Ananda
They weaved towards the inland hills.
‘We don’t have the equipment to do that sort of work here,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘If the artist is as good as Palipana says, he’ll improvise the tools. Have you ever been involved with this kind of thing?’
‘No. Never done reconstruction. I have to say we sort of scorn it. They look like historical cartoons to us. Dioramas, that sort of thing. Are you getting a cast made of the skull?’
‘Why?’
‘Before you give it to him—whoever this noncertified person is. I’m glad we’ve decided on a drunk, by the way.’
‘You can’t get a cast done without waking up all of Colombo. We’ll just give him the skull.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘And it would take weeks to arrange. This isn’t Brussels or America. Only the weapons in this country are state-of-the-art.’
‘Well, let’s find the guy first and see if he can even hold a paintbrush without shaking.’
They arrived at a scattering of mud-and-wattle huts on the edge of a village. It turned out the man named Ananda Udugama was no longer living with his in-laws but in the next town, at a petrol station. They drove on, and she watched as Sarath got out and walked up and down the one street of the town, asking for him. When they located him it appeared that he had just woken from an early-evening sleep. Sarath gestured to her and she joined them.
Sarath explained what they wanted him to do, mentioned Palipana, and that he would be paid. The man, who wore thick spectacles, said he would need certain things—erasers, the kind on the end of school pencils, small needles. And he said he needed to see the skeleton. They opened the back of the jeep. The man used their squat flashlight to study the skeleton, running it up and down the ribs, the arcs and curves. Anil felt there was little he could learn from such a viewing.
Sarath persuaded the man to come with them. After a slight shake of the head, he went into the room he was living in and came out with his belongings in a small cardboard box.
Two hours before Ratnapura they were stopped by a roadblock, soldiers moving languidly out of the shadows towards them from both sides of the road. They sat in silence, falsely polite, handing over their identity cards when a hand snaked into the jeep and snapped its fingers. Anil’s card seemed to give the soldiers trouble, and one of them opened her door and stood waiting. She was not aware of what was expected of her until Sarath explained under his breath; then she climbed out.
The soldier leaned into the jeep and lifted out her shoulder bag and emptied it noisily on the hood. Everything out there in the sun, a pair of glasses and a pen sliding off onto the tarmac, where he let them remain. When she moved forward to pick them up he put his hand out. In the noon sunlight he slowly handled every object in front of him: unscrewed and sniffed a small bottle of eau de cologne, looked at the postcard with the bird, emptied her wallet, inserted a pencil into a cassette and twisted it silently. There was nothing of real value in her bag, but the slowness of his actions embarrassed and irritated her. He opened the back of her alarm clock and pulled out the battery, and when he saw the packets of batteries still sealed in plastic, he collected them too, and gave them to another soldier, who carried them to a sandbagged cave on the side of the road. Leaving the bag and its contents, the soldier walked away and signalled them on, without even looking back. ‘Don’t do anything,’ she heard Sarath say from the darkness of the jeep.
She gathered her things into the bag and got into the passenger seat.
‘The batteries are essential for making homemade bombs,’ Sarath explained.
‘I know that,’ she snapped back. ‘I know that.’
As they drove away she turned to see Ananda, unconcerned, twirling a pencil.
A walawwa in Ekneligoda, the house belonging to a family named Wickramasinghe, who had lived in it for five generations. The last Wickramasinghe, an artist, had lived there during the 1960s. After his death the two-hundred-year-old house was taken over by the Archaeological Society and Historical Board. (There was a distant family member connected with archaeology.) But when the region became unsafe and rife with disappearances, the building was no longer inhabited, and like a well that has gone dry it took on a sense of absence.
Sarath had come to this family estate for the first time as a boy, when his younger brother was expected to die. ‘Diphtheria,’ they had said. ‘Something white in the mouth,’ the doctors had whispered to his parents. So before Gamini was brought home from the hospital, Sarath, along with his favourite books, was packed into the car and driven to Ekneligoda, out of harm’s way. The Wickramasinghes were travelling in Europe, so for two months the thirteen-year-old, looked after by just an ayah, ranged into their gardens, drew maps of the mongoose paths in the thickets, created imaginary towns and neighbours. While on Greenpath Road in Colombo the family closed their doors and prepared to look after the dying younger son, ensconced like a small prince and armed with the secret of death he himself did not know about.
In his thirties Sarath would visit the house again whenever field trips brought him into the region, but he had not been back for at least a decade, and now the dishevelled vacuum of the building and grounds depressed him. Still, he knew where the old keys were hidden on the lower strut of the fence, found the same eternal path of the mongoose through the thornbush thicket in the lower garden.
With Anil and Ananda at his side, he opened all the rooms so they could each choose a work space and bedroom, then locked the unwanted rooms once more. They would camp out in the smallest space needed, not sprawl over the property. He walked with Anil through a house that now seemed much smaller to him, and he felt himself to be in two eras. He described the paintings that had been on the walls in an earlier decade, when he had lived there for two months and evolved into a privacy he had perhaps never fully emerged from. Few survive diphtheria, it had been emphasized to him. And he had accepted with certainty the likelihood of his brother’s death, that he would soon be the only son.
Now the whisper of Anil’s foot was beside him. Then her quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’ They’d entered a room off the courtyard, where someone had charcoalled two Sinhala words in giant script on the walls. MAKAMKRUKA. And on the wall opposite, MADANARAGA. ‘What’s that? Are those names?’ ‘No.’ He reached up so his hand could touch the brown lettering.
‘Not names. A makamkruka is—it’s difficult to describe—a man who is a makamkruka is a churner, an agitator. Someone who perhaps sees things more truly by turning everything upside down. He’s a devil almost, a yaksa. Though a makamkruka, strangely, guards the sacred spot in a temple ground. No one knows why this kind of person is honoured with such a responsibility.’
‘And?’
‘The other is stranger. Madanaraga means “with the speed of love,” sexual arousal. It’s the kind of word you find in ancient romances. Not in the vernacular.’
While Ananda laboured over the head, Anil was to continue work on Sailor’s skeleton, trying to discover among other things his ‘markers of occupation.’ She had been with Sarath for more than three weeks now, and they were ‘in the field,’ not in contact with Sarath’s political networks in the city. No one in Colombo would expect them to be camped in this family estate, close to the area where Sailor had possibly been buried the first time. Perhaps Sailor was locally ‘important’ or ‘identifiable.’ Here they would be closer to the source and they would be undisturbed.
