Distance
The 120-foot-high statue had stood in a field of Buduruvagala for several generations. Half a mile away was the more famous rock wall of Bodhisattvas. In noon heat you walked barefoot and looked up at the figures. This was a region of desperate farming, the nearest village four miles away. So these stone bodies rising out of the earth, their faces high in the sky, often were the only human aspect a farmer would witness in his landscape during the day. They gazed over the stillness, over the buzz-scream of cicadas which were invisible in the parched grass. They brought a permanence to brief lives.
After the long darkness of night the rising sun would first colour the heads of the Bodhisattvas and the solitary Buddha, then move down their rock robes until finally, free of forests, it swathed down onto the sand and dry grass and stone, onto the human forms that walked on bare burning feet towards the sacred statues.
Three men had travelled all night across the fields carrying a thin bamboo ladder. Some quiet talk, a fear of being witnessed. They had made the ladder that afternoon and now they propped it against the statue of the Buddha. One of them lit a beedi and put it in his mouth, then climbed up the ladder. He tucked the roll of dynamite into a stone fold of cloth on the statue and ignited the fuse with the cigarette. Then he jumped down and the three of them ran and turned at the noise and held hands and lowered their heads in a crouch as the statue buckled and the torso leapt towards the earth and the great expressive face of the Buddha fell forward and smashed into the ground.
The thieves pried the stomach open with metal rods but found no treasure, and so they left. Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life. This was for once not a political act or an act perpetrated by one belief against another. The men were trying to find a solution for hunger or a way to get out of their disintegrating lives. And the ‘neutral’ and ‘innocent’ fields around the statue and the rock carvings were perhaps places of torture and burials. Since it was mostly uninhabited land, with only a few farmers and pilgrims, this was a place where trucks came to burn and hide victims who had been picked up. These were fields where Buddhism and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century.
The artisan brought to Buduruvagala to attempt a reconstruction of the Buddha statue was a man from the south. Born in a village of stonecutters, he had been an eye painter. According to the Archaeological Department, which oversaw the project, he was a drinker but would not begin drinking until the afternoons. There was a small overlap of working and drinking but it was only in the evenings that he was unapproachable. He had lost his wife some years earlier. She was one of the thousands who had disappeared.
Ananda Udugama would be on the site by dawn, would peg the blueprints into the earth and assign duties to the seven men who worked with him. The workers had dug out the base, which held the lower legs and thighs of the statue. These had not been damaged. They were pulled out and stored in a field where there were bees and left there until the rest of the body was reconstructed. A quarter of a mile away, and simultaneously with the reconstruction of this large broken Buddha, another statue was being built—to replace the destroyed god.
It was assumed that Ananda would be working under the authority and guidance of foreign specialists but in the end these celebrities never came. There was too much political turmoil, and it was unsafe. They were finding dead bodies daily, not even buried, in the adjoining fields. Victims picked up as far away as Kalutara were brought here, out of family range. Ananda appeared to stare past it all. He gave two of the men on his team the job of dealing with the bodies—tagging them, contacting civil rights authorities. By the time the monsoon came the murders had subsided, or at least this area was no longer being used as a killing field or a burial ground.
Later it came to be seen that the work done by Ananda was complex and innovative. All through the various seasons of heat, the time of monsoons and their storms, he oversaw the work in the mud trench, which resembled a hundred-foot-long coffin. It was a structure in which the found fragments of stone would be dropped. Inside it was a grid divided into one-foot squares, and once the stones were identified as to what likely part of the body they came from, by someone at the head of the triage, as it were, these were placed in the appropriate section. All this was tentative, approximate. They had pieces of stone as big as boulders and shards the size of a knuckle. This distinguishing took place in the worst of the May monsoons, so fragments of rock would be tossed into square pools of water.
Ananda brought in some of the villagers to work, ten more men. It was safer to be seen working for a project like this, otherwise you could be pulled into the army or you might be rounded up as a suspect. He got more of the village involved, women as well as men. If they volunteered, he put them to work. They had to be there by five in the morning and they packed it in by two in the afternoon, when Ananda Udugama had his own plans for the day.
