Anil's Ghost

The Mouse

When Gamini’s wife, Chrishanti, left their marriage, he remained in the house for a week, surrounded by all the things he had never wished for—state-of-the-art kitchen equipment, her zebra-striped table mats. Without her presence the gardener and sweeper and cook loosened away from necessity. He let his driver go. He would walk to Emergency Services. At the end of that first week he left the house and stayed at the hospital, where he knew he could always find a bed; this way he could rise at dawn and soon be in surgery. Now and then his hand slapped his breast pocket for the pen Chrishanti had given him, which he had lost, but he missed little of his past life.
When his brother phoned, concerned, he told him he did not want his concern. He was already taking pills with a protein drink so he could be continuously awake to those dying around him. In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary. If he had not been such a good doctor his behaviour would have been reported. He knew that what he was able to do in the hospital was his only societal value. It was where he met his fate, this offstage battle with the war. He ignored war news. He was told he had begun to smell, and for some reason this distressed him. He hoarded Lifebuoy soap and showered three times a day.
Sarath’s wife visited Gamini once in Emergency Services, putting her arm through his as he came off duty. She said that she and Sarath were offering Gamini a place to stay, he had become too much of a vagabond. She was the only person who could say things like that to him. He took her to lunch, ate more than he had eaten in months, and curled her interrogation back onto her specific interests. All through the meal he just looked at her face and arms. He was as gracious as possible, didn’t touch her once, the only touch was when her arm had slipped through his as they met. When they separated he didn’t embrace her. She would have felt how thin his frame was.
There was no talk about Sarath. Only about her work at the radio station. She knew he had always liked her. He knew he’d always loved her, her busy arms, the strange lack of confidence in one who seemed to him so complete. He had met her the first time at a fancy-dress party in someone’s garden outside Colombo. She was in a man’s tuxedo, her hair swept back. He began a conversation and danced twice with her, disguised, so she didn’t know who he was. This was years earlier, before either of them was married.
Who he was, that night, was her fiancé’s brother.
He proposed marriage to her twice during the party. They were on the cadju terrace. He had the paint and the tattered clothes of a yakka on him, and she half laughed him off, saying she was engaged already. They had been talking seriously about the war and she thought his proposal was a joke, simply a wish for diversion. So he talked about how long he had known the gardens they were in, how many times he had come here. You must know my fiancé, she said, he comes here too. But he claimed not to recall the name. They were both hot and she untied her bow tie so it hung loose. ‘You too must be hot. All this stuff on you.’ ‘Yes.’ There was a pond with a bamboo fountain spout that tilted over when it filled, and he kneeled by it. ‘Don’t get paint in the pond, there are fish.’ So he unwrapped the turban he was wearing, and soaked it and began wiping the colours from his face. When he got up she saw who he was, her fiancé’s brother, and he asked her to marry him again.
Now, years later, after his own marriage had ended, they walked out of the cafeteria and onto the street where her car was. He kept a distance as he said good-bye, not touching her, just that offhand hungry gaze, that offhand wave to the departing vehicle.

Gamini woke in the almost empty ward of the hospital. He showered and dressed, watched intently by the patient next to him. It was still before dawn and the grand staircase was dark. He walked down slowly, not putting his hand on the banister, which hid who knew what in that old wood. He passed Pediatrics, Communicable Diseases, Bone Work, and entered the front courtyard, bought some tea and a potato roti at the street canteen and consumed them there, under a tree full of loud birds. Apart from a few moments like this he was indoors most of the day. He’d come out and sit on a bench. He’d tell one of the interns to wake him after an hour in case he fell asleep. The boundary between sleep and waking was a cotton thread so faintly coloured he often crossed it unawares. When he performed night surgery he would sometimes feel as if he were cutting into flesh surrounded only by night and stars. He would wake from this reverie and be back in the building, recognize it once more fitting itself around him. His duties made him come upon strangers and cut them open without ever knowing their names. He rarely spoke. It seemed he did not approach people unless they had a wound, even if he couldn’t see it—the orderly yawning in the hall, the visiting politician Gamini refused to be photographed with.
Nurses read the charts out to him as he scrubbed. They loved working with him; he was strangely popular though unforgiving. He was brutal in his decisions when he realized he couldn’t save the body he was working on. ‘Enough,’ he would say, and walk out. ‘Basta,’ someone who’d been abroad said, and he laughed by the swinging door. It was almost a moment of human conversation. Gamini knew he had never been good company; small talk plunged to its death around him. Now and then a night nurse woke him and asked for help. She would be cautious, but he would wake quickly and then walk with her in just a sarong to hold an intravenous over a struggling child. Then he would slip back to his borrowed bed. ‘I owe you a favour,’ the nurse would say as he was leaving her. ‘You don’t owe anyone favours. Wake me anytime you need help.’
Her light on all night.