The first morning they were there, Ananda Udugama had gone off without a word. Leaving Sarath frustrated and Anil carefully silent. She set up her workbench and temporary lab in a courtyard under a banyan’s ragged shade and brought Sailor out with her. Sarath decided to do his own research work in the grand dining room. He would occasionally have to return to Colombo for supplies and to report in. There were no telephones, except for his on-again, off-again cell phone, and they felt isolated from the rest of the country.
Ananda had in fact, that first morning, woken early and walked to the nearby village market, bought some fresh toddy and established himself by the public well. He chatted with anyone who sat near him, shared his few cigarettes and watched the village move around him, with its distinct behaviour, its local body postures and facial characteristics. He wanted to discover what the people drank here, whether there was a specific diet that would puff up cheeks more than usual, whether lips would be fuller than in Batticaloa. Also the varieties of hairstyle, the quality of eyesight. Did they walk or cycle. Was coconut oil used in food and hair. He spent a day in the village and then went into the fields and collected mud in three sacks. He could mix the two browns and one black into a variety of shades. Then he bought several bottles of arrack in the village and returned to the walawwa.
He would be up at dawn and would park himself in a square of sun and move as it moved, the way a cat would. He may have looked at the skull now and then, but that was all. He would go to the village and return with kite papers in several colours, suet, food dyes and one day two old turntables and a random selection of 78s.
Of all the possible spaces in the large house Ananda had chosen the room the artist had worked in. He knew nothing about the history of the place but liked the light within this room, where the two words MAKAMKRUKA and MADANARAGA were written. The courtyard where Anil worked was just outside. The morning he actually began to work on the skull she heard music coming from his room. A tenor burst into song, sang with energy for a few moments, then slowed before the song ended. Curious, she went in, to see Ananda winding the gramophone. Beside it was another turntable, where he was moulding a clay base, on which the skull rested. His free hand could spin it to the left or right like a potter’s wheel. He was already working on the throat. She stepped back and out.
She recognized the technique of face construction. He had marked several pins with red paint to represent the various thicknesses of the flesh over the bone, and then placed a thin layer of plasticine on the skull, thinning or thickening it according to the marks on the pins. Eventually he would press finer layers of rubber eraser onto the clay to build the face. Collaged this way with various household objects it would look like a five-and-dime monster.
For the three days of the week when Sarath was away in Colombo, there was little communication between her and Ananda, the eye-painter turned drunk gem-pit worker turned head-restorer. They shuffled about each other, rattling around the house, basic courtesies having dropped away after the first day. She continued to see this project as Sarath’s folly.
In the evenings she carried whatever equipment might be damaged by rain into the granary. By then Ananda would be drinking. It hadn’t become serious until he began working on the head. Now he was easily annoyed if his food had been moved around in the kitchen or if he cut himself with the X-acto, as he was always doing. Once, he shouldered his way into the afternoon sunlight and found her taking some bone measurements, and as he passed her his sarong brushed the table. She barked at him, so he turned in a fury and yelled back at her. This was followed by a silent and even subtler fury. He stalked to his room and she half expected the head to come rolling out.
She went looking for him that night, walking out of the house with a lamp. She was relieved he had not shown up for dinner (they cooked their own meals but ate together, silently). By ten-thirty he was still not back, and before she locked up the house—something he usually did—she felt she should make a brief gesture of searching for him, so with the lamp she walked out into the darkness. And he was there on a low wall, passed out, wearing just his sarong. She pulled him to his feet and staggered back with his weight and arms all over her.
Anil wasn’t fond of drunks. She found nothing humorous or romantic about them. In the hallway, where she had steered him, he fell to the floor and was soon asleep. There was no way of waking him and getting him to move. She went to her room and returned with her Walkman and a tape. A little vengeance. She put the earphones on his head, switched the Walkman on. Tom Waits singing ‘Dig, Dig, Dig’ from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs channeled itself into his inner brain, and he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him, and finally ripped off the wires attached to his head.
She sat on the courtyard steps. The release of the moon so it stared down on what had been once the Wickramasinghe home. She buzzed the tape forward to Steve Earle’s ‘Fearless Heart,’ with its intricate swagger. No one but Steve Earle for her in the worst times. There was a thump in her blood, a sexual hip in her movement, when she heard any of his songs of furious loss. So she moved half-dancing into the courtyard, past the skeleton of Sailor. It was a clear night and she could leave him there.
But undressing in her room she thought of him under the claustrophobia of plastic and went out and unpinned the sheets. So the wind and all the night were in Sailor. After the burnings and the burials, he was on a wooden table washed by the moon. She walked back to her room, the glory of the music now gone.
There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be the long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck. Or she sat above him and watched him come into her fast hand movements. The precise and inarticulate sounds of each witnessed by the other.
Ananda drifted in front of her—the emaciated body of a serious drinker, still shirtless. He rubbed his arms and bony chest with his hands, peering around the courtyard unaware that she was in one of its dark corners.
At her worktable he carefully put his hands behind him so as to be sure not to disturb anything, and bent over, looking through those thick spectacles at her calipers, the weight charts, as if he were within the hush of a museum. He bent down further and sniffed at the objects. A mind of science, she thought. Yesterday she had noticed how delicate his fingers were, dyed ochre as the result of his work.
Now Ananda picked up the skeleton and carried it in his arms.
She was in no way appalled by what he was doing. There had been hours when, locked in her investigations and too focussed by hours of intricacy, she too would need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightning of politics raised his hands at the last minute, so they were broken. Ananda held Sailor and walked slowly with him and placed him back on the table, and it was then he saw Anil. She nodded imperceptibly to show there was no anger in her. Slowly rose and walked over to him. A small yellow leaf floated down and slipped into the skeleton’s ribs and pulsed there.
She saw the two moons caught in the mirror of Ananda’s glasses. It was a ramshackle pair—the lenses knitted onto the frame with wire and the stems wrapped in old cloth, rag really, so he could wipe or dry his fingers on them. Anil wished she could trade information with him, but she had long forgotten the subtleties of the language they once shared. She would have told him what Sailor’s bone measurements meant in terms of posture and size. And he—God knows what insights he had.
In the afternoons when Ananda could go no further with the skull’s reconstruction, he took it all apart, breaking up the clay. Strangely. It seemed a waste of time to her. But early the next morning he would know the precise thickness and texture to return to and could re-create the previous day’s work in twenty minutes. Then he thought and composed the face a further step. It was as if he needed the warm-up of the past work to rush over so he could move with more confidence into the uncertainty that lay ahead. Thus there was nothing to see if she entered his room when he was not working. After just ten days, the room was more like a nest—rags and padding, mud and clay, colours daubed everywhere, the large letters above him on the wall.
