Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,34

the outline of ducks on either side of his sentence. In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears. It has already become an old legend. But the girl who stood waist-deep and cut it into rock in the last week of Palipana’s dying life and carried him into the water beside it and placed his hand against it in the slop of the water was not old. He nodded, remembering the words. And now he would remain by the water and each morning the girl undressed and climbed down against the wall of submerged rock and banged and chiselled, so that in the last days of his life he was accompanied by the great generous noise of her work as if she were speaking out loud. Just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake.

He had handed Lakma his old, weathered spectacles, and in the end, after she had sewn his notebooks into his clothing, she would take only this talisman of these glasses with her when she went into the forest.

*

But that night, with the two strangers on the ambalama, the girl could sense the restlessness of Anil, as clear to her as Sarath’s beedi brightening now and then in the dark. Palipana sat up and Lakma knew he would speak, as if there had been no half-hour pause.

‘The man I mentioned, the artist, there was tragedy in his life. Now he works in the gem pits, goes down into them four or five days a week. An arrack drinker, I’ve heard. It is not safe to be with him underground. Maybe he’s still there. He was the craftsman who painted eyes—as his father and grandfather did. An inherited talent, though I think he was the best of the three. I think he’s the one you should find. You will have to pay him.’

Anil said, ‘Pay him for what?’

‘To rebuild the head,’ Sarath murmured in the darkness.

They set out for Colombo the next day, although neither of them wished to leave the spell of the old man and his forest site. They waited for the cool of sundown and left when Palipana and the girl walked towards the ambalama to sleep. An hour south of Matale, the car took a corner and Sarath saw the lights of a truck coming towards them. He braked hard and the car shuddered and skidded on the macadam. Then he saw it was not moving; the truck was parked on the road facing them, its headlights on.

He released the brake and they drifted slowly forward. She had been asleep and now she put her head out the window. There was a man lying on the road in front of the truck. Spread-eagled on his back. The truck was immense above him, the glare of its lights shot beams ahead, but the man was below them in darkness. He was shirtless, his bare feet pointed up saucily, his arms out. Their fear was followed by the humour of it all. Everything was quiet around them as their car crept past. Not even a dog barking. No cicadas. The motor of the truck turned off.

‘Is he the driver?’ She whispered it, not wanting to break the silence.

‘This is how they sometimes sleep, take a short rest. Simply stop in the wrong lane, leave the lights on, and stretch out on the road for half an hour or so. Or he could just be drunk.’

They drove on, Anil now fully awake, leaning with her back to the door so she could face Sarath as he spoke, hardly audible in the wind rushing into the windows. As an archaeologist he always travelled on night roads, more since his wife died, he said. There would be two trips every week—up to Puttalam or to the south coast. He accompanied teams of students puttering along the bunds of prawn farms for ancient village sites or he went to oversee the restoration of a stone bridge in Anuradhapura.

They were just south of Ambepussa and would reach the outskirts of Colombo in an hour. ‘When I was young, my father took bets with us—how many drunks we’d see sleeping by trucks, how many dogs we’d pass. A bonus if we saw a dog with a sleeping man. Or sometimes it would be a group of three or four dogs in the moon shadow of

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