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Intro
The Human Rights Centre in Geneva has sent Anil, in her role as a forensic pathologist, on a seven-month trip to her home country of Sri Lanka to investigate potential human rights abuses—particularly those carried out by the Sri Lankan government—during the country’s civil war. Anil was born and raised in Sri Lanka but left the country when she was 18 and hasn’t been back in 15 years. In those intervening years, her parents have died in a car crash, and her only sibling, a brother, has moved out of the country.
In Anil’s first days in Sri Lanka, she meets Sarath, an anthropologist sent by the government to work alongside her during her investigations. Anil isn’t sure whether to trust Sarath or not, but because the government has sent him, Anil feels like she has no choice but to accept his presence. When Anil accompanies Sarath to the makeshift lab where they’ll be working aboard a docked ship, she notices that some of the skeletons that Sarath has gathered, which are ostensibly from ancient burial grounds, appear to have been buried more recently. Anil asks if they can visit the site where Sarath exhumed the skeletons, and Sarath says he’ll work on getting a permit to do so.
Sarath acquires the permit, and he and Anil travel to Bandarawela, where he found the supposedly ancient skeletons. They investigate the burial site and find three skeletons that seem to have been buried in the 6th century. The fourth skeleton they find, though, appears to have been buried much more recently, perhaps within the past 10 years, and it appears that the skeleton was buried somewhere else first and then transported to this new site. Sarath and Anil begin referring to that skeleton as Sailor. When investigating further, Anil finds what appear to be bullet holes in Sailor’s bones. Because the site where they found Sailor is a restricted government zone, they believe that if they can uncover the mystery of Sailor’s death and reburial, they may uncover concrete evidence linking the government to war crimes and extrajudicial killings.
As Sarath and Anil continue to investigate, Sarath warns Anil that she must not be too zealous in her pursuit of the truth. If Anil runs afoul of the government, Sarath cautions, there’s no telling what the government might do. He decides that he and Anil need help with their continuing investigation, so he decides that they should meet with his former mentor, Palipana.
Palipana was a once-revered anthropologist in Sri Lanka who fell into disgrace after concerns arose that he fabricated some of his findings in a blockbuster academic article. Palipana now lives an ascetic life at a monastery. Anil and Sarath travel to see Palipana and seek guidance about how to identify Sailor. Palipana says that if they could recreate Sailor’s face, they might be able to find someone who recognizes that face and could identify Sailor. With that goal in mind, Palipana advises Sarath and Anil to track down Ananda, a man who once specialized in ceremonially painting the eyes of statues of the Buddha but has since fallen on hard times and now works in a gem mine.
When Anil and Sarath leave the monastery, as they drive back to Colombo, they come across a man whose hands have been nailed to the pavement. Anil and Sarath work to free the man, whose name is Gunesena, and they then take him to an emergency room in Colombo where Sarath’s brother, Gamini, works as a doctor.
After making sure that Gunesena is okay, Anil and Sarath leave Colombo and head south, where they believe Sailor may have been initially buried. On the way, they stop to speak with Ananda. Ananda initially refuses to go with them but eventually changes his mind and decides to help.
The three then travel to a town in the south called Ekneligoda. There, Ananda works tirelessly to reconstruct Sailor’s face. As he works, Anil has a breakthrough and concludes that Sailor, like Ananda, must have spent time working in mines. When Ananda finishes reconstructing Sailor’s face, both Anil and Sarath are struck by how peaceful the expression of the reconstruction is. Sarath explains that Ananda wants to grant peace to the dead because his wife, Sirissa, disappeared years ago during a massacre.
Sarath begins bringing Sailor’s reconstructed face to nearby towns to see if anyone recognizes it. One night, Anil hears a sound coming from Ananda’s room. When she opens Ananda’s door, she sees him stabbing himself in the neck with a knife. She intervenes, and Sarath comes not much later. Sarath then brings Ananda to a hospital, where the doctor says Ananda will recover.
Sarath and Anil then continue their search for Sailor’s identity. At the third mine they visit, someone identifies Sailor. Sailor’s true name is Ruwan, and he worked as a toddy tapper—or someone who makes a kind of fermented drink from palm trees—before he broke his leg in a fall and went to work in a graphite mine.
Now that they know Sailor’s identity, Sarath says that he can return to Colombo to see if Sailor’s name appears in any government lists of undesirables. After Sarath leaves for Colombo, though, Anil becomes suspicious of Sarath’s motives. She contacts a man named Dr. Perera, who once knew Anil’s father. With Dr. Perera’s help, Anil returns to Colombo the next day. When she arrives, she gives a presentation to government officials, accusing the government of murdering hundreds of innocent people in Sri Lanka. Unbeknownst to Anil, Sarath is in the back of the room listening.
After Anil makes her allegations, Sarath rises from his seat and begins to poke holes in her theories and asks her why she doesn’t have a skeleton that proves what she’s saying. Anil says that someone stole Sailor’s skeleton. Sarath then says that Anil will have 48 hours to prove her ideas using a different skeleton that the government will provide. In the meantime, Anil must hand over her notes and any recordings she has. Anil reluctantly hands over her things.
Sarath then waits outside, worrying that Anil may never make it out of the building. When she exits, he approaches her and tells her she must finish her investigation as soon as possible, preferably by the next morning. Anil is irate that Sarath betrayed her, and she argues. Sarath slaps Anil in the face, and Anil, unsure of what else to do, goes to the lab on the ship with the skeleton the government provided.
Anil is shocked when she realizes the skeleton she now has, which Sarath secured, belongs to Sailor. She is even more shocked when she finds her tape recorder in Sailor’s rib cage. When Anil plays the tape, she hears Sarath’s voice at the end, telling her that she must use Sailor’s skeleton to get all of the evidence she can against the government and leave the country by 5 a.m. the next morning. Anil heeds Sarath’s advice, gathers what evidence she needs, and leaves. However, Sarath is eventually murdered by the government because of his attempts to achieve truth and justice. His body is delivered to the morgue at the hospital where Gamini works.
Later, Ananda gets work reconstructing a statue of the Buddha that was damaged in an attempted robbery. Nearby, a new statue of the Buddha is also being constructed. When that new statue is finished, Ananda is appointed to paint the eyes on the statue. When he does, he experiences a spiritual moment before Ananda’s nephew, who is working with him, touches him on the shoulder and brings him back to the world.