Sometimes bodies washed in onto the shore, the combers throwing them onto the beaches. On the Matara coast, or at Wellawatta, or by St. Thomas’s College in Mount Lavinia where they, Sarath and Gamini, had learned to swim as children. These were the victims of politically motivated murders—victims of torture in the house at Gower Street or a house off the Galle Road—lifted into the air by helicopter, flown a couple of miles out to sea and dropped through the fathoms of air. But only a few of these ever came back as evidence into the arms of the country.
Inland the bodies came down the four main rivers—the Mahaveli Ganga, the Kalu Ganga, the Kelani Ganga, the Bentota Ganga. All of them were eventually brought to Dean Street Hospital. Gamini had chosen not to deal with the dead. He avoided the south-wing corridors, where they brought the torture victims to be identified. Interns listed the wounds and photographed the bodies. Still, once a week, he went over the reports and the photographs of the dead, confirmed what was assumed, pointed out fresh scars caused by acid or sharp metal, and gave his signature. He was running on the energy of pills when he arrived to do this, and spoke quickly into a tape recorder left for him by an Amnesty man; he stood by the windows so he could get more light on the terrible photographs, covering the faces with his left hand, the pulse in his wrist jumping. He read out the number of the file, gave his interpretation and signature. The darkest hour of the week.
He walked away from the week’s pile of photographs. The doors opened and a thousand bodies slid in, as if caught in the nets of fishermen, as if they had been mauled. A thousand bodies of sharks and skates in the corridors, some of the dark-skinned fish thrashing . . .
They had begun covering the faces on the photographs. He worked better this way, and there was no danger of his recognizing the dead.


The joke was that he had entered the medical profession because he assumed it would have a nineteenth-century pace. He liked its manner of amateur authority. There was the anecdote about Dr. Spittel carrying a body out of a hospital when lights failed during a night operation in Kandy, placing it on a bench in the parking lot and aiming car headlights onto the patient. A quietly heroic life remembered in a few such stories. That was the satisfaction. He’d be remembered the way a cricketer was who played one classic innings on an afternoon in 1953, his name emerging in a street baila for a week or two. Famous in a song.
As a boy, in the months when he fought off the fate of diphtheria, Gamini would lie on a mat during his afternoon sleeps and wish only for the life that his parents had. Whatever career he chose, he wanted it to move with their style and pace. To rise early and work until a late lunch, then sleep and conversation, then drop in at the office once more, briefly. His father’s and grandfather’s law offices took up one wing of the family’s large house on Greenpath Road. He was never allowed into the mysterious warrens during the workday when he was younger, but at five p.m. he would carry a glass filled with amber fluid, push the swing door with his foot and enter. There were squat filing cabinets and small desk fans. He said hullo to his father’s dog and then placed the drink on his father’s table.
At this moment his body was yanked into the air and swivelled so that he now sat on his father’s lap, large dark arms around him. ‘Start at the beginning,’ he’d say, and Gamini proceeded to tell him about his day’s adventures, his day at school, what his mother had said when he came home. He was, in the early years, fully at ease with the family. When he looked back he never remembered anger or nervousness in the house. He recalled his parents gentle with each other. They were always conversing, sharing everything, and in bed he could hear the continuing hum of it like wool between the house and the world. He realized later that every dimension of his father’s world existed in the house. Clients came to him. There was a tennis court in the back where guests joined the family on weekends.
It was assumed that the two brothers would be part of the family firm. But Sarath left home, deciding not to be a lawyer. And a few years later, Gamini also betrayed those voices in the house and entered medical school.

