on to Tilbury Docks. By the 1970s it made just local trips. The rooms of tourist class were broken apart to become a cargo hold. Tea, fresh water, rubber products and rice replaced difficult passengers, save for a few souls, such as nephews of shareholders of the shipping line looking for work and adventure. It remained a ship of the Orient, a vessel that could survive the heat of Asia, that still contained the smells of salt water, rust and oil, and the waft of tea in cargo.
For the last three years the Oronsay had been berthed permanently in an unused quay at the north end of Colombo harbour. The grand ship had now become essentially part of the land and was being used by Kynsey Road Hospital as a storage and work area. With limited lab space in the hospitals in Colombo, a section of the transformed liner was to be Sarath and Anil’s base.
They left Reclamation Street and walked up the gangplank.
She struck a match, and in the dark hold, light focussed and spilled up her arm. She saw the cotton thread of ‘protection’ on her left wrist, and then the match went out. In the month since the raksha bandhana had been tied on during a friend’s pirith ceremony it had lost its rose colour. When she pulled on a rubber glove in the laboratory, the thread was even paler under it, as if within ice.
Next to her Sarath turned on a torch he had located during the flare of her match, and they both moved forward behind the spoke of twitching light, towards the metal wall. When they reached it he banged hard with the flat of his hand and they heard movement in the room beyond, the scurrying of rats. He banged again, and again there were sounds of movement. She murmured, ‘Like a man and a woman scrambling out of bed when his wife comes home,’ then stopped. Anil didn’t know him well enough to taunt the structure of marriages. She was about to add, Honey, I’m home.
Honey, I’m home, she would say, crouching beside a corpse to ascertain the hour of death. The phrase came out caustic or tender, depending on her mood, mostly in a whisper as she put her hand out and held her palm a millimetre over the flesh to take in its body heat. Its. Not his or hers anymore.
‘Bang it once more,’ she asked him.
‘I’ll use the claw hammer.’ This time the metallic noise echoed into the dark space, and when it died down everything became silent.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘I’ll light a sulphur lamp.’ But Anil had worked in night quarries alongside sulphur brightness, or in basements made naked by it. The porous light revealed a large room, the remnants of a toppled saloon counter in the corner, behind which she later would find a chandelier. This was to be their storage space and work lab, claustrophobic, the odour of Lysol in the air.
She noticed Sarath had already begun using the space to store some of his archaeological findings. There were rock and bone fragments wrapped in clear plastic all over the floor, crates roped tight. Well, she hadn’t come here to deal with the Middle Ages.
He was saying something she could not hear, while unlocking boxes, bringing out the results of a recent dig.
‘. . . mostly sixth century. We think it was a sacred grave for monks, near Bandarawela.’
‘Were any skeletons found?’
‘So far three of them. And some fossilized wood pots of the same period. Everything fits into the same time pattern.’
She pulled her gloves on and lifted an old bone to test the weight. The dating seemed right.
‘The skeletons were wrapped in leaves, then cloth,’ he told her. ‘Then stones were placed on top of them, which slid down later through the rib cage into the chest area.’
Years after a body was buried there would be a small shift on the surface of the earth. Then a falling of that stone into the space left by decayed flesh, as if signalling the departure of a spirit. This was a ceremony of nature that always affected her. As a child in Kuttapitiya Anil had once stepped on the shallow grave of a recently buried chicken, her weight driving the air in the dead body out through its beak—there was a muffled squawk, and she’d leapt back with fear, her soul jostled, then clawed earth away, terrified she would see the creature blink. But it