He put his cup down. ‘Look, I don’t join one side or the other. If that’s what you mean. As you said, everyone has an army.’
She picked up the postcard and spun it between her thumbs. ‘Sorry. I feel tired. I’ve spent all morning going through reports at the Civil Rights Movement office. There’s nothing hopeful there. Do you want to have dinner later?’
‘I cannot.’
She waited for some explanation but nothing more came from him. Just his eyes darting to a map on the wall, to the picture of the bird on her postcard. While he continued to tap his pencil against the desk.
‘Where’s that bird from?’
‘Oh . . . nowhere.’ She could close down too.
An hour later they were running through rain and were fully wet by the time they climbed into the car. He drove her to Ward Place and kept the car idling under the portico as she collected her things from the back seat. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, and closed the door.
Once inside, Anil emptied her bag onto the table to find the postcard. Rereading her girlfriend Leaf’s message from America made her feel better. Some communication from the West. She went into the kitchen, her mind circling around Sarath once more. She had been working with him for several days and she still had no handle on him. He was high up in the state-sponsored Archaeological Department, so how much a part of the government was he? Was he its ear and eye while assigned to aid her in the Human Rights investigation and report? In that case whom was she working for?
Forensic work during a political crisis was notorious, she knew, for its three-dimensional chess moves and back-room deals and muted statements for the ‘good of the nation.’ In the Congo, one Human Rights group had gone too far and their collection of data had disappeared overnight, their paperwork burned. As if a city from the past had been reburied. The investigative team, which included Anil in a lowly role as a programme assistant, had nothing left to do but get on a plane and go home. So much for the international authority of Geneva. The grand logos on letterheads and European office doors meant nothing where there was crisis. If and when you were asked by a government to leave, you left. You took nothing with you. Not a slide tray, not a piece of film. At the airport, while they searched her clothing, she’d sat almost naked on a stool.
One postcard from Leaf. One American bird. She pulled some cutlets and a beer out of the fridge. There would be a book to read, a shower to take. Later she might go to Galle Face Green and have a drink at one of the newer hotels, watch the drunk members of a touring English cricket team sing karaoke.
Was the partner assigned to her neutral in this war? Was he just an archaeologist who loved his work? The day before, on a road trip out of Colombo, he had shown her a few temples and then, passing some of his students working in a historic area, had joyfully joined them and was soon collecting slivers of mica, telling them where they were likely to find fragments of iron in the ground, as if he were a gifted and natural finder of things. Most of what Sarath wished to know was in some way linked to the earth. She suspected he found the social world around him irrelevant. His desire, he had told her, was to write a book someday about a city in the south of the island that no longer existed. Not a wall of it remained, but he wanted to tell the story of that place. It would emerge out of this dark trade with the earth, his knowledge of the region in chronicles—its medieval business routes, its presence as a favourite monsoon town of a certain king, as revealed in poems that celebrated the city’s daily life. He’d quoted a few lines from one of the poems which his teacher, a man named Palipana, had taught him.
That was Sarath at his most expressive, almost enthusiastic, one evening after a crab dinner in Mount Lavinia. He stood by the surf drawing the shape of the city with his hands, sketching it in the dark air. Through the imaginary lines she could see the waves, their curl and roll, like his sudden excitement moving towards her.