*

Two months after his wife left him, Gamini collapsed from exhaustion, and the administration ordered a leave. He had nowhere to go, his home abandoned. He realized Emergency Services had become for him, even in its mad state, a cocoon, as his parents’ house had been. Everything that was of value to him took place there. He slept in the wards, he bought his meals from the street vendor just outside the hospital. Now he was being asked to step away from the world he had burrowed into, created around himself, this peculiar replica of childhood order.
He walked to Nugegoda, the neighbourhood where his house was, and banged on the locked door. He could smell cooking. A stranger appeared but would not open it. ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m Gamini.’ ‘So?’ ‘I live here.’ The man walked away and there were voices in the kitchen.
It was a while before Gamini realized they were going to ignore him. He crossed the small garden. The odour of the food was wonderful to him. He had never felt so hungry. He didn’t want the house, he wanted a home-cooked meal. He entered through the back door. Glancing around, he was conscious they were looking after the place much better than he had. The man who had ignored him was with two women. He knew none of them. He had thought at first his wife had sent relatives over. ‘Can I have some water?’
The man brought him a glass. Gamini heard children farther back in the bungalow and was pleased about that, that all the space was being used. He remembered something and asked if there was any mail. They brought him a stack of it. A letter from his wife, which he put in his pocket. Several cheques from the hospital. He opened them, signed a couple on the back and gave them to one of the women. Two others he kept for himself. The women gestured and he sat down to eat with them. String hoppers, pol sambol, chicken curry. Afterwards he strolled with a comfortably full stomach to the bank. He was flush. He phoned Quickshaw’s and hired a car and waited in the air-conditioned lobby of Grindlays until it rolled up. Gamini got in next to the driver.
‘To Trincomalee. Then to the Nilaveli Beach Hotel.’
‘No, no.’
He was expecting this. It was supposedly dangerous with guerrilla forces in the vicinity. ‘It will be quite safe, I’m a doctor. They don’t touch doctors, we’re like prostitutes. Here’s a Red Cross sign for the windshield. I’m hiring you for a week. You don’t have to like me or be polite. I’m not one of those who needs to be loved. Stop here.’
He got out of the car and climbed into the back seat, he needed to sprawl out. He was asleep by the time the car weaved itself out of Colombo. ‘Take the coast road,’ he murmured just before sleep. ‘Wake me up in Negombo.’

Gamini and the driver walked into the dark, sunless lobby of the old Negombo rest house. A small lamp by the front desk lit up the manager, who sat in front of a poorly painted mural of the sea, and Gamini, remembering something, turned around, looked through the door and saw the same scene in reality. They had a beer and went on. Near Kurunegala he asked the driver to take a side road. A few miles past Kurunegala, Gamini climbed out and asked the driver to meet him at the same place the next morning. It took a while for the driver to understand. Still, he wanted to be here for the night.
His father had brought him to the forest monastery nearby, in Arankale. He had brought him as a child, and every few years Gamini managed to revisit the place. As a war doctor he had come to have little faith, but he always felt a great peace here. With nothing much, just a light shirt and pants, no umbrella for the sunlight, no food, he made his way into the forest. Sometimes when he came here he saw that the place had been kept up; sometimes it had closed down like an eye in the forest.
There was the well. There was the corrugated sheet that made a roof over the porch where old monks slept. He could stay there. He could bathe at the well in the morning. He buttoned the breast pocket of his shirt so his glasses would not fall out and be lost.

.  .  .