The women distinguished the stones, which slid wet from their hands into the grid. It rained for more than a month. When the rain stopped, the grass steamed around them and they could finally hear one another and began to talk, their clothes dry in fifteen minutes. Then the rain would come again and they were back within its noise, silent, solitary in the crowded field, the wind banging and loosening a corrugated roof, trying to unpeel it from a shed. The distinguishing of the stones took several weeks, and by the time the dry season came most of the limbs had been assembled. There was now one arm, fifty feet long, an ear. The legs still safe in the field of bees. They began to move the sections towards each other in the cicada grass. Engineers came and with a twenty-foot drill burrowed through the soles of the feet and moved up the limbs of the body, till there was a path for metal bones to be poured in, tunnels between the hips and torso, between the shoulders and neck to the head.
During the months of assembly, Ananda had spent most of his time on the head. He and two others used a system of fusing rock. Up close the face looked quilted. They had planned to homogenize the stone, blend the face into a unit, but when he saw it this way Ananda decided to leave it as it was. He worked instead on the composure and the qualities of the face.
On the horizon the other statue of the Buddha rose gradually into the sky, while Ananda’s reconstruction stretched out along a sandy path. The path sloped, the head remaining the lowest part of the body—essential for the final stage of knitting it together.
Five cauldrons of boiling iron hissed under the slight rainfall. The men brought out the prepared corrugated troughs and poured the iron along them and watched it disappear into the feet of the statue, the red metal sliding into the path drilled within the body—giant red veins slipping down the hundred-foot length. When it hardened it would lock all the limbs together. Then it rained again, this time for two days, and the village workers were sent home. Everyone left the site.
Ananda sat in a chair next to the head. He looked up at the sky, into the source of the storm. They had built a walk ledge ten feet off the ground with bamboo. Now this forty-five-year-old man got up and climbed up onto the ledge to look down at the face and torso, which held inside it the cooling red iron.
He was there again the next morning. It was still raining, then it suddenly stopped, and the heat began to draw out steam from the earth and the statue. Ananda kept pulling off and drying his wired-together spectacles. He was on the platform most of the time now, wearing one of the Indian cotton shirts Sarath had given him some years back. His sarong was heavy and dark from the rain.
He stood over what they had been able to re-create of the face. It was a long time since he had believed in the originality of artists. He had known some of them in his youth. You slipped into the old bed of the art, where they had slept. There was comfort there. You saw their days of glory, then their days of banishment. He had always liked them and their art more during their years of banishment. He himself did not create or invent faces anymore. Invention was a sliver. Still, all the work he had done in organizing the rebuilding of the statue was for this. The face. Its one hundred chips and splinters of stone brought together, merged, with the shadow of bamboo lying across its cheek. All its life until now the statue had never felt a human shadow. It had looked over these hot fields towards green terraces in the distant north. It had seen the wars and offered peace or irony to those dying under it. Now sunlight hit the seams of its face, as if it were sewn roughly together. He wouldn’t hide that. He saw the lidded grey eyes someone else had cut in another century, that torn look in its great acceptance; he was close against the eyes now, with no distance, like an animal in a stone garden, some old man in the future. In a few days the face would be in the sky, no longer below him as he walked on this trestle, his shadow moving across the face, the hollows holding rain so he could lean down and drink from it, as if a food, a wealth. He looked at the eyes that had once belonged to a god. This is what he felt. As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.
It was the evening before the Nētra Mangala ceremony of the new Buddha statue and offerings were being brought from the nearby villages. The figure stood upright, high above the fires, as if leaning into the darkness. By three in the morning the chants had altered into the recitation of slokas alongside quiet drums. Ananda could hear the recitations of the Kosala-bimba-varnanāva, could also hear the night insects chirping beside the paths of light that radiated from the statue, like spokes into the fields, leading to bonfires where children and mothers slept or sat waiting for morning. The drummers returned from their performance sweating in the cold dark, their feet lit by the oil lamps as they came along the paths.
The work on the statues had ended days apart, so there seemed suddenly to be two figures—one of scarred grey rock, one of white plaster—standing now in the open valley a half-mile away from each other.
Ananda was sitting in a teak chair, being dressed and painted. He was to perform the eye ceremony on the new statue. The darkness around him had removed centuries of history. In the time of the old kings, such as Parakrama Bahu, when only kings performed the ceremony, there would have been temple dancers who danced and sang the Melodies, as if this were heaven.