Still, on this night, without words, there seemed to be a pact. The way he had respected the order of her tools, touching nothing, the way he raised Sailor into his arms. She saw the sadness in Ananda’s face below what might appear a drunk’s easy sentiments. The hollows that seemed gnawed at. Anil put out her hand and touched his forearm, and then left him alone in the courtyard. For the next few days they went back to their mutual silences. It was possible he had been very drunk that night and remembered nothing about it. Two or three times a day he would put on one of the old 78s and stand in his doorway, looking out at whatever was going on in her life in that courtyard.
At six in the morning she dressed, then began walking the mile to the school. A few hundred yards before she climbed the hill, the road narrowed into a bridge, a lagoon on one side, a salt river on the other. This is where Sirissa would start to see the teenagers, some with catapults hanging off their shoulders, some smoking. They would acknowledge her with their eyes but never speak to her, whereas she would always give a greeting. Later, when they saw her on the school grounds, they wouldn’t acknowledge her in any way. She would turn after she had gone five yards past them at the bridge, still moving away from them, to catch their curious watching of her. She was not that much older. And they were hungry in their search for a pose, and perhaps only one or two of them would have a knowledge already of women. They were aware of Sirissa’s silk-like hair, her litheness as she turned around to look at them, as she kept on walking—a sensual gesture they came to expect.
It was always six-thirty a.m. when she reached the bridge. There would be a few prawn boats, a man up to his neck in the water, whose hands, out of sight, would be straightening the nets that had been dropped by his son from a boat during the night. The man moved in his quietness as she walked past him. From here Sirissa would reach the school in ten minutes, change in a cubicle, soak rags in a bucket, and begin cleaning the blackboards. Then sweep the rooms free of leaves that had slipped in through the grilled windows if there had been wind or a storm in the night. She worked in the empty school grounds until she heard the gradual arrival of the children, the teenagers, the older youths, like a gradual arrival of birds, voices deepening, as if it were a meeting called for in a jungle clearing. She would go among them and wipe clean the blackboards on the edge of the sand courtyard—used by the youngest children, who would sit on the earth in front of the teachers learning their Sinhala, their mathematics, their English: ‘The peacock is a beautiful bird. . . . It has a long tail!’
There was a strict stillness during the morning classes. Then, at one in the afternoon, the courtyard filled with noise and bodies again, the school day completed, the students in their white uniforms scattering to three or four villages that fed the school, back into their other life. She ate her lunch at the desk in the math classroom. She opened up the leaf with the food inside, held it in her left hand and wandered beside the blackboard, collecting the food with three fingers and a thumb, not even looking down, but peering at the chalked numbers and symbols to catch and follow the path of the argument. She had been good at theorems in school. Their logic fell clearly in front of her. She could pick an edge and fold it neatly into an isosceles. She would always listen to the teachers as she worked in the flower beds or hallways. Now she washed her hands at the tap and began her walk home, a few teachers still in the hall, a few later cycling past her.
In the evenings during the government curfews she remained indoors, with a lamp and a book in her room. Her husband would be with her in a week. She’d turn a page and find a drawing of her by Ananda on a frail piece of paper he had tucked into the later reaches of the book’s plot. Or a line drawing of a wasp she had disliked, its giant eyes. She would have preferred to walk into the streets after dinner, for she loved the closing up of stores. The streets dark, the fall of electric light out of the shops. It was her favourite time, like putting away the senses one by one, this shop of drinks, this cassette store, these vegetables packed away, and the street growing darker and darker as she walked on. And a bicycle riding off with three sacks of potatoes balanced on it into even purer darkness. Into the other life. That existence. For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered. So Sirissa loved the calm of the night streets that no longer had commerce in them, like a theatre after the performance was over. Vimalarajah’s herb shop, or his brother Vimalarajah’s silver shop with a shutter halfway down its darkness, the light slowly dwarfed till it revealed just an inch under the metal door, a line of gold varnish, and then the turning off of a switch so that horizon disappeared. The air would breeze around her dress as she imagined herself walking without curfew. The pigeons settled in among the lightbulbs spelling out the name Cargill’s. So many things happened during the feathers of night. The frantic running, the terrified, the scared, the pea-brain furious and tired professional men of death punishing another village of dissent.
At five-thirty in the morning, Sirissa wakes and bathes herself at the well behind the house she is living in. She dresses, eats some fruit, and leaves for the school. It is the same twenty-five-minute walk she is familiar with. She knows she will turn lazily after passing the boys on the bridge. There will be the familiar birds, Brahminy kites, perhaps a flycatcher. The road narrows. A hundred yards ahead of her is the bridge. Lagoon on the left. Salt river on the right. This morning there are no fishermen and it is an empty road. She is the first to walk it, being a servant at the school. Six-thirty a.m. Nobody to whirl for, her gesture that shows she knows she is equal to them. She is about ten yards from the bridge when she sees the heads of the two students on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old . . . she doesn’t know or care. She sees two more heads on the far side of the bridge and can tell even from here that she recognizes one of them. She would shrink down into herself, go back, but she cannot. She feels something is behind her, whatever is the cause of this. She desires to become nothing at all. Mind capable of nothing. She does not even think of releasing them from this public gesture. Cannot touch anything because everything feels alive, wounded and raw but alive. She begins running forward, past their eyes, her own shut dark until she is past them. Up the hill towards the school. She keeps running forward, and then she sees more.
Anil stood lost in the stricture of no movement, in a precise focus of thought. She had no idea how long she had been there in the courtyard, how long she had been thinking through all the possible trajectories of Sailor, but when she came out of it and moved, her neck felt as if it had an arrow in it.
The central truism in her work was that you could not find a suspect until you found the victim. And in spite of their knowledge that Sailor had probably been killed in this district, in spite of details of age and posture, her theorizing of height and weight, in spite of the “head composition” that she had not much faith in, it seemed unlikely that they would identify him; they still knew nothing about the world Sailor had come from.
And in any case, if they did identify him, if they did discover the details of his murder, what then? He was a victim among thousands. What would this change?
She remembered Clyde Snow, her teacher in Oklahoma, speaking about human rights work in Kurdistan: One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. She and Sarath both knew that in all the turbulent history of the island’s recent civil wars, in all the token police investigations, not one murder charge had been made during the troubles. But this could be a clear case against the government.
However, without identifying Sailor, they had no victim yet.
