Anil's Ghost

  ‘I must have been mistaken.’

  ‘Yes, madame.’

  ‘She comes with him on his trips?’

  ‘Sometimes she comes. She does radio programmes. Sometimes his cousin comes. He’s a minister in the government.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘No, madame. I think he came only once. Is prawn curry all right?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  To avoid further conversation, during her meal she pretended to be looking over her notes. She thought about Sarath’s marriage. It was difficult to imagine him as a married man. She was already used to him in the role of a widower, with a silent presence around him. Well, she thought, night falls and you need company. A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.

  After dinner she returned to the room where the skeletons were. She didn’t want to sleep yet. She didn’t want to think about the minister who had come with Sarath to Bandarawela. The dim lights didn’t give her enough voltage to read by so she found an oil lamp and lit it. Earlier, she had come across the rest house’s one-shelf library. Agatha Christie. P. G. Wodehouse. Enid Blyton. John Masters. The usual suspects in any Asian library. She had read most of them as a child or as a teenager. Instead she leafed through her own copy of Bridges’s World Soils. Anil knew Bridges like the back of her hand, but she was processing the text now towards her present situation, and as she read she sensed she was leaving the others, the four skeletons, in the darkness.

  She was in the chair, her head down towards her thighs, fast asleep, when Sarath woke her.

  . . .

  He touched her shoulder, then pulled the earphones off her hair and put them on his head, pressing the start button to hear cello suites that sewed everything together as he walked around the room.

  A swallow, as if she were coming up for air.

  ‘You didn’t lock the door.’

  ‘No. Is everything okay?’

  ‘Everything’s here. I arranged for a breakfast. It’s already late.’

  ‘I’m up.’

  ‘There’s a shower out back.’

  ‘I don’t feel good. I’m coming down with something.’

  ‘If we have to we can break the journey back to Colombo.’

  She went out carrying her Dr. Bronner’s, with which she travelled all over the world. The anthropologist’s soap! She was still half asleep in the shower. Her toes nestled against a piece of rough granite, cold water gushing down onto her hair.

  She washed her face, rubbing the peppermint soap on her closed eyelids, then rinsing it off. When she looked over the plantain leaves at shoulder level into the distance she could see the blue mountains beyond, the out-of-focus world, beautiful.

  But by noon she was encased in a terrible headache.

  *

  She was feverish in the back seat of the van, and Sarath decided to stop halfway back to Colombo. Whatever sickness she had was like an animal in her, leading her from sudden shivers to sweat.

  Then, sometime past midnight, she was in a room that was on the edge of the sea. She had never liked the south coast around Yala, not as a child, not now. The trees appeared to have been grown only for the purpose of shade. Even the moon seemed like a compound light.

  At dinner she had been delirious, almost in tears. Sarath appeared to be a hundred miles away across the table. One of them was shouting unnecessarily. She was hungry but couldn’t chew, not even her favourite prawn curry. She just kept spooning the soft lukewarm dhal into her mouth, then drinking lime juice. In the afternoon she had woken to a thumping noise. She managed to climb out of bed and looked down the open-air passageway and saw monkeys disappearing around the far corner of the hall. She believed what she saw. She took capsules every four hours to keep away headaches. This was sunstroke or dengue fever or malaria. When they got back to Colombo she would have tests done. ‘It’s the sun,’ Sarath murmured. ‘I’ll buy you a bigger hat. I’ll buy you a bigger hat. I’ll buy you a bigger hat.’ He was always whispering. She kept saying, What? What? Could hardly bother to say it. Were there monkeys? Monkeys were stealing towels and swimming trunks off the laundry lines during the afternoons while everyone slept. She prayed the hotel wouldn’t turn off the generator. She couldn’t face the thought of no fan or shower to cool her down. All that worked was the telephone. She was expecting a call in the night.

  When dinner was over she took the carafe of lime juice and ice to her room and fell asleep immediately. She woke at eleven and took more pills to blanket the headache she knew would return soon. Clothes wet from perspiration. To perspire. To aspire. Discuss. The fan was hardly moving, air didn’t even reach her arms. Where was Sailor? She hadn’t thought about him. She rolled over in the dark and dialed Sarath’s room number. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sailor.’

  ‘He’s safe. In the van. Remember?’

  ‘No, I—Is that safe?’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  She hung up, making certain the phone was cradled properly, and lay there in the dark. Wanting air. When she opened the curtains she saw light spraying off the compound pole. There were people on the dark sand preparing boats. If she turned on the lamp she would look like a fish in an aquarium to them.

  She left her room. She needed a book to keep her awake till the phone call came. In the alcove she stared at the shelves for a while, grabbed two books and scurried back to her room. In Search of Gandhi, by Richard Attenborough, and a life of Frank Sinatra. She drew the curtains, turned on the light and peeled off her damp clothes. In the shower she put her hair under the cold water and leaned against a corner of the stall, just letting the coolness lull her. She needed someone, Leaf perhaps, to sing along with her. One of those dialogue songs they were always singing together in Arizona . . .

