaps. While he looked through various soil charts she grabbed a field manual from the library shelves.
‘So we stay where? In Ratnapura?’ She said it loud. She liked the echoes in this large building.
‘Beyond that. There is a place we can stay, a walawwa, an old family estate—we can continue working there. With luck it’s still empty. Sailor must have been killed somewhere in that area, perhaps even came from there. We can try to find Palipana’s artist on the way. I suggest you break contact with Chitra.’
‘And you’ve told no one.’
‘I have to meet officials, give them summaries of what we’re up to, but for them our investigation is nothing. I haven’t spoken about this.’
‘How can you bear it.’
‘You don’t understand how bad things were. Whatever the government is possibly doing now, it was worse when there was real chaos. You were not here for that—the law abandoned by everyone, save a few good lawyers. Terror everywhere, from all sides. We wouldn’t have survived with your rules of Westminster then. So illegal government forces rose up in retaliation. And we were caught in the middle. It was like being in a room with three suitors, all of whom had blood on their hands. In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another. I’ll tell you a thing I saw. . . .’
Sarath was speaking in the empty offices, but he looked around.
‘I was in the south. . . . It was almost evening, the markets closed. Two men, insurgents I suppose, had caught a man. I don’t know what he had done. Maybe he had betrayed them, maybe he had killed someone, or disobeyed an order, or not agreed quickly enough. In those days the justice of death came in at any level. I don’t know if he was to be executed, or harassed and lectured at, or in the most unlikely scenario, forgiven. He was wearing a sarong, a white shirt, the long sleeves rolled up. His shirt hung outside the sarong. He had no shoes on. And he was blindfolded. They propped him up, made him sit awkwardly on the crossbar of a bicycle. One of the captors sat on the saddle, the one with the rifle stood by his side. When I saw them they were about to leave. The man could see nothing that was going on around him or where he would be going.
‘When they took off, the blindfolded man had to somehow hang on. One hand on the handlebars, but the other he had to put around the neck of his captor. It was this necessary intimacy that was disturbing. They wobbled off, the man with the rifle following on another bike.
‘It would have been easier if they had all walked. But this felt in an odd way ceremonial. Perhaps a bike was a form of status for them and they wished to use it. Why transport a blindfolded victim on a bicycle? It made all life seem precarious. It made all of them more equal. Like drunk university students. The blindfolded man had to balance his body in tune with his possible killer. They cycled off and at the far end of the street, beyond the market buildings, they turned and disappeared. Of course the reason they did it that way was so none of us would forget it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’
There are images carved into or painted on rock—a perspective of a village seen from the height of a nearby hill, a single line depicting a woman’s back bent over a child—that have altered Sarath’s perceptions of his world. Years ago he and Palipana entered unknown rock darknesses, lit a match and saw hints of colour. They went outside and cut branches off a rhododendron, and returned and set them on fire to illuminate the cave, smoke from the green wood acrid and filling the burning light.
These were discoveries made during the worst political times, alongside a thousand dirty little acts of race and politics, gang madness and financial gain. War having come this far like a poison into the bloodstream could not get out.
Those images in caves through the smoke and firelight. The night interrogations, the vans in daylight picking up citizens at random. That man he had seen taken away on a bicycle. Mass disappearances at Suriyakanda, reports of mass graves at Ankumbura, mass graves at Akmeemana. Half the world, it felt, was being buried, the truth hidden by fear, while the past revealed itself in the light of a burning rhododendron bush.
Anil would not understand this old and accepted balance. Sarath knew that for her the journey was in getting to the truth. But what would the truth bring them into? It was a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol. Sarath had seen truth broken into suitable pieces and used by the foreign press alongside irrelevant photographs. A flippant gesture towards Asia that might lead, as a result of this information, to new vengeance and slaughter. There were dangers in handing truth to an unsafe city around you. As an archaeologist Sarath believed in truth as a principle. That is, he would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use.
And privately (Sarath would consider and weigh this before sleep), he would, he knew, also give his life for the rock carving from another century of the woman bending over her child. He remembered how they had stood before it in the flickering light, Palipana’s arm following the line of the mother’s back bowed in affection or grief. An unseen child. All the gestures of motherhood harnessed. A muffled scream in her posture.
The country existed in a rocking, self-burying motion. The disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave. Murders in the Muthurajawela marsh.