It was almost four-thirty when the men pulled two long bamboo ladders out of the dark fields and within the ring of bonfires lifted them against the statue. When the sun rose it would be seen that they rested on the giant figure’s shoulders. Ananda Udugama and his nephew were already climbing the ladders up into the night. Both were robed, Ananda with a turban of fine silk on his head. Both carried cloth satchels.
In the coldness of the world, halfway up, it seemed that only the fires below connected him to earth. Then, looking into the dark, he could see the dawn prizing itself up out of the horizon, emerging above the forest. The sun lit the green bamboo of the ladder. He could feel its partial warmth on his arms, saw it light the brocade costume he wore over Sarath’s cotton shirt—the one he had promised himself he would wear for this morning’s ceremony. He and the woman Anil would always carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena.
He reached the head a few minutes before the precise hour for the eye ceremony. His nephew was there, waiting for him. Ananda had climbed this ladder a day earlier and so knew he would be most comfortable and efficient two rungs from the top. He used a sash to tie himself to the ladder and then his nephew passed him the chisels and brushes. Below them the drumming stopped. The boy held up the metal mirror so that it reflected the blank stare of the statue. The eyes unformed, unable to see. And until he had eyes—always the last thing painted or sculpted—he was not the Buddha.
Ananda began to chisel. He used a coconut husk to clean the grit from the large trough he had cut, which to those below would be only a delicate line of expression. There was no talking between him and the boy. Every now and then he would lean forward into the ladder and put his arms down to let the blood back into them. But the two worked at a fast pace, because soon there would be the harshness of sunlight.
He was working on the second eye, sweating within the brocade costume though it was still just dawn heat. Only the sash held him safe on the ladder. There was plaster dust everywhere—on the cheeks and shoulders of the statue’s head, on Ananda’s clothes, on the boy. Ananda was very tired. As if all his blood had magically entered into this body. Soon, though, there would be the evolving moment when the eyes, reflected in the mirror, would see him, fall into him. The first and last look given to someone so close. After this hour the statue would be able to witness figures only from a great distance.
The boy was watching him. Ananda nodded to acknowledge he was all right. They still did not speak. He had probably about another hour to go.
The noise of his hammering stopped and there was just the wind around them, its tugs and gusts and whistles. He handed the tools to his nephew. Then he drew from a satchel the colours for the eye. He looked past the vertical line of cheek into the landscape. Pale greens, dark greens, bird movement and their nearby sounds. It was the figure of the world the statue would see forever, in rainlight and sunlight, a combustible world of weather even without the human element.
The eyes, like his at this moment, would always look north. As would the great scarred face half a mile away, which he had helped knit together from damaged stone, a statue that was no longer a god, that no longer had its graceful line but only the pure sad glance Ananda had found.
And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wing, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagola and skirting to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud. There was a girl moving in the forest. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him. Grasses being burned, bamboo, the smell of petrol and grenade. The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat. The face open-eyed in the great rainstorms of May and June. The weather formed in the temperate forests and sea, in the thorn scrub behind him in the southeast, in the deciduous hills, and moving towards the burning savanna near Badulla, and then the coast of mangroves, lagoons and river deltas. The great churning of weather above the earth.
Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him here. The eyes he had cut and focussed with his father’s chisel showed him this. The birds dove towards gaps within the trees! They flew through the shelves of heat currents. The tiniest of hearts in them beating exhausted and fast, the way Sirissa had died in the story he invented for her in the vacuum of her disappearance. A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared.
He felt the boy’s concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the doctors and nurses, archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, and members of the human rights and civil rights organizations with whom I met in Sri Lanka and in other parts of the world. This novel could not have been written without their generosity and their knowledge and experience in archaeological sites, in hospitals of chaos and dedication, in archives of terrible sadness. This book is for these people and these organizations. It is especially for Anjalendran, and Senake, and Ian Goonetileke.