Anil had worked with teachers who could take a seven-hundred-year-old skeleton and discover through evidence of physical stress or trauma in those bones what the person’s profession had been. Lawrence Angel, her mentor at the Smithsonian, could, from just the curvature of a spine to the right, recognize a stonemason from Pisa, and from thumb fractures among dead Texans tell that they had spent long evenings gripping the saddle on mechanical barroom bulls. Kenneth Kennedy at Cornell University remembered Angel identifying a trumpet player from the scattered remains in a bus crash. And Kennedy himself, studying a first-millennium mummy of Thebes, discovered marked lines on the flexor ligaments of the phalanges and theorized the man was a scribe, the marks attributed to his constantly holding a stylus.
Ramazzini in his treatise on the diseases of tradesmen had begun it all, talking of metal poisoning among painters. Later the Englishman Thackrah spoke of pelvic deformations among weavers who sat for hours at their looms. (‘Weaver’s bottom,’ Kennedy noted, may have led to Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Comparisons were made because of similar anatomical ailments between javelin throwers among Neolithic Saharans of the Niger and modern golf professionals.
These were the markers of occupation. . . .
The night before, Anil had leafed through Kennedy’s charts in Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton, one of her constant travelling companions. On Sailor’s bones she could find no precise marker of occupational stress. As she stood utterly still in the courtyard, she realized there were two possible versions of a life that she could deduce from the skeleton in front of her. And the two aspects of the skeleton did not logically fit together. The first, from her reading of the bones, suggested ‘activity’ above the height of the shoulder. He had worked with his arms stretched out, reaching up or forward. A man who painted walls perhaps, or chiselled. But it appeared to be a harder activity than painting. And the arm joints showed a symmetrical use, so both arms had been active. His pelvis, trunk and legs also gave the suggestion of agility, something like the swivel of a man on a trampoline. Acrobat? Circus performer? Trapeze, because of the arms? But how many circuses were around in the Southern Province during the emergency? She remembered there had been many roaming ones in her childhood. And she remembered once seeing a children’s book on extinct animals where one of the extinct creatures was an acrobat.
The other version of him was different. The left leg had been broken badly, in two places. (These wounds were not a part of his murder. She could tell the breaks had occurred about three years before his death.) And the heel bones—the heel bones suggested an alternate profile completely, a man static and sedentary.
Anil looked around the courtyard. Sarath was barely visible, sitting in the darkness of the house, while Ananda squatted comfortably in front of the head on the turntable, a lit beedi in his mouth. She could imagine the squint of his eyes behind his spectacles. She passed him as she walked to the granary cupboards. Then moved back.
‘Sarath,’ she said quietly, and he came out. He sensed the edge to her voice.
‘I— Can you tell Ananda not to move. To stay as he is. That I’m going to have to touch him, okay?’
Sarath’s glasses were on his nose. He looked at her.
‘Do you understand me?’
‘Not really. You want to touch him?’
‘Just tell him not to move, okay?’
As soon as Sarath entered his work space, Ananda threw a cloth over the head. There was a brief conversation, then hesitant monosyllabic agreement repeated after each of Sarath’s phrases. She walked in slowly and kneeled beside Ananda, but as soon as she touched him he jumped up.
She turned away in frustration.
‘Ne, ne!’ Sarath tried to explain once more. It took a while for them to arrange Ananda into exactly the same position he had been in.
‘Get him to keep it taut, as if he was working.’
Anil took hold of Ananda’s ankle in both hands. She pressed her thumbs into the muscle and cartilege, moved them up a few inches above his ankle bone. There was a dry laugh from Ananda. Then down to the heel again. ‘Ask him why he works like this.’ She was told by Sarath that he was comfortable.
‘It’s not comfortable,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the foot is relaxed. There’s stress. The ligament is being stretched against the bone. There will be a permanent bruise to it. Ask him.’
‘What?’
‘Ask him why he works this way.’
‘He’s a carver. That’s how he works.’
‘But does he usually squat like this?’
Sarath asked the question and the two men rattled back and forth.
‘He said he got used to squatting in the gem mines. The height down there is only about four feet. He was in them for a couple of years.’
‘Thank you. Please, will you thank him. . . .’
She was excited.
‘Sailor worked in a mine too. Come here, look at the strictures on the ankle bones of the skeleton—this is what Ananda has under his flesh. I know this. This was my professor’s area of specialty. See this sediment on the bone, the buildup. I think Sailor worked in one of the mines. We need to get a chart of the mines in this area.’
‘Are you talking about gem mines?’
‘It could be anything. Also, this is just one aspect of his life, the rest is very different. He must have done something more active before he broke his leg. So we have a story about him, you see. A man who was active, an acrobat almost, then he was injured and had to work in a mine. What other mines do they have around here?’
There followed two days of storms when they had to stay indoors. As soon as the bad weather ended, Anil borrowed Sarath’s cell phone, found an umbrella and went into a light rain. She clambered down a slope away from the trees and stalked across to the far edge of the paddy field, to where Sarath had told her there was the clearest reception.
She needed communication with the outside world. There was too much solitude in her head. Too much Sarath. Too much Ananda.
Dr. Perera at Kynsey Road Hospital answered the phone. It took a while for him to remember who she was, and he was startled to be told that she was speaking to him from a paddy field. What did she want?
She had wanted to talk to him about her father, knew she had been skirting the memory of him since her arrival on the island. She apologized for not calling and meeting him before she left Colombo. But on the phone Perera seemed muted and wary.
‘You sound sick, sir. You should take a lot of liquids. A viral flu comes like that.’
She would not tell him where she was—Sarath had warned her of that—and when he asked for the second time she pretended she could not hear, said, ‘Hello . . . hello? Are you there, sir?’ and hung up.
*
Anil moves in silence, the energy held back. Her body taut as an arm, the music brutal and loud in her head, while she waits for the rhythm to angle off so she can open her arms and leap. Which she does now, throwing her head back, her hair a black plume, back almost to the level of her waist. Throws her arms too, to hold the ground in her back flip, her loose skirt having no time to discover gravity and drop before she is on her feet again.
It is wondrous music to dance alongside—she has danced to it with others on occasions of joy and gregariousness, carousing through a party with, it seemed, all her energy on her skin, but this now is not a dance, does not contain even a remnant of the courtesy or sharing that is part of a dance. She is waking every muscle in herself, blindfolding every rule she lives by, giving every mental skill she has to the movement of her body. Only this will lift her backward into the air and pivot her hip to send her feet over her.
A scarf tied tight around her head holds the earphones to her. She needs music to push her into extremities and grace. She wants grace, and it happens here only on these mornings or after a late-afternoon downpour—when the air is light and cool, when there is also the danger of skidding on the wet leaves. It feels as if she could eject herself out of her body like an arrow.
