Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,3

Lights were coming on here and there in the small shops. She leaned forward. ‘Some cigarettes, please.’ They swerved to a halt against the pavement and the driver yelled towards a shop. A man came into the rain with three different kinds of cigarettes and she picked out the Gold Leaf package and paid him. They took off again.

Suddenly Anil was glad to be back, the buried senses from childhood alive in her. The application she had made to the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, when a call had gone out for a forensic anthropologist to go to Sri Lanka, had originally been halfhearted. She did not expect to be chosen, because she had been born on the island, even though she now travelled with a British passport. And it seemed somewhat unlikely that human rights specialists would be allowed in at all. Over the years complaints from Amnesty International and other civil rights groups had been sent to Switzerland and resided there, glacierlike. President Katugala claimed no knowledge of organized campaigns of murder on the island. But under pressure, and to placate trading partners in the West, the government eventually made the gesture of an offer to pair local officials with outside consultants, and Anil Tissera was chosen as the Geneva organization’s forensic specialist, to be teamed with an archaeologist in Colombo. It was to be a seven-week project. Nobody at the Centre for Human Rights was very hopeful about it.

As she entered the Archaeological Offices she heard his voice.

‘So—you are the swimmer!’ A broad-chested man in his late forties was approaching her casually, with his hand out. She hoped this wasn’t Mr. Sarath Diyasena, but it was.

‘The swimming was a long time ago.’

‘Still . . . I may have seen you at Mount Lavinia.’

‘How?’

‘I went to school at St. Thomas’s. Right there. Of course I’m a bit older than you are.’

‘Mr. Diyasena . . . let’s not mention swimming again, okay? A lot of blood under the bridge since then.’

‘Right. Right,’ he said in a drawl she would become familiar with, a precise and time-stalling mannerism in him. It was like the Asian Nod, which included in its almost circular movement the possibility of a no. Sarath Diyasena’s ‘Right,’ spoken twice, was an official and hesitant agreement for courtesy’s sake but included the suggestion that things were on hold.

She smiled at him, wanting to get over the fact that they had managed to clash in their first few sentences. ‘A true pleasure to meet you. I’ve read several of your papers.’

‘Of course I’m in the wrong era for you. But I know most of the locations at least. . . .’

‘Do you think we can get a breakfast?’ she asked as they walked towards his car.

‘Are you married? Got a family?’

‘Not married. Not a swimmer.’

‘Right.’

‘The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies—one in the north, two in the south—using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are. I am just an archaeologist. This pairing by your commission and the government was not my idea—a forensic pathologist, an archaeologist, odd pairing, if you want my opinion. What we’ve got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerrilla separatists. Murders committed by all sides.’

‘I couldn’t tell who was worst. The reports are terrible.’

He ordered another tea and looked at the food that had arrived. She had specifically asked for curd and jaggery. When they were finished he said, ‘Come. I’ll take you to the ship. Let me show you where we will work. . . .’

The Oronsay, a passenger liner in the old days of the Orient Line, had been gutted of all valuable machinery and luxury furnishings. It had once travelled between Asia and England—from Colombo to Port Said, sliding through the narrow-gauge waters of the Suez Canal and journeying