A week later, Gamini stepped from the Nilaveli Beach Hotel compound and walked to the sea. He was very drunk. He had been shambling around in the deserted resort with a cook and a night manager and two women who cleaned the empty bedrooms and screamed whenever the cook attempted to push them into the swimming pool. They were always wrestling in the halls. On the beach he fell asleep, and when he woke there were gunmen around him laughing.
His sarong had half fallen off. He said, as clearly as he could in the two official languages, ‘I—am—a—doctor—’ and passed out again. The next time he woke up he was in a hut full of wounded boys. Seventeen years old. Sixteen years old. Some even younger. This was supposed to be his holiday and he said so to one of the gunmen. ‘I’m expected at dinner at seven. If I’m not there by seven-thirty they don’t serve—’
‘Yes, yes. But this—’ The man gestured with his arm all the way down the hut to the wounded. ‘There’s this, no?’
Gamini had been weaning himself off his pills and was in midstream, in his switch to alcohol, so he was not sure of his present level of drunkenness. He’d been sleeping a lot. He’d wake up and find himself in a stranger’s garden. It wasn’t so much the desire for sleep as the need for it. Inside a dream he’d be carrying bodies in and out of elevators. Elevators always made him claustrophobic, but they were better than the creaking vertigo of the stairs.
When the guerrillas found him curled up on the beach the sea had been at his ankles. They’d come looking for the tourist who was supposed to be a doctor. One of the women by the swimming pool had directed them to the beach.
Gamini walked up and down, looking at the bodies in the hut. Rags knotted around the wounds, no painkillers, no bandages. He sent a soldier to his hotel room with the key to get sheets they could tear up and to collect the plastic bag with various things that would be useful—aftershave, pills. The gunman returned wearing one of his shirts. Gamini shook the tablets out onto the table and cut them into quarters. There was going to be a problem with communication. He couldn’t speak Tamil well enough, they couldn’t speak Sinhala. There was just paltry English between Gamini and the leader.
It was late afternoon and he was hungry. He had missed the lunch sitting and the hotel staff was unbending. He asked the leader to send someone over to scare up some food for him. He hoped he was not going to hear gunshots in the distance. He began to work, moving down the line of the wounded.
Most would survive but would lose an arm or be impaired in some way. He had already seen the evidence of so many woundings in his brief ride through Trincomalee. He continued along the makeshift ward carrying a wooden pakispetti box, sat beside a boy and dressed his limbs with strips of sheet. Those he would operate on shortly were each given a quarter of one of his precious pills so they would be high when he worked on them. He was startled to see how strong the effect was of even this small section of pill; he’d been swallowing them whole for more than a year. Fifteen minutes after the patient swallowed the pill, three guerrillas held him firmly to the bed and Gamini sutured a gash. The air was so hot he had already taken off his shirt, tied rags around his wrists to stop the sweat from going down to his fingers. He needed to sleep, his eyes flickering, always a signal, and there was still no food. He came close to throwing a small tantrum, lay down beside the bodies and curled himself up into sleep.
He snored loudly. When his wife was leaving him, Gamini accused her of abandoning him because he snored. Now the boys around him were silent so they would not disturb him.
But he woke to someone shouting in pain. He went out and washed his face at the tap. By this time the cook had been brought over on a bicycle, and slowly, in Sinhala, Gamini ordered ten large meals to be shared among them, and made sure the cook put it on his bill. This had an influence. When the feast arrived surgery was stopped. The hotel staff had brought two bottles of beer for him. During the meal he remembered the disappearance of Dr. Linus Corea and wondered whether he himself would ever return to Colombo.
He worked into the night, bending over patients while someone on the other side of their beds held an old Coleman lamp. Some of the boys were delirious when they emerged from the influence of the pills. Who sent a thirteen-year-old to fight, and for what furious cause? For an old leader? For some pale flag? He had to keep reminding himself who these people were. Bombs on crowded streets, in bus stations, paddy fields, schools had been set by people like this. Hundreds of victims had died under Gamini’s care. Thousands couldn’t walk or use their bowels anymore. Still. He was a doctor. In a week he would be back working in Colombo.
After midnight he walked along the beach with an escort gunman to his hotel. There he noticed right away that the alarm clock he had bought in Kurunegala was missing. He climbed onto and slept on his sheetless bed.


Where did the secret war begin between him and his brother? It had begun with the desire to be the other, even with the impossibility of emulating him. Gamini would always remain in spirit the younger, unable to catch up, nicknamed ‘Meeya.’ The Mouse. And he loved his lack of responsibility, loved never being at the centre, while perceptive of what went on there. His parents much of the time weren’t even aware of him half buried in an armchair, reading a book, ears perked up, listening to their conversations faithful as a dog. Sarath loved history, their father loved law, Gamini burrowed away unknown. The mother who had wished to be a dancer in her youth now choreographed them all. She would remain mysterious to Gamini. The love she showed was a general affection, never specifically for him. He found it difficult to imagine her as his father’s lover. She seemed daughterless, simply keeping up with the three males in the house—a garrulous husband, an intelligent and bound-to-be-successful older son, and a second-born secretive one. Gamini. The Mouse.
The fact that neither brother wanted to follow his father into the family law firm left the mother defending everyone’s position—a foot in each son’s camp, a hand on her husband’s shoulder. In any case, they scattered. Sarath moved into archaeological studies and Gamini flung himself into medical school, but most of all into the world outside the family. The only way he visited them now was via the rumours of his wildness. If they had never really been too conscious of Gamini at home, his parents now met a legion of unsavory anecdotes about him. It appeared he wanted them to give up on him, and eventually, out of embarrassment, they did.