  She dragged herself out and sat at the foot of the bed, wet. She was hot but couldn’t open the curtains. It would have meant putting on clothes. She began reading. When she got bored she switched to the other book, and was soon carrying a larger and larger cast of characters in her head. The light was bad. She remembered Sarath had told her the one essential thing he always took on any trip out of Colombo was a sixty-watt bulb. She crawled across the bed and called him. ‘Can I use your lightbulb? It’s a rotten light here.’

  ‘I’ll bring it.’

  They taped down sheets from the Sunday Observer so the pages covered the floor. You have the felt pen? Yes. She began removing her clothes, her back to him, then lay down next to the skeleton of Sailor. She was wearing just her red knickers, silk ones she usually put on with irony. She hadn’t imagined them for public consumption. She looked up at the ceiling, her hands on her breasts. Her body felt good against the hard floor, the coolness of the polished concrete through the newspaper, the same firmness she had felt as a child sleeping on mats.

  He was using the felt marker to trace her shape. You will have to put your arms down for a moment. She could feel the pen move around her hands and alongside her waist, then down her legs, both sides, so he linked the blue lines at the base of her heels.

  She rose out of the outline, turned back and saw he had drawn outlines of the four skeletons as well.

  There was a knocking and she roused herself. She hadn’t moved. All evening she kept discovering herself stilled, unable to think. Even reading she’d gotten entangled sleepily in the arms of paragraphs that wouldn’t let her go. Something about the phrasing of Ava Gardner’s complaint about Sinatra held her. Wrapped in a sheet she opened the door. Sarath passed her the bulb and disappeared from sight. He had been in a shirt and sarong. She was going to ask him to . . . She pulled the table to the centre of the room, switched the light off. She used the sheet to unscrew the hot bulb. She feared wild electricity somewhere in the wire. She could hear the noise of the waves outside. With effort she lifted her head and screwed the bulb Sarath had brought into the socket. Everything was sudden
ly heavy and slowed down.

  She lay flat on the bed, cold once more, shivering, a moan in her mouth. She rummaged through her bag and found two small bottles of scotch she had taken from the plane. Sarath had taken off her clothes and traced her outline. Had he done that?

  The telephone rang. It was America. A woman’s voice.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Leaf? God it’s you! You got my message.’

  ‘You’ve picked up an accent already.’

  ‘No, I— Is this a legal call?’

  ‘Your voice is all up and down.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you okay, Anil?’

  ‘I’m sick. It’s very late. No, no. It’s fine. I’ve been waiting for you. It’s just I’m sick and it makes me feel even further away from everybody. Leaf? Are you well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me. How well?’

  There was silence. ‘I’m not remembering. I’m forgetting your face.’

  Anil could hardly breathe. She turned from the phone to wipe her cheek on the pillow. ‘Are you there? Leaf?’ She heard the noise of great distances on the line between them. ‘Is your sister with you?’

  ‘My sister?’ Leaf said.

  ‘Leaf, listen, remember—who killed Cherry Valance?’

  Crackle and silence as she held the phone tight to her ear.

  In the next room Sarath had his eyes open, unable to escape the sound of Anil’s weeping.

  *

  Sarath reached his hand across the breakfast plates and held Anil’s wrist. His thumb on her pulse. ‘We’ll get to Colombo this afternoon. We can work on the skeleton in the ship lab.’

  ‘And keep the skeleton with us, whatever happens,’ she said.

  ‘We keep all four. A unit. A disguise. We claim they’re all ancient. Your fever is down.’

  She pulled her hand away. ‘I’ll remove a chip from Sailor’s heel—to have a private ID.’

  ‘If we take more pollen and earth samples, we can find out where he was buried first. Then do the study on the boat.’

  ‘There’s a woman who has been working on pupae around here,’ Anil said. ‘I read an article. I’m sure she was from Colombo. It was a very good junior thesis.’

  He looked at her quizzically. ‘Don’t know. Try the young faculty when you’re at the hospital.’

  They sat facing each other in silence.

  ‘I said to my girlfriend Leaf before I came here, Perhaps I’ll meet the man who is going to ruin me. Can I trust you?’

  ‘You have to trust me.’

  They were at the Mutwal docks in Colombo by early evening. She helped him carry the four skeletons into the lab on board the Oronsay.

  ‘Take tomorrow off,’ he said. ‘I have to find more equipment, so I’ll need a day.’

  Anil remained on the ship after he left, wanting to work for a while. She walked down the stairs and entered the lab, picked up the metal pole they kept by the door and began banging on the walls. Scurrying. Eventually the darkness was silent. She struck a match and walked with it held out in front of her. She pulled down the lever of the generator and soon there was a shaky hum and electricity emerged slowly into the room.

  She sat there watching him. The fever was starting to leave and she was feeling lighter. She began to examine the skeleton again under sulphur light, summarizing the facts of his death so far, the permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy. One forearm broken. Partial burning. Vertebrae damage in the neck. The possibility of a small bullet wound in the skull. Entrance and exit.