Sarath sees her from the dining room window. He watches a person he has never seen. A girl insane, a druid in moonlight, a thief in oil. This is not the Anil he knows. Just as she, in this state, is invisible to herself, though it is the state she longs for. Not a moth in a man’s club. Not the carrier and weigher of bones—she needs that side of herself too, just as she likes herself as a lover. But now it is herself dancing to a furious love song that can drum out loss, ‘Coming In from the Cold,’ dancing the rhetoric of a lover’s parting with all of herself. She thinks she is most sane about love when she chooses damning gestures against him, against herself, against them together, against eros the bittersweet, consumed and then spat out in the last stages of their love story. Her weeping comes easy. It is for her in this state no more than sweat, no more than a cut foot she earns during the dance, and she will not stop for any of these, just as she would not change herself for a lover’s howl or sweet grin, then or anymore.
She stops when she is exhausted and can hardly move. She will crouch and lean there, lie on the stone. A leaf will come down. Its click of applause. The music continues furious like blood moving for a few more minutes in a dead man. She lies under the sound and witnesses her brain coming back, lighting its candle in the dark. And breathes in and breathes out and breathes in and breathes out.
On the weekend, while they were in the front garden of the walawwa, Ananda sat down beside them and talked to Sarath in Sinhala.
‘He has finished the head,’ Sarath said, not even turning towards her but still watching Ananda’s face. ‘Apparently, he says, it’s done. If there are any problems with it I suggest we don’t complain, he’s badly drunk. Save whatever hesitations. Or he might disappear on us.’
She said nothing and the two men continued speaking, the dusk settling around them within the sound of the frogs. She got up and strolled towards the twangings and croaks. She was lost in the antiphonies until she felt Sarath’s hand on her shoulder.
‘Come. Let’s see it now.’
‘Before he passes out? Yes, yes. No criticism.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I humour him. I humour you. When do I get my turn?’
‘I don’t think you like being humoured.’
‘A favour then, sometime.’
In the courtyard a torch of twigs was stuck into the earth. Sailor’s head was on a chair. Nothing else, only the two of them and the presence of the head.
The firelight set the face in movement. But what affected her—who felt she knew every physical aspect about Sailor, who had been alongside him now in his posthumous life as they travelled across the country, who had slept in a chair all night while he lay on the table in the Bandarawela rest house, who knew every mark of trauma from his childhood—was that this head was not just how someone possibly looked, it was a specific person. It revealed a distinct personality, as real as the head of Sarath. As if she was finally meeting a person who had been described to her in letters, or someone she had once lifted up as a child who was now an adult.
She sat on the step. Sarath was walking towards the head and then walking backwards, away from it. Then he would turn, as if to catch it unawares. She just watched it point-blank, coming to terms with it. There was a serenity in the face she did not see too often these days. There was no tension. A face comfortable with itself. This was unexpected coming from such a scattered and unreliable presence as Ananda. When she turned she saw that he had gone.
‘It’s so peaceful.’ She spoke first.
‘Yes. That’s the trouble,’ Sarath said.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘I know. It’s what he wants of the dead.’
‘He’s younger-looking than I expected. I like the look on him. What do you mean by that? “What he wants of the dead”?’
‘We have seen so many heads stuck on poles here, these last few years. It was at its worst a couple of years ago. You’d see them in the early mornings, somebody’s night work, before the families heard about them and came and removed them and took them home. Wrapping them in their shirts or just cradling them. Someone’s son. These were blows to the heart. There was only one thing worse. That was when a family member simply disappeared and there was no sighting or evidence of his existence or his death. In 1989, forty-six students attending school in Ratnapura district and some of the staff who worked there disappeared. The vehicles that picked them up had no number plates. A yellow Lancer had been seen at the army camp and was recognized during the roundup. This was at the height of the campaign to wipe out insurgent rebels and their sympathizers in the villages. Ananda’s wife, Sirissa, disappeared at that time. . . .’
‘My God.’
‘He told me only recently.’
‘I . . . I feel ashamed.’
‘It’s been three years. He still hasn’t found her. He was not always like this. The head he has made is therefore peaceful.’
Anil rose and walked back into the dark rooms. She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda’s wife in every aspect of it. She sat down in one of the large cane chairs in the dining room and began weeping. She could not face Sarath with this. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see the rectangular shape of a painting and beside it Ananda standing still, looking through the blackness at her.
Who were you crying for? Ananda and his wife?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Ananda, Sailor, their lovers. Your brother working himself to death. There’s only a mad logic here, no resolving. Your brother said something, he said, “You’ve got to have a sense of humour about all this—otherwise it makes no sense.” You must be in hell if you can seriously say things like that. We’ve become medieval. I saw your brother once before that night in the hospital with Gunesena. I’d cut myself badly and gone to Emergency Services to get some stitches. Your brother was there in a black coat and he was covered in blood, covered in blood reading a paperback. I’m sure now it was Gamini. I thought he looked familiar when I saw him with you. I thought he was a patient, part of an attempted murder. Your brother’s on speed, isn’t he?’
‘He’s been on various things. I don’t know now.’
‘He’s so thin. Someone needs to help him.’
‘He embraces it, what he does to himself. He’s reached a balance with it.’
‘What are you going to do with the head?’
‘He might have come from one of these villages. I can see if anyone recognizes it.’
‘Sarath, you can’t do this. You said . . . these are communities that lost people. They’ve had to deal with beheaded bodies.’
‘What’s our purpose here? We’re trying to identify him. We have to start somewhere.’
‘Please don’t do this.’
. . .
He had been standing, listening to them speaking in English in the courtyard. But now he faced her, not knowing that the tears were partly for him. Or that she realized the face was in no way a portrait of Sailor but showed a calm Ananda had known in his wife, a peacefulness he wanted for any victim.
She would have turned on a light but she had noticed Ananda never stepped into electrically lit areas. He worked always with flare torches in his room if it was too overcast. As if electricity had betrayed him once and he would not trust it again. Or maybe he was of that generation of battery lovers unaccustomed to official light. Just batteries or fire or moon.
He moved two steps forward and with his thumb creased away the pain around her eye along with her tears’ wetness. It was the softest touch on her face. His left hand lay on her shoulder as tenderly and formally as the nurse’s had on Gamini that night in the emergency ward, which was why, perhaps, she recalled that episode to Sarath later. Ananda’s hand on her shoulder to quiet her while the other hand came up to her face, kneaded the skin of that imploded tension of weeping as if hers too was a face being sculpted, though she could tell that wasn’t in his thoughts. This was a tenderness she was receiving. Then his other hand on her other shoulder, the other thumb under her right eye. Her sobbing had stopped. Then he was not there anymore.
