Anil’s Ghost

This was the place of a complete crime. Heads separated from bodies. Hands broken off. None of the bodies remained—all the statuary had been removed in the few years following its discovery by Japanese archaeologists in 1918, the Bodhisattvas quickly bought up by museums in the West. Three torsos in a museum in California. A head lost in a river south of the Sind desert, adjacent to the pilgrim routes.

The Royal Afterlife.

There had been continual emergency from 1983 onwards, racial attacks and political killings. The terrorism of the separatist guerrilla groups, who were fighting for a homeland in the north. The insurrection of the insurgents in the south, against the government. The counterterrorism of the special forces against both of them. The disposal of bodies by fire. The disposal of bodies in rivers or the sea. The hiding and then reburial of corpses.

It was a Hundred Years’ War with modern weaponry, and backers on the sidelines in safe countries, a war sponsored by gun- and drug-runners. It became evident that political enemies were secretly joined in financial arms deals. ‘The reason for war was war.’

‘You know, I’d believe your arguments more if you lived here,’ he said. ‘You can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave.’

‘You want me to censor myself.’

‘I want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you’ll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame.’

‘You have a hang-up about journalists, don’t you.’

‘That’s how we get seen in the West. It’s different here, dangerous. Sometimes law is on the side of power not truth.’

A paranoid is someone with all the facts, the joke went. Maybe this was the only truth here.

In the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection for the self.

In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures who fought would consume themselves. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.

And who was this skeleton? In this room, among these four, she was hiding among the unhistorical dead […] Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.

‘Well, kings also caused trouble in those days,’ he said. ‘Even then there was nothing to believe in with certainty. They still didn’t know what truth was. We have never had the truth. Not even with your work on bones.’

‘We use the bone to search for it. “The truth shall set you free.” I believe that.’

‘Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.’

This was when he stopped believing in man’s rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one’s land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of those motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no worse and no better than the enemy. He believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.

‘Anyway, these guys who are setting off the bombs are who the Western press calls freedom fighters. . . . And you want to investigate the government?’

‘There are innocent Tamils in the south being killed too,’ Sarath said. ‘Terrible killings. You should read the reports.’

‘I get the reports.’ Gamini laid his head back. It was resting against her thigh but he seemed unaware of this. ‘We’re all fucked, aren’t we. We don’t know what to do about it. We just throw ourselves into it. Just no more high horses, please. This is a war on foot.’

Driving with Sarath once. He asked, ‘Is your tape recorder off?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘There are at least two unauthorized places of detention in Colombo. One of the locations is off Havelock Road in Kollupitiya. Some of those picked up are there for a month, but the torture itself doesn’t last that long. Most can be broken within an hour. Most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen.’

‘Is your tape recorder off?’ he had said. ‘Yes, it’s off.’ And only then had he talked.

‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear….’

‘We were caught in the middle. It was like being in a room with three suitors, all of whom had blood on their hands. In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another.’

Half the world, it felt, was being buried, the truth hidden by fear, while the past revealed itself in the light of a burning rhododendron bush.

Anil would not understand this old and accepted balance. Sarath knew that for her the journey was in getting to the truth. But what would the truth bring them into? It was a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol. Sarath had seen truth broken into suitable pieces and used by the foreign press alongside irrelevant photographs. A flippant gesture towards Asia that might lead, as a result of this information, to new vengeance and slaughter. There were dangers in handing truth to an unsafe city around you. As an archaeologist Sarath believed in truth as a principle. That is, he would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Secrets turn powerless in the open air.’

‘Political secrets are not powerless, in any form,’ he said.

‘But the tension and danger around them, one can make them evaporate. You’re an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones and sediment.’

‘It’s in character and nuance and mood.’

‘That is what governs us in our lives, that’s not the truth.’

‘For the living it is the truth,’ he quietly said.

‘What I wish to report is that some government forces have possibly murdered innocent people. This is what you are hearing from me. You as an archaeologist should believe in the truth of history.’

‘I believe in a society that has peace, Miss Tissera. What you are proposing could result in chaos. Why do you not investigate the killing of government officers?’

At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for the place. ‘But I could never leave here,’ Gamini had whispered.

‘American movies, English books—remember how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’

The woman Anil had said, that night on Galle Face Green, ‘I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.’

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.

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.