In fact he had loved that family world. Though later, in conversations with Sarath’s wife, she would argue, ‘What kind of family would call a child “the Mouse”?’ She could picture him in his youth, irrelevant to adult preoccupations, with his big ears, in that big armchair.
Though he didn’t mind. Thought it was true for all children. He and his brother had become content with aloneness, the lack of necessity for speaking. ‘Well, it drives me mad,’ Sarath’s wife retaliated. ‘It drives me mad about both of you.’ In conversations with her Gamini continued to see his childhood as a time of contentment, while she saw him as a soul who had only just survived, never secure in the love around him. ‘I was spoiled,’ he’d say. ‘You’re only secure when you are alone doing things on your own. You weren’t spoiled, you were ignored.’ ‘I’m not going through the rest of my life blaming my mother for my lack of kisses.’ ‘You could.’
He had loved his childhood, he thought to himself. He had loved the dark living rooms during the afternoons, following the path of ants on the balcony, the costumes he put together by taking clothes out of various almirahs and dressing up and singing in front of mirrors. And the grandeur of that chair remained with him. He wanted to go out and buy one just like it, now, an adult’s prerogative and whim. When he thought of succour, it was the chair he remembered, not a mother or a father. ‘I rest my case,’ Sarath’s wife said quietly.
And Sarath, for his parents, was the boy who walked the heavens. The three of them laughed and argued during dinner while Gamini watched their style and manner. By the time he was eleven he was proud of being a good mimic, could imitate the quizzical expressions of concerned dogs, for instance.
Still, he remained invisible, even to himself, seldom looking into mirrors save when dressed in costumes. He had an uncle who used to direct amateur theatrical productions, and once, alone in his house, Gamini had come across some outfits. He tried them on one by one, wound the record player, then danced over sofas, singing invented songs, until interrupted by the return of his aunt. Who had simply exclaimed, ‘Aha! So that’s what you do. . . .’ And he was humiliated and embarrassed beyond measure or imagining. For years afterwards he judged himself vain, and as a result revealed even less of himself to others. He quietened, became barely aware of the subtler gestures within himself. Later he would be vivid only with strangers—in the storm of the last stages of a party or in the chaos of emergency wards. This was the state of grace. It was here that people could lose themselves as if in a dance, too intent on skills or desires to be conscious of their power while they chased romance or reacted to some emergency. He could be at the centre and still feel he was invisible. This was when his notoriousness began.
The barrier that separated him from his family during childhood remained in place. He did not want it dislodged, he did not want the universes brought together. He wasn’t self-conscious about this. The awareness of it was to come later in a terrible crisis and with clarity. He would be holding his brother and be aware that as far back as childhood he had known that for him the catalyst for the freedom and secrecy he always wanted was this benign brother. Gamini, beside Sarath years later, would say all this out loud to him, shocked at his own unlearned vengeance. When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children. There is always that murmuring conviction of family, like the sea around an island. So youth hides in the shape of something lean as a spear, or something as antisocial as a bark. And we become therefore more comfortable and intimate with strangers.

The Mouse insisted that for his final years of school he leave Colombo and go to boarding school at Trinity College in Kandy. In this way he was a good distance from his family for much of the year. He loved the slow-rocking train that took him away, up-country. He always loved trains, never bought a car, never learned to drive. In his twenties he luxuriated in the wind against his drunk head when he leaned into the noise and fear of tunnels, deep space around him. He enjoyed talking intimately and with humour to strangers; oh, he knew all this was a sickness—but he did not dislike it, this distance and anonymity.
He was tender, nervous and gregarious. After more than three years up north, working in the peripheral hospitals, he would become more obsessive. His marriage a year later failed almost instantly, and after that he was mostly alone. In surgery he asked for just one assistant. Others could watch and learn at a distance. He was never articulate in explaining what he did and what was going on. Never a good teacher but a good example.
He had been in love with just one woman and she was not the one he married. Later there was another woman, a wife in a field hospital near Polonnaruwa. Eventually he felt himself on a boat of demons and himself to be the only clearheaded and sane person there. He was a perfect participant in the war.


