Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,55

behind him so as to be sure not to disturb anything, and bent over, looking through those thick spectacles at her calipers, the weight charts, as if he were within the hush of a museum. He bent down further and sniffed at the objects. A mind of science, she thought. Yesterday she had noticed how delicate his fingers were, dyed ochre as the result of his work.

Now Ananda picked up the skeleton and carried it in his arms.

She was in no way appalled by what he was doing. There had been hours when, locked in her investigations and too focussed by hours of intricacy, she too would need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightning of politics raised his hands at the last minute, so they were broken. Ananda held Sailor and walked slowly with him and placed him back on the table, and it was then he saw Anil. She nodded imperceptibly to show there was no anger in her. Slowly rose and walked over to him. A small yellow leaf floated down and slipped into the skeleton’s ribs and pulsed there.

She saw the two moons caught in the mirror of Ananda’s glasses. It was a ramshackle pair—the lenses knitted onto the frame with wire and the stems wrapped in old cloth, rag really, so he could wipe or dry his fingers on them. Anil wished she could trade information with him, but she had long forgotten the subtleties of the language they once shared. She would have told him what Sailor’s bone measurements meant in terms of posture and size. And he—God knows what insights he had.

In the afternoons when Ananda could go no further with the skull’s reconstruction, he took it all apart, breaking up the clay. Strangely. It seemed a waste of time to her. But early the next morning he would know the precise thickness and texture to return to and could re-create the previous day’s work in twenty minutes. Then he thought and composed the face a further step. It was as if he needed the warm-up of the past work to rush over so he could move with more confidence into the uncertainty that lay ahead. Thus there was nothing to see if she entered his room when he was not working. After just ten days, the room was more like a nest—rags and padding, mud and clay, colours daubed everywhere, the large letters above him on the wall.

Still, on this night, without words, there seemed to be a pact. The way he had respected the order of her tools, touching nothing, the way he raised Sailor into his arms. She saw the sadness in Ananda’s face below what might appear a drunk’s easy sentiments. The hollows that seemed gnawed at. Anil put out her hand and touched his forearm, and then left him alone in the courtyard. For the next few days they went back to their mutual silences. It was possible he had been very drunk that night and remembered nothing about it. Two or three times a day he would put on one of the old 78s and stand in his doorway, looking out at whatever was going on in her life in that courtyard.

At six in the morning she dressed, then began walking the mile to the school. A few hundred yards before she climbed the hill, the road narrowed into a bridge, a lagoon on one side, a salt river on the other. This is where Sirissa would start to see the teenagers, some with catapults hanging off their shoulders, some smoking. They would acknowledge her with their eyes but never speak to her, whereas she would always give a greeting. Later, when they saw her on the school grounds, they wouldn’t acknowledge her in any way. She would turn after she had gone five yards past them at the bridge, still moving away from them, to catch their curious watching of her. She was not that much older. And they were hungry in their search for a pose, and perhaps only one or two of them would have a knowledge already of women. They were aware of Sirissa’s silk-like hair, her litheness as she turned around to look at them, as she kept on walking—a sensual gesture they came to expect.

It was always six-thirty a.m.

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