In all of her time with Sarath, she realized, he had hardly touched her. With Sarath she felt simply adjacent. Gamini’s shaking her hand in the night hospital, his sleeping head on her lap that one night had been more personal. Now Ananda had touched her in a way she could recollect no one ever having touched her, except, perhaps, Lalitha. Or perhaps her mother, somewhere further back in her lost childhood. She slipped into the courtyard and saw Sarath still there facing the image of Sailor. He would already know as she did that no one would recognize the face. It was not a reconstruction of Sailor’s face they were looking at.
Once she and Sarath had entered the forest monastery in Arankale and spent a few hours there. A corrugated overhang was nailed into the rock of a cave entrance to keep out sun and rain. Beyond was a curved road of sand to a bathing pool. A monk swept his way along the path for two hours each morning and removed a thousand leaves. By late afternoon another thousand leaves and light twigs had fallen upon it. But at noon its surface was as clear and yellow as a river. To walk this sand path was itself an act of meditation.
The forest was so still that Anil heard no sounds until she thought of listening for them. Then she located the noisemakers in the landscape, as if using a sieve in water, catching the calls of orioles and parrots. ‘Those who cannot love make places like this. One needs to be in a stage beyond passion.’ It was practically the only thing Sarath had said that day in Arankale. Most of the time he walked and slept in his own thoughts.
They had wandered within the forest, discovering remnants of sites. A dog followed them and she remembered Tibetans believed that monks who hadn’t meditated properly became dogs in the next life. They circled back to the clearing, a clearing like a kamatha, the threshing circle in a paddy field. On a ledge of stone a small statue of the Buddha rested, a cut plantain leaf protected him from glare and rain. The forest towering over them so they felt they were within a deep green well. The corrugated overhang by the cave rattled and shook whenever the wind came down through the trees.
There was no wish in her to step away from this place.
Kings and those who are powerful desire what weighs them to the ground. Historical honour, measured ownership, their sure truths. But in Arankale, Sarath told her, in the last years of the twelfth century, Asanga the Wise and his followers lived for decades in solitude, the world unaware of them. When they died the monastery and then the forest were stilled of humans. And in those uninhabited years the paths were leaf-filled, there was no song of sweeping. No odour of saffron or margosa came from the baths. Arankale perhaps became more beautiful, Anil thought, and more subtle without humans in the structure they had designed when they were no longer in the currents of love.
Four centuries later monks began living again in the caves above what had once been the temple clearing. It had been a long era of humanlessness, religiouslessness. The knowledge of such a monastery had vanished from people’s minds and the site was an abandoned forest sea. What was left of wooden altars was eaten by colonies of insects. Generations of pollen silted the bathing pool and then rough vegetation consumed it, so it was invisible to any passerby who did not know its sudden loose depth, which was a haven for creatures that scurried on the warmth of the cut rock and on unnamed plants in this nocturnal world.
For four hundred years the unheard throat calls of birds. The hum of some medieval bee motoring itself into the air. And in the remnant of the twelfth-century well, under the reflected sky, a twist of something silver in the water.
Sarath said this to her, the night on Galle Face Green:
‘Palipana could move within archaeological sites as if they were his own historical homes from past lives—he was able to guess the existence of a water garden’s location, unearth it, reconstruct its banks, fill it with white lotus. He worked for years on the royal parks around Anuradhapura and Kandy. He’d take one imagined step and be in an earlier century. Standing in the Forest of Kings or at one of the rock structures in the western monasteries, he must have found it difficult to distinguish the present age from ancient times. The season was identifiable—temperature, rainfall, humidity, the odour of the grass, its burned colours. But that was all. Nothing else gave away an era. . . . So I can understand what he did. It was just the next step for him—to eliminate the borders and categories, to find everything in one landscape, and so discover the story he hadn’t seen before.
‘Don’t forget, he was going blind. In the last years of partial sight, he thought he finally saw the half-perceived interlinear texts. As letters and words began to disappear under his fingers and from his eyesight, he felt something else, the way those who are colour-blind are used to see through camouflage during war, to see the existing structure of the figure. He was living alone.’
There was a laugh from Gamini, who was also listening.
Sarath paused, then continued. ‘In his youth Palipana was mostly solitary while he learned Pali and other languages.’
‘But he was very fond of women,’ Gamini said. ‘One of those men who have three women on three hills. Of course you’re right, he was living alone. . . . You’re probably right.’
Gamini, by repeating the phrase, cancelled out his agreement. He lay back on the grass and looked up. A quiet crash of the combers against the breakwater along Galle Face Green. His brother and the woman had become silent as a result of his interruption, so he went on. ‘This was a civilized country. We had “halls for the sick” four centuries before Christ. There was a beautiful one in Mihintale. Sarath can take you around its ruins. There were dispensaries, maternity hospitals. By the twelfth century, physicians were being dispersed all over the country to be responsible for far-flung villages, even for ascetic monks who lived in caves. That would have been an interesting trek, dealing with those guys. Anyway, the names of doctors appear on some rock inscriptions. There were villages for the blind. There are recorded details of brain operations in the ancient texts. Ayurvedic hospitals were set up that still exist—I’ll take you there and show them to you sometime. Just a short train journey. We were always good with illness and death. We could howl with the best. Now we carry the wounded with no anaesthetic up the stairs because the elevators don’t work.’
‘I think I met you before.’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve never seen you.’
‘Do you remember everyone? You have a black coat.’
He laughed. ‘We don’t have time to remember. Get Sarath to show you Mihintale.’
‘Oh, he did, he showed me a joke there. At the top of that flight of steps leading to the hill temple was a sign in Sinhala that must have once said, WARNING: WHEN IT RAINS, THESE STEPS ARE DANGEROUS. Sarath was laughing at it. Someone had altered one Sinhala syllable on the sign, so it now read, WARNING: WHEN IT RAINS, THESE STEPS ARE BEAUTIFUL.’
‘This is my serious brother? He’s usually the one in our family with historical irony. We are prime examples for him of why cities become ruins. The seven reasons for the fall of Polonnaruwa as a political centre. Twelve reasons why Galle became a major port and survived into the twentieth century. We don’t agree much, my brother and I. He thinks my ex-wife was the best thing that happened to me. He probably wished to f*ck her. But didn’t.’
‘Stop it, Gamini.’