The rooms Sarath and Gamini lived in as children were hidden from the sunlight of Colombo, from traffic noises and dogs, from other children, from the sound of the metal gate clanging into its socket. Gamini remembers the swivel chair he spun in, bringing whirling chaos to the papers and shelves, the forbidden atmosphere of his father’s office. All offices, for Gamini, would have the authority of complex secrets. Even as an adult, stepping into such rooms made him feel unworthy and illicit. Banks, law firms, underlined his uncertainty, gave him a sense of being in a headmaster’s room, believing that things would never be explained enough for him to understand.
We evolve deviously. Gamini grew up not knowing half the things he thought he was supposed to know—he was to make and discover unusual connections because he had not known the usual routes. He was for most of his life a boy spinning in a chair. And just as things had been kept away from him, he too became a container of secrets.
In the house of his childhood he would press his right eye into a door handle, he would knock gently and if there was no reply slip into his parents’ room, a brother’s room, an uncle’s room, during their afternoon sleep. Then walk barefoot towards the bed and look at the sleepers, look from the window and leave. Not much going on there. Or silently approach a gathering of adults. He was already in the habit of not speaking unless responding to a question.

.  .  .

He was staying at his aunt’s house in Boralesgamuwa, and she and her friends were playing bridge on the long porch that surrounded the house. He came towards them carrying a lit candle, shielding the flame. He placed it on a side table a yard or so to the right of them. No one noticed this. He drifted back into the house. A few minutes later Gamini crawled on his belly with his air rifle through the grass, stalking his way from the bottom of the garden towards the house. He was wearing a small camouflage hat of leaves to disguise his presence even further. He could almost hear the four women bidding, having halfhearted conversations.
He estimated they were twenty yards away. He loaded the air rifle and positioned himself like a sniper, elbows down, legs at angles to give him balance and firmness, and fired. Nothing was hit. He reloaded and settled in to aim again. This time he hit the side table. One of the women looked up, cocking her head, but she could see nothing around her. What he wished to do was shoot out the flame of the candle with the pellet, but the next shot flew low, only a few inches above the red porch floor, and hit an ankle. At that instant, simultaneous with the gasp from Mrs. Coomaraswamy, his aunt looked up and saw him with the air rifle hugged against his cheek and shoulder, aiming right at them.


Gamini felt happiest when he stepped from disorganized youth into the exhilaration of work. On his first medical appointment, travelling to the hospitals in the northeast, it seemed he was finally part of a nineteenth-century journey. He remembered the memoir he had read by old Dr. Peterson, who wrote of such travels, it must have been, sixty years before. His book included etchings—a hackery travelling along canopied roads, bulbuls drinking at a tank—and Gamini recalled one sentence.

I travelled by train to Matara and the rest of the way on horse and cart, with a bugler going ahead all the way, blowing his bugle to keep the wild animals off the road.

Now, in the middle of civil war, he rode the slow, wheezing bus at almost the same pace, into almost the same landscape. In a small romantic section of his heart he wished for a bugler.
There were just five doctors working in the northeast. Lakdasa was in charge, responsible for assigning them out to the peripherals and the small villages. Skanda was main surgeon, head of triage operations when there was an emergency. There was the Cuban, with them for just one year. C——, the eye doctor, who had joined three months earlier. ‘She’s got an unreliable diploma,’ Lakdasa said to the others after a week, ‘but she works hard, and I’m not letting her go.’ And the young graduate Gamini in his first posting.
From the base hospital at Polonnaruwa they would travel to peripheral hospitals, where some of them were to live. An anaesthetist turned up one day a week, which was the day surgery was performed. If there were emergency operations on other days, they improvised with chloroform or whatever pills they could find to knock the patient out. And from the base hospital they drove to places Gamini had never heard of and couldn’t even locate on a map—Araganwila, Welikande, Palatiyawa, visiting clinics in half-built schoolrooms, met by mothers and infants, malaria and cholera patients.
The doctors who survived that time in the northeast remembered they never worked harder, were never more useful than to those strangers who were healed and who slipped through their hands like grain. Not one of them returned later into the economically sensible careers of private practice. They would learn everything of value here. It was not an abstract or moral quality but a physical skill that empowered them. There were no newspapers or varnished tables or good fans. Now and then a book, now and then the radio with cricket commentary alternating between Sinhala and English. They allowed a transistor radio into the operating room on special occasions or for a crucial few hours in a test match. When the commentator switched to English there had to be an instant translation into Sinhala by Rohan, the anaesthetist. He was the most bilingual of the staff, having had to read the small-type texts that came with tanks of oxygen. (Rohan was a reader, in any case, often travelling down to Colombo by bus to hear a local or visiting South Asian writer read from a new book at the Kelaniya campus.) Patients in the surgical ward often drifted back into consciousness and found themselves within the drama of a cricket match.