  She could read Sailor’s last actions by knowing the wounds on bone. He puts his arms up over his face to protect himself from the blow. He is shot with a rifle, the bullet going through his arm, then into the neck. While he’s on the ground, they come up and kill him.

  Coup de grace. The smallest, cheapest bullet. A .22’s path that her ballpoint pen could slide through. Then they attempt to set fire to him and begin to dig his grave in this burning light.

  Anil entered Kynsey Road Hospital and passed the sign by the chief medical officer’s door.

  Let conversations cease.

  Let laughter flee.

  This is the place where Death

  Delights to help the living.

  It was printed in Latin, Sinhala and English. Once in the laboratory, where she worked now and then in order to use better equipment, she could relax, alone in the large room. God, she loved a lab. The stools always had a slight rake so you sat in a lean. There would always be that earnest tilt forward. On the perimeter, along the walls, were the bottles that held beet-coloured liquids. She could walk around the table watching a body from the corner of her eye, then sit on the stool and time would be forgotten. No hunger or thirst or desire for a friend or lover’s company. Just an awareness of someone in the distance hammering a floor, banging through ancient concrete with a mallet as if to reach the truth.

  She stood against the table and it nestled into her hipbones. She slid her fingers along the dark wood to feel for any grain of sand, any chip or crumb or stickiness. In her solitude. Her arms dark as the table, no jewellery except the bangle that would click as she lay her wrist down gently. No other sound as Anil thought through the silence in front of her.

  These buildings were her home. In the five or six houses of her adult life, her rule and habit was always to live below her means. She had never bought a house and kept her rented apartments sparse. Though in her present rooms in Colombo there was a small pool cut into the floor for floating flowers. It was a luxury to her. Something to confuse a thief in the dark. At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.

  She knew herself to be, and was known to others as, a determined creature. Her name had not always been Anil. She had been given two entirely inappropriate names and very early began to desire ‘Anil,’ which was her brother’s unused second name. She had tried to buy it from him when she was twelve years old, offering to support him in all family arguments. He would not commit himself to the trade though he knew she wanted the name more than anything else.

  Her campaign had caused anger and frustration within the household. She stopped responding when called by either of her given names, even at school. In the end her parents relented, but then they had to persuade her irritable brother to forfeit his second name. He, at fourteen, claimed he might need it someday. Two names gave him more authority, and a second name suggested perhaps an alternative side to his nature. Also there was his grandfather. Neither of the children had in fact known the grandfather whose name it had been. The parents threw their hands up and finally the siblings worked out a trade between them. She gave her brother one hundred saved rupees, a pen set he had been eyeing for some time, a tin of fifty Gold Leaf cigarettes she had found, and a sexual favour he had demanded in the last hours of the impasse.

  After that she allowed no other first names on her passports or school reports or application forms. Later when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that name and the joy of getting it that she remembered most. Everything about the name pleased her, its slim, stripped-down quality, its feminine air, even though it was considered a male name. Twenty years later she felt the same about it. She’d hunted down the desired name like a specific lover she had seen and wanted, tempted by nothing else along the way.

  Anil recalled the nineteenth-century air of the city she had left behind. The prawn sellers holding out their wares to passing traffic on Duplication Road, the houses in Colombo Seven painted that meticulous flat white. This was where the old money and the politically powerful lived. ‘Heaven . . . Colombo Seven . . .’ her father would sing, to the tune of ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ as he let Anil thread his cuff links into his shirtsleeves while he dressed for dinner. There was always this whisp
ering pact between them. And she knew that no matter what time he returned home from dances or other engagements or emergency operations, he would drive her to her dawn swimming practice the next morning, through the empty streets towards the Otters Club. On the drive home they would pause at a stall for a bowl of milk and sugar hoppers, each wrapped in a shiny page from an English magazine.

  Even during the monsoon months, at six in the morning she would run from the car through heavy rain and dive into the pocked water and swim her heart out for an hour. Just ten girls and the coach, the noise of the rain clattering on the tin roofs of cars, on the hard water and the taut rubber bathing caps as the swimmers sloshed, turned and emerged again, while a handful of parents read the Daily News. All real effort and energy when she was a kid seemed to have happened by seven-thirty in the morning. She kept that habit in the West, studying for two or three hours before going off to classes at medical school. In some ways her later obsessive tunneling toward discovery was similar to that underwater world, where she swam within the rhythm of intense activity, as if peering through time.

  So in spite of Sarath’s suggestion the day before that she sleep in, Anil had breakfasted and was already on her way to Kynsey Road Hospital by six in the morning. The eternal prawn sellers were there on the side of the road, holding out last night’s catch. The smell of hemp idled in the air from ropes lit outside cigarette stalls. She had always veered towards this smell as a child, loitered beside it. Suddenly, and she didn’t know why, she recalled the schoolgirls of Ladies’ College on a balcony looking down at the boys from St. Thomas’s, cads all of them, singing as many verses as they could of ‘The Good Ship Venus’ before the matron chased them off the grounds.