‘I didn’t, anyway. Not much. I got diverted. The bodies were coming in by truckloads. She didn’t love the smell of scrub lotion on my arms. The fact that I would use medicinal aids during my shifts. So that later I was not fully awake in her company. Not great courtship. I’d get into a bath and pass out. My honeymoon was at a base hospital. The country was falling apart and my wife’s family complained about my unavailability. I was supposed to have my shirt ironed and go to a dinner party, hold her hand as we waited for the car. . . . Maybe I would have laughed if I’d seen that sign about the steps. Dangerous . . . beautiful . . . Lucky for you both to be there. He’—Gamini pointed into the dark—‘took me there when he was studying with Palipana. I liked Palipana. I liked his strictness. He was right in the heart of our age. No small talk. What did he call himself?’
‘An epigraphist,’ Sarath said.
‘A skill . . . to decipher inscriptions. Wonderful! To study history as if it were a body.’
‘Of course your brother does that too.’
‘Of course. And then Palipana went mad. What do you say, Sarath?’
‘Hallucinations, perhaps.’
‘He went mad. Those over-interpretations, what we must call lies, over the interlinear stuff.’
‘He isn’t mad.’
‘Okay, then. Same as you and me. But no one in his clique supported him when it was revealed. He was certainly the only great man I met, but he was just never a “sacred” guy for me. You see, in the heart of any faith is a history that teaches us not to trust—’
‘Sarath at least went to see him,’ Anil interrupted.
‘Did he. Did he . . . ?’
‘I didn’t. Not till this last week.’
‘So he’s alone.’ Gamini said. ‘Just his three women on three hills.’
‘He lives with his niece. It’s his sister’s daughter.’
Anil came out of a deep sleep. Some bird-scramble on the roof or a truck in the distance must have woken her. She removed the silent earphones from her hair, groped for her Prince T-shirt and walked into the courtyard. Four a.m. The beacon from her flashlight went straight towards Sailor’s skeleton. So he was safe. She flicked the light to the chair and saw the head wasn’t there. Sarath must have moved it. What had woken her? Someone with a nightmare? Was it Gamini in his black coat? She’d been dreaming about him. Or perhaps Cullis in the distance. It was about the same hour she had left him wounded in Borrego. Her funny valentine.
The courtyard was a layer lighter.
A wind in the roof tiles, a stronger wind and rustle high in the tall darkness of the trees. She had not brought one picture of him when she packed, was proud of that. She sat down on a step. She thought there had been birdsong and was listening for more of it. Then she heard the gasp and was running to Ananda’s door and pushing it open into the dark.
There were sounds she had never heard before. She ran back for the flashlight, yelled to Sarath and came back in. Ananda was lying against a corner, trying with what energy he had left to stab himself in the throat. The blood on the knife and in his fingers and down his arm. His eyes like a deer in her light. The sound coming from God knows where. Not his throat. It couldn’t be his throat. Not now.
‘How quick were you?’ It was Sarath.
‘Quick. I was outside. Rip some cloth off the bed.’
She moved towards Ananda. The eyes open, not blinking, and she thought he might already be dead. She waited for eye movement, and after what felt like a long time it came. His hand was still half gestured into the air. ‘I need the cloth fast, Sarath.’ ‘Right.’ She tried pulling the knife out of Ananda’s grip but couldn’t, and let it be. The blood coming off his elbow onto her sarong, she was close enough to smell it, the flashlight held between her thighs, aimed up as she crouched there.
Sarath began to tear the pillowcase and passed her strips of cloth, which she wrapped around Ananda’s neck. She put the large flap of skin flat against his neck and bound it tight.
‘I need some antiseptic. Do you know where it is?’ When he brought it she soaked the cloth in it so it would reach the wound. The windpipe was still intact, but she needed to tighten the bandage so less blood would be lost, even though he was having difficulty breathing already. She leaned forward and pressed the wound with her fingers, the knife in his hand now behind her.
‘You need to phone Gamini and get him to send someone.’
‘The cell phone’s dead. I’ll phone from the village. If I can’t get someone, I’ll drive him to Ratnapura.’
‘Light a lamp, will you, for us. Before you go.’
He returned with an oil lamp. It was too bright for them at that hour, and he turned down the wick, because what he could see was terrible.
‘He called forth the dead,’ she whispered.
‘No. He’s just one of those who try to kill themselves because they lost people.’
She caught a waver in the eyes in front of her.
. . .
Anil was not conscious of Sarath’s leaving. She remained with Ananda in the corner of the room, lamplight holding them together. She should have been the one to go. Sarath could talk and calm him. Or did he need silence? Perhaps. Perhaps the presence of a woman helped.
She slipped in the blood getting up from her crouch, went to the bed and tore more strips off the pillowcase. She felt an amulet under the pillow and took it. When she returned, his eyes were wide open, seemed to be swallowing everything. Oh my God—he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He couldn’t see. She found them on the floor, he had been wearing them when he began to kill himself.
She rubbed the blood on her hands onto her sarong and placed the spectacles on his face. Suddenly, in spite of his wound, in spite of the knife still in his right hand, still a threat, he seemed to be back with her, among the living. She felt she could speak in any language, he would understand the purpose of any gesture. How far back was their moment of connection, when his hand had been on her shoulder? Just a few hours earlier. She put the amulet in his left hand but he could not or would not hold it. He was drifting back into unconsciousness or sleep.
What was an amulet, what was a baila, to him now? Or spectacles, or a bond. All that was for her own peace. She had interrupted his death. She was the obstacle to what he wanted. The blood had already filled the bandage. She rose and hurried through the courtyard, along with the random glance of the flashlight, into the kitchen, to their portable icebox. Opened it, and at the back, wrapped in newspaper, found the emergency epinephrine she always carried. Perhaps it would slow the bleeding, constrict the blood vessels and help his blood pressure. She rolled an ampule between her palms to warm it. On her knees, beside him, she sucked the epinephrine up into the syringe. He was looking at her, it felt, from a great distance, with no interest in what she was doing. She put her left hand on his chest to keep him from moving—she was pushing him back, she realized, as far as he would go, to stay secure, into the room’s corner—then stabbed it into the arm. Continuing to hold him with her left hand, she filled the syringe once more, from a second ampule held between her knees, then gave him another injection. When she looked up he was still gazing through her. But when the drug started to influence him, his eyes became endangered. They slipped slowly, as if grasping for a ledge to stay awake on. As if he thought he would die now should he fall back into stillness.
It was ten in the morning and she heard the sounds of the foreman arriving as usual on the property. He was there to weigh the tea that had been picked and collected into sacks by seven workers. Anil always went out to watch the ceremony. She was there for a memory she’d held on to since she was a child. She always had loved the thick odour from the leaves, and as for that green leaf she knew there was nothing greener. She remembered entering tea and rubber factories as if they were kingdoms and imagining which of those kingdoms she wished to be a part of when she became an adult. A husband in tea or a husband in rubber. There was no other choice. And their house flung on top of a solitary hill.
