Anil’s Ghost: 6. Between Heartbeats Summary & Analysis

Before returning to Sri Lanka, when Anil worked in Arizona, she worked with a woman named Leaf, who became Anil’s closest friend. The two often watched Hollywood movies together, and one movie in particular struck Anil. In that movie, a character named Cherry Valance was shot at the end. Anil and Leaf debated whether the man would have survived or not, as the movie did not make his fate clear. At one point, Anil and Leaf also wrote a letter to the director of a different movie, titled Point Blank, to ask, as forensic pathologists, where the actor Lee Marvin had been shot to try and verify if he would have died from his wound.

In the last year that Gamini works in the northeast of Sri Lanka, he works in a hospital at Polonnaruwa. To meet needs, all the doctors work on a variety of cases, regardless of their specialties. One day, when Gamini is preparing to do heart surgery on a young boy with another doctor named Fonseka, he (Gamini) hears that a village has been attacked. He goes forward with surgery on the boy and makes Fonseka stay even after the victims of the massacre begin arriving at the hospital. The surgery ends up taking six hours, though Gamini lets Fonseka leave after three hours. After Fonseka leaves, a nurse assists Gamini. Gamini is struck by the nurse’s facility in performing aspects of the surgery, and Gamini advises her to become a doctor. 

After Gamini finishes the surgery, he attends to people who have been wounded in the attack, including nine-month-old twins who have each been shot through the hand and in the right leg. The evil astounds Gamini. Ultimately, 30 people die in the massacre. Months later, Gamini sees the nurse who assisted him with the boy’s heart surgery. She tells him that she was transferred but then chose to return.

The nurse then says that she has seen the boy whom they operated on that day. His parents have renamed the boy Gamini in honor of Gamini. Gamini is deeply moved, and he also realizes how isolated he has become. In the next months, Gamini spends more time with another doctor, named Lakdasa. He feels as if he is falling in love with her, but nothing romantic happens between them. A year later, after returning to Colombo, he meets his wife, Chrishanti.

An italicized section then describes Anil and Gamini riding on a train together. Gamini says that “she” should have loved him but doesn’t tell Anil that he means that Sarath’s wife should have loved him (Gamini) instead of Sarath. Anil asks Gamini who he’s talking about, but Gamini won’t say. Gamini then explains that he was at the hospital when Sarath’s wife was brought in after she drank lye to kill herself. Gamini gave her painkillers but tried to ensure that she was lucid so that he could speak with her. But when they spoke, Sarath’s wife seemed to turn from him in disgust. By the end of the conversation, Anil realizes that Gamini has been speaking about Sarath’s wife the entire time, and she (Anil) is shocked to learn that Gamini was in love with her.

In the past, while Anil was still working in Arizona, Leaf left. Anil didn’t hear from Leaf for six months and was hurt. After Anil went to Europe, Leaf called and asked Anil to come visit her in New Mexico. There, Leaf said that, even though she seemed too young to have Alzheimer’s, she has developed the disease. She said that she had it as a result of having encephalitis as a child. Anil then asked Leaf who shot Cherry Valance (a character from a movie they used to watch together) as a way to try and engage Leaf’s memory. Leaf couldn’t remember who shot Cherry Valance, though, and Anil then tells her that John Wayne shot Cherry Valance.  

In Sri Lanka, in the present, in Ekneligoda, Anil asks Sarath why he became an archaeologist. Sarath recalls a trip he took to China early in his career. During that trip, he and the team he worked with discovered stone slabs buried in the ground, which turned out to be the roof of a burial ground. They then found the bodies of 20 women buried in the 5th century BCE. Anil speculates that the women were poisoned. Sarath explains that in the burial grounds, they found a plethora of musical instruments, including dozens of bells. At one point, they arranged for all of the bells to be played for the archaeologists to hear. Sarath says that it was perhaps those bells that made him into an archaeologist. 

Anil then tells Sarath that a man once fell in love with her before he met her because he had heard her laugh on a tape recording. Anil is referring to Cullis. She then thinks about Cullis and their relationship. She recalls that before she left for Sri Lanka, she had considered giving Cullis a phone and fax number where he could reach her. Ultimately, though, she decided against it and decided to leave their relationship in the past.