Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,16

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. To fetch a dead body: what a curious task! To cut down the corpse of an unknown hanged man and then bear the body of the animal on one’s back . . . something dead, something buried, something already rotting away? Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.

Anil bolted the door and went looking for the owner of the rest house. She requested a light dinner, then ordered a shandy and walked out onto the front verandah. There were no other guests, and the rest-house owner followed her.

‘Mr. Sarath—he always comes here?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes, madame, when he comes to Bandarawela. You live in Colombo?’

‘In North America, mostly. I used to live here.’

‘I have a son in Europe—he wishes to be an actor.’

‘I see. That’s good.’

She stepped off the polished floor of the porch into the garden. It was the politest departure from her host she could make. She didn’t feel like hesitant small-talk this evening. But once she reached the red darkness of the flamboyant tree she turned.

‘Did Mr. Sarath ever come here with his wife?’

‘Yes, madame.’

‘What was she like?’

‘She’s very nice, madame.’

A nod for proof, then a slight tilt of his head, a J stroke, to suggest possible hesitance in his own judgement.

‘Is?’

‘Yes. Madame?’

‘Even though she is dead.’

‘No, madame. I asked Mr. Sarath this afternoon and he said she is well. Not dead. He said she said to give me her wishes.’

‘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