Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,36

empty road. The motor’s hum filled the quietness, a thread in this silent world, just her and Sarath and the wounded man. Now and then a village, now and then an unmanned roadblock where they had to slow down and twist through the eye of a needle. As they passed a streetlamp Anil saw that what she was squeezing into his palms was now bloody water. Still she didn’t stop, because the movement kept him calm and awake, kept him from drifting into shock. The mutual gestures—her pull, his giving—were becoming hypnotic to both.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Gunesena.’

‘Do you live near here?’

The man rolled his head slightly, a tactful yes and no, and Anil smiled. In an hour they were within the outskirts of Colombo, and later drove into the compound of Emergency Services.

A Brother

In the operating rooms of the base hospitals in the North Central Province there were always four books in evidence: Hammon’s Analysis of 2,187 Consecutive Penetrating Wounds of the Brain in Vietnam; Gunshot Wounds by Swan and Swan; C. W. Hughes’s Arterial Repair During the Korean War; and Annals of Surgery. Doctors in the midst of an operation would have an orderly turn pages so they could skim the text while continuing surgery. After two weeks of fifteen-hour days they no longer needed assistance from books and moved with ease alongside wounds and suture techniques. But the medical texts remained, for future doctors in training.

In the doctors’ common room in a North Central Province hospital someone had left a copy of Elective Affinities among the other, more porous paperbacks. It remained there throughout the war, unread save by someone who might pick it up while waiting, consider its back-cover description, then replace it respectfully on the table with the others. These—a more popular gang that included Erle Stanley Gardner, Rosemary Rogers, James Hilton and Walter Tevis—were consumed in two or three hours, swallowed like sandwiches on the run. Anything to direct your thoughts away from a war.

The buildings that made up the hospital had been erected at the turn of the century. It had been managed in a lackadaisical way before the exaggeration of war. In the grass courtyard, signs from a more innocent time would last throughout the waves of violence. Half-dead soldiers who wished for sun and fresh air rested there and ate morphine tablets beside a BETEL CHEWING IS PROHIBITED sign.

The victims of ‘intentional violence’ had started appearing in March 1984. They were nearly all male, in their twenties, damaged by mines, grenades, mortar shells. The doctors on duty put down The Queen’s Gambit or The Tea Planter’s Bride and began arresting the haemorrhages. They removed metal and stone from lungs, sutured lacerated chests. In one of the hospital texts that the young doctor Gamini read was a sentence he became excessively fond of: In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary.

During the first two years of the war more than three hundred casualties were brought in as a result of explosions. Then the weapons improved and the war in the north-central province got worse. The guerrillas had international weaponry smuggled into the country by arms dealers, and they also had homemade bombs.

The doctors saved the lives first, then the limbs. There were mostly grenade injuries. An antipersonnel mine the size of an inkwell would destroy most of a person’s feet. Wherever there was a base hospital in the country, new villages sprang up nearby. There was a need for rehabilitation programmes, and the making of what came to be known as the ‘Jaipur Limb.’ In Europe a new artificial foot cost 2,500 pounds. Here the Jaipur Limb was made for 30 pounds—cheaper because Asian victims could walk without a shoe.

The hospital would run out of painkillers during the first week of any offensive. You were without self in those times, lost among the screaming. You held on to any kind of order—the smell of Savlon antiseptic that was used to wash floors and walls, the ‘children’s injection room’ with its nursery murals. The older purpose of a hospital continued alongside the war. When Gamini finished surgery in the middle of the night, he walked through the compound into the east buildings, where the sick children were. The mothers were always there. Sitting on stools, they rested their upper torso and head on their child’s bed and slept holding the small hands. There were not too many fathers around then. He watched the children, who were unaware of their parents’ arms.