only son.
Now the whisper of Anil’s foot was beside him. Then her quiet voice. ‘What’s that?’ They’d entered a room off the courtyard, where someone had charcoalled two Sinhala words in giant script on the walls. MAKAMKRUKA. And on the wall opposite, MADANARAGA. ‘What’s that? Are those names?’ ‘No.’ He reached up so his hand could touch the brown lettering.
‘Not names. A makamkruka is—it’s difficult to describe—a man who is a makamkruka is a churner, an agitator. Someone who perhaps sees things more truly by turning everything upside down. He’s a devil almost, a yaksa. Though a makamkruka, strangely, guards the sacred spot in a temple ground. No one knows why this kind of person is honoured with such a responsibility.’
‘And?’
‘The other is stranger. Madanaraga means “with the speed of love,” sexual arousal. It’s the kind of word you find in ancient romances. Not in the vernacular.’
While Ananda laboured over the head, Anil was to continue work on Sailor’s skeleton, trying to discover among other things his ‘markers of occupation.’ She had been with Sarath for more than three weeks now, and they were ‘in the field,’ not in contact with Sarath’s political networks in the city. No one in Colombo would expect them to be camped in this family estate, close to the area where Sailor had possibly been buried the first time. Perhaps Sailor was locally ‘important’ or ‘identifiable.’ Here they would be closer to the source and they would be undisturbed.
The first morning they were there, Ananda Udugama had gone off without a word. Leaving Sarath frustrated and Anil carefully silent. She set up her workbench and temporary lab in a courtyard under a banyan’s ragged shade and brought Sailor out with her. Sarath decided to do his own research work in the grand dining room. He would occasionally have to return to Colombo for supplies and to report in. There were no telephones, except for his on-again, off-again cell phone, and they felt isolated from the rest of the country.
Ananda had in fact, that first morning, woken early and walked to the nearby village market, bought some fresh toddy and established himself by the public well. He chatted with anyone who sat near him, shared his few cigarettes and watched the village move around him, with its distinct behaviour, its local body postures and facial characteristics. He wanted to discover what the people drank here, whether there was a specific diet that would puff up cheeks more than usual, whether lips would be fuller than in Batticaloa. Also the varieties of hairstyle, the quality of eyesight. Did they walk or cycle. Was coconut oil used in food and hair. He spent a day in the village and then went into the fields and collected mud in three sacks. He could mix the two browns and one black into a variety of shades. Then he bought several bottles of arrack in the village and returned to the walawwa.
He would be up at dawn and would park himself in a square of sun and move as it moved, the way a cat would. He may have looked at the skull now and then, but that was all. He would go to the village and return with kite papers in several colours, suet, food dyes and one day two old turntables and a random selection of 78s.
Of all the possible spaces in the large house Ananda had chosen the room the artist had worked in. He knew nothing about the history of the place but liked the light within this room, where the two words MAKAMKRUKA and MADANARAGA were written. The courtyard where Anil worked was just outside. The morning he actually began to work on the skull she heard music coming from his room. A tenor burst into song, sang with energy for a few moments, then slowed before the song ended. Curious, she went in, to see Ananda winding the gramophone. Beside it was another turntable, where he was moulding a clay base, on which the skull rested. His free hand could spin it to the left or right like a potter’s wheel. He was already working on the throat. She stepped back and out.
She recognized the technique of face construction. He had marked several pins with red paint to represent the various thicknesses of the flesh over the bone, and then placed a thin layer of plasticine on the skull, thinning or thickening it according to the marks on the pins. Eventually he would press finer