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Thanks to the following for the help they gave me during the research and writing of this book: Gillian and Alwin Ratnayake, K. H. R. Karunaratne, N. P. Sumaraweera, Manel Fonseka, Suriya Wickremasinghe, Clyde Snow, Victoria Sanford, K. A. R. Kennedy, Gamini Goonetileke, Anjalendran C., Senake Bandaranayake, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Tissa Abeysekara, Jean Perera, Neil Fonseka, L. K. Karunaratne, R. L. Thambugale, Dehan Gunasekera, Ravindra Fernando, Roland Silva, Ananda Samarasingha, Deepika Udagama, Gunasiri Hewepatura, Vidyapathy Somabandu, Janaka Weeratunga, Diluni Weerasena, D. S. Liyanarachchi, Janaka Kandamby, Dominic Sansoni, Katherine Nickerson, Donya Peroff, H. Rousseau, Sara Howes, Milo Beech, David Young and Louise Dennys.
Also: the Kynsey Road Hospital, the Base Hospital Polonnaruwa, the Karapitiya General Hospital, the Nadesan Centre, the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka, Amnesty International and the Conference on Human Rights organized by the Colombo Medical Faculty and the Colombo University Centre for the Study of Human Rights in May 1996.
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The following works were invaluable in the writing of this book: The National Atlas of Sri Lanka (Survey Department, 1988); Cūlava?sa; Asiatic Art in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, ed. Pauline Scheurleer (Rijksmuseum, 1985); Bells of the Bronze Age, a documentary film produced by Archaeological Magazine; Mediaeval Sinhalese Art by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Pantheon Books, 1956), especially his writing on ‘eye ceremonies’; Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton, ed. Mehmet Yaar ?can and Kenneth A. R. Kennedy (Wiley, 1989), especially Kennedy’s work on markers of occupational stress; ‘Upper Pleistocene Fossil Hominids from Sri Lanka’ by Kennedy, Deraniyagala, Roertgen, Chiment and Disotell, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1987); Stones, Bones, and the Ancient Cities by Lawrence H. Robbins (St. Martin’s Press, 1990); pamphlets on war surgery, es-pecially “Injuries Due to Anti-Personnel Landmines in Sri Lanka” by G. Goonetileke; ‘Senarat Paranavitana as a Writer of Historical Fiction in Sanskrit’ by Ananda W. P. Guruge, Vidyodaya Journal of Social Sciences (University of Sri Jayawardenapura); Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover (Little, Brown, 1991); ‘A Note on the Ancient Hospitals of Sri Lanka’ (Department of Archaeology); ‘Restoration of a Vandalized Bodhisattva Image at Dambogoda’ by Roland Silva, Gamini Wijeysuriya and Martin Wyse (Konos Info, March 1990); P. R. C. Peterson’s memoir of his years as a doctor in Sri Lanka, Great Days! Memoirs of a Government Medical Officer of 1918, compiled and edited by Manel Fonseka; reports from Amnesty International, Asia Watch, the Commission of Human Rights.
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The epigraph is made up of two poems from the essay ‘Miner’s Folk Songs of Sri Lanka’ by Rex A. Casinander, Etnologiska Studier (Goteborg), no. 35 (1981).
The partial list of the ‘disappeared’ is drawn from Amnesty International reports.
The line by Robert Duncan is from The HD Book, chapter 6, “Rites of Participation” (Caterpillar, October 1967).
Lines from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and from Alexander Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask appear on page 54.
Italicized sentences from H. Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse (Bollingen Series XI, Princeton University Press, 1956) appear on page 56.
The italicized line on page 135 is from Plainwater by Anne Carson (Knopf, 1995).
The italicized remark on page 43 is from Great Books by David Denby (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
The remark on Jung on page 230 is by Leonora Carrington during an interview with Rosemary Sullivan.
Thank you to David Thomson for his genealogical unearthing of American western heroes.
A special thank you to Manel Fonseka.
Much forensic and medical information was also drawn from interviews with Clyde Snow in Oklahoma and Guatemala; Gamini Goonetileke in Sri Lanka; and K. A. R. Kennedy in Ithaca, New York, as well as from many persons listed above.
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Thank you to Jet Fuel. To Rick/Simon and Darren Wershler-Henry and Stan Bevington at Coach House Press. To Katherine Hourigan, Anna Jardine, Debra Helfand and Leyla Aker. Also to Ellen Levine, Gretchen Mullin and Tulin Valeri.
And finally, thanks to Ellen Seligman, Sonny Mehta, Liz Calder. And Linda, Griffin and Esta.
A Note About the Author
Michael Ondaatje is the author of three previous novels, one memoir, and eleven books of poetry. Born in Sri Lanka, he lives in Toronto.