Sarath had not been able to locate his brother and so had driven Ananda to Ratnapura Hospital. He was still not back. She stood by the neighbouring shed where the weigh-scales were, and when the tea pluckers had gone she stepped onto the platform’s wobble, bent down and took a few small green leaves.
Before going to bed the previous night, she’d carried a bucket of water into the room and scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees. She had wanted to do it then, while he was still alive. If he died in the night she could not face going in there again. She worked for half an hour. The blood looked black in that light. Later, in the courtyard, she stripped off her T-shirt and sarong and washed them. And only then began to bathe herself—every inch of skin where she could sense the dried blood, every strand of her thin dark hair. She removed her bangle and scrubbed her wrist, then dropped the bangle into the bucket and washed that too. Several more times she jerked the full bucket up out of the well and poured water over herself. She felt manically awake, shivering, she wanted to talk. She left the clothes by the well and walked to her room and tried to disappear into sleep. She could feel the coldness of the well water reaching her in her exhaustion, knew it had entered her bones. She was with Sarath and Ananda, citizened by their friendship—the two of them in the car, the two of them in the hospital while a stranger attempted to save Ananda. Her hands were at her sides, she was barely able to reach for a sheet to cover herself. It was almost morning and light was in the room with her. Only then did she drift off, believing that the good stranger would save Ananda.
She opened her eyes in the afternoon and Sarath was there.
‘He will be all right.’
‘Oh,’ she murmured. She pressed Sarath’s hand to the side of her face.
‘You saved him. Getting to him so quickly, then the bandage, the epinephrine. The doctor said he didn’t know too many who would know to do that in a crisis.’
‘It was lucky. I’m allergic to bees, I always carry it. Some people can’t breathe after a bee attack. And epinephrine also slows bleeding.’
‘You should live here. Not be here just for another job.’
‘This isn’t just “another job”! I decided to come back. I wanted to come back.’
There is a long stone path from the village road up to the walawwa. There is an old wall on the right hidden by foliage. A fork in the driveway after thirty yards. If you are driving you turn left and park, near the tea pluckers’ shed. If you are cycling or walking you veer right and approach the house and enter it through a small east door.
It is a classic building, two hundred years old, handed down through five generations. From no viewing point does the house look excessive or pretentious. The site and location, the careful use of distance—how far back you can stand from the building to look at it, the lack of great views of another person’s land—make you turn inward rather than dominate the world around you. It has always seemed a hidden, accidentally discovered place, a grand meulne.
You enter through the gate with its idiosyncratic slope on the top beam and you are in a walled front garden, with sand-coloured packed-down earth. There are two locations of shade here. The shadowed porch and the shadow under the great red tree. Beneath the tree is a low stone bench. Anil spends much of her time here, under the tree bent like an Aeolian harp that throws a hundred variations of shadow textures onto the sandy earth.
How old was the painter in the Wickramasinghe family when he died? How old is Ananda? How old was Anil, standing once in an airport unable to cry out the pain of her frustrated unreturned desire? What were the missing organs in men that made them stroll through life as courteously unfaithful, nonverbal creatures? If two lovers felt they could kill themselves over loss or desire, what of the rest of the planet of strangers? Those who were not in the slightest way in love and who were led and swayed into enemy camps by the ambitious and vainglorious . . .
She was in the garden alongside the moonamal tree and the kohomba tree. The flowers of the moonamal when shed always turned face up to the moon. The kohomba twigs she could break off and strip to clean her teeth, or burn to keep mosquitoes away. This place seemed the garden of a wise prince. But the wise prince had killed himself.
The aesthetics of the walawwa never surfaced among the three of them. It had been a location of refuge and fear, in spite of calm, consistent shadows, the modest height of the wall, the trees that flowered at face level. But the house, the sand garden, the trees had entered them. Anil would never get over her time here. Years later she might see an etching or a drawing and understand something about it, not sure why—unless she were told that the walawwa she lived in had belonged to the artist’s family and that the artist had also lived there for a time. But what was it about the drawing? This simple series of lines of a naked water carrier, say, and the exactly right distance of his figure from the tree whose arced trunk echoed the shape of a harp.
One can die from private woes as easily as from public ones. Here various families had been solitary, might have begun speaking quietly to themselves while a pencil was being sharpened. Or they would listen to a transistor radio, hearing something faint at the farthest radius point of the antenna. When batteries died it was sometimes a week before one of them walked into the village, that sea of electric light! For it was a grand house built in the era of lamps, built when there seemed to be only the possibility of private woe. But it was here the three of them hunted a public story. ‘The drama of our time,’ the poet Robert Duncan remarked, ‘is the coming of all men into one fate.’
The storm comes towards them from the north. The sky black, fresh wind shaking branches and shadows as they sit under their red tree. The only thing unaffected by the storm is Sarath, his eyes searching into the distance as they talk back and forth.
‘Come on, let’s go in—’
‘Stay,’ he says. ‘We’re already wet.’
She sits down on the stone bench facing him, watching the rain break apart his neatly combed head of hair. She feels irresponsible, to be out in a storm like this. She would have done it as a kid. She can hear drumming from the village, barely audible beneath the sound of rain.
‘You look like your brother with your hair dishevelled. Actually I like your brother.’ She leans forward. ‘I’m going in.’
She walks to the porch and climbs the steps out of the mud, shakes her hair loose and wrings it out like a cloth. She glances back. Sarath’s head is bent down, his lips moving, as if speaking with someone. She knows there will never be a boat to reach Sarath, to discover what he might be thinking. His wife? A cave fresco? The bounce of the rain in front of him? She dries her arms in the darkness of the dining room, puts her left hand to her mouth so she can lick the rain off the bangle.
In the rain he remembers what he was going to tell her about Ananda. He thought of it on the drive back from the hospital. No. About Sailor. ‘Plumbago,’ he says, the word filling his head. ‘He may have worked in a plumbago mine.’
. . .
That night, long past midnight, Anil could still hear the drumming through the rain. It paced and choreographed everything. She kept waiting for its silence.
Sailor’s head, Ananda’s version of him, was already in the village, and it was there that an unknown, unwished-for drummer had attached himself to it, begun playing beside it. Anil knew it was unlikely that identification would occur. There had been so many disappearances. She knew it was not the head that would give the skeleton a name but his markers of occupation. So she and Sarath would go now to the villages in the region where there were plumbago-graphite mines.
The drum continued its intricate antiphonal pulse, like steps that led them down a stairway to the sea. The drumming would stop only when there was a name provided for the head. But that night it didn’t stop.