Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,43

can’t clarify it further.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well—is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? Or fear if we commit a crime? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body.’

‘As in dreams.’

‘As in dreams,’ he agreed. ‘Though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don’t know we have.’

‘So it’s something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from a knot in another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past.’

He paused before speaking again, surprised at the degree of her interest. ‘I don’t think we know yet how similar the knots are, or if there are essential patterns. I’ve always liked those nineteenth-century novels where brothers and sisters in different cities could feel the same pains, have the same fears. . . . But I digress. We don’t know, Anil.’

‘It sounds Sri Lankan, the name.’

‘Well, check its derivation. It doesn’t sound scientific.’

‘No. Some bad god.’

She remembers the almond knot. During autopsies her secret habit of detour is to look for the amygdala, this nerve bundle which houses fear—so it governs everything. How we behave and make decisions, how we seek out safe marriages, how we build houses that we make secure.

Driving with Sarath once. He asked, ‘Is your tape recorder off?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘There are at least two unauthorized places of detention in Colombo. One of the locations is off Havelock Road in Kollupitiya. Some of those picked up are there for a month, but the torture itself doesn’t last that long. Most can be broken within an hour. Most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen.’

‘Is your tape recorder off?’ he had said. ‘Yes, it’s off.’ And only then had he talked.

‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear. . . .’

Anil’s name—the one she’d bought from her brother at the age of thirteen—had another stage to go through before it settled. By the time Anil was sixteen, she was taut and furious within the family. Her parents brought her to an astrologer in Wellawatta in an attempt to mollify these aspects of her nature. The man wrote down her birth hour and date, subtracted and fractioned them, considered her neighbouring stars and, not realizing the involved commerce behind it, said the problem resided in her name. Her tempestuousness could be harnessed with a name change. Unknown to him was the deal that had involved Gold Leaf cigarettes and rupees. He spoke with a voice that approached serenity and wisdom in the small cubicle, behind whose curtain other families waited in the hall hoping to overhear gossip and family history. What they heard were loud insistent refusals from the girl. The astrologer-soothsayer had eventually compromised his solution down to a simple appendage—the addition of an e, so she would be Anile. It would make her and her name more feminine, the e would allow the fury to curve away. But she refused even this.

Looking back, she could see her argumentativeness was only a phase. There is often a point in a person’s life where there is bodily anarchy: young boys whose hormones are going mad, young girls bouncing like a shuttlecock in the family politics between a father and a mother. Girls and their dad, girls and their mum. It was a minefield in one’s teens, and it was only when the relationship between her parents broke down completely that she calmed and sailed, or essentially swam, through the next four years.

The family wars continued to reside in her, and hadn’t left her when she went abroad to study medicine. In the forensic labs she made it a point to distinguish female and male traits as clearly as possible. She witnessed how women were much more easily discombobulated by the personal slights of a lover or husband; but they were better at dealing with calamity in professional work than men. They were geared to giving birth, protecting children, steering them through crisis. Men needed to pause and dress themselves in coldness in order to deal with a savaged body. In all her training in Europe and America she saw that again and again. Women doctors were more confident in chaos and accident, calmer in dealing with the fresh corpse of an old woman, a young beautiful man, small children. The