.  .  .

They shaved at night beside a candle and slept clean-shaven as princes. Then they woke at five a.m., in the dark. They would lie there for a moment locating themselves, trying to remember the shape of the room. Was there a mosquito net above them or a fan, or just a Lion brand mosquito coil? Were they in Polonnaruwa? They travelled so much, they slept in so many places. There was the stirring outside of koha birds. A bajaj. Predawn loudspeakers being turned on so there was just their hum and crackle. The doctors opened their eyes when someone touched them on the shoulder, in silence, as if in enemy territory. And there was the darkness, and the minimal clues as to where they were. Ampara? Manampitiya?
Or they would wake too soon and it was still only three hours past midnight, and they feared they would not go back to sleep again but did so within the sweep of a minute. Not one of them had sleeplessness in those days. They slept like pillars of stone, remaining in the same position they had lowered themselves into in the bed or cot or on the rattan mat, on their backs or facedown, usually on their backs because it allowed them the pleasure for a few seconds of resting, with all their senses alive, certain of coming sleep.
Within minutes of waking they got dressed in the dark and gathered in the corridors, where there was hot tea. Soon they would be driving the forty miles to clinics, the vehicle chiselling with two weak headlamps through the darkness, jungle and an unseen view alongside them, now and then a villager’s fire beside the road. They would stop at a food stall. A ten-minute breakfast of fish cutlets in the lesser dark. The noise of utensils being passed. Lakdasa coughing. Still no conversation. Just the intimacy of walking across a road with a cup of tea for someone. These always felt like significant expeditions. They were kings and queens.
Gamini worked in the northeast for more than three years. Lakdasa would remain there, setting up clinics. And the eye doctor with the dubious diploma would also never leave the peripheral hospitals. During the worst crises Gamini had seen her passing out swabs and lotions to trainees even as she operated on an emergency case. What the others envied most about her, apart from her presence as an attractive woman, was the physical evidence of her work. Gamini loved the sight of her ward as everyone in the fifteen-bed room turned towards the door when he walked in, all with the same white patch taped over their dark faces, the same badge of belonging to her.

Somebody once brought a book about Jung into their midst. In the book one of them had found a sentence and underlined it. (There was a habit among them of critical marginalia. An exclamation point beside something not psychologically or clinically valid. If there was any instance in a novel of outrageous or unlikely physical prowess or sexual achievement, Skanda, the surgeon, would write in the margin beside the scene: This happened to me once . . . and add with even more irony, Dambulla, August 1978. A scene where a man was met in a hotel room by a woman in a negligée and handed a martini received similar comments. When Skanda left to work in the cancer wards in Karapitiya, near Galle, the others knew he would be defacing books there as well, medical texts as well as novels; he was the worst of the marginalia criminals among them.) In any case, it was the anaesthetist who probably brought in the book about Jung. Pictures, essays, commentaries and biography. And someone had underlined Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
Whatever this meant, it seemed a thoughtful warning, and they let the remark seep into them. They all knew it was about the sense of self-worth that, during those days, in that place, had overcome them. They were not working for any cause or political agenda. They had found a place a long way from governments and media and financial ambition. They had originally come to the northeast for a three-month shift and in spite of the lack of equipment, the lack of water, not one luxury except now and then a tin of condensed milk sucked in a car while being surrounded by jungle, they had stayed for two years or three, in some cases longer. It was the best place to be. Once, after performing surgery for almost five hours straight, Skanda said, ‘The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.’
The quotation about Jung and Skanda’s remark were what Gamini carried with him. And the sentence about the sixth sense was the gift he gave to Anil a few years later.