his blood pressure, he tested it daily, and any session at a clinic ended with his weighing himself on the scales and checking his blood sugar. He noted the bell curves and continued as usual driving through jungles and garrisoned land to meet his patients. It didn’t matter what state he was in as long as he knew what state he was in.
On Saturday mornings Gamini and Lakdasa drove back to Polonnaruwa listening to the cricket. A long day at a clinic. Sometimes along the road, now and then, there were thirty-foot strips of grain being dried on the tarmac, strips laid so narrow a car could pass over them without having the wheels touch the drying grain. A man with a broom stood nearby to signal to passing cars to be aware of it, and to sweep the grain back to the centre if they were not.
In the cafeteria of the base hospital—a half-hour break in his shift—a woman sat down at Gamini’s table and drank her tea, ate a biscuit with him. It was about four in the morning and he didn’t know her. He just nodded to her, he felt private and too tired to talk.
‘I helped you with an operation once, some months ago. The massacre night.’ His mind wheeled back a century.
‘I thought you got transferred.’
‘Yes, I was, then I came back here.’
He hadn’t recognized her at all. She’d had a mask on when he spent the crucial long hours with her over the boy. When she was not wearing a mask, in pre-op, he had probably only glanced at her. Their comradeship had been mostly anonymous.
‘You’re married to someone here, right?’ She nodded. There was a scar at her wrist. It was new, he would have noticed that during the surgery.
He looked up quickly at her face. ‘It is very good to meet you.’
‘Yes. For me too,’ she said.
‘Where did you go?’
‘He’—a cough—‘he got stationed in Kurunegala.’
Gamini kept watching her, the way she was selecting the words carefully. Her face was young and lean and dark, her eyes bright as if it were daylight.
‘Actually, I have passed you in the wards a lot!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. I know you didn’t recognize me. Why should you.’ A pause. She put her hand through her hair and then was very still.
‘I’ve seen that boy.’
‘That boy?’
She looked down, smiling to herself now. ‘The boy we operated on. I have visited him. They . . . they renamed the boy Gamini. The parents. After you. It was a lot of trouble, red tape, for them to do that.’
‘Good. So I have an heir.’
‘Yes, you do. . . . I am training now extra hours in the children’s ward.’ She was about to continue, then stopped.
He nodded, suddenly tired. What he wanted in his life now seemed a huge thing. What he wished for would involve the lives of others, years of effort. Chaos. Unfairness. Lying.
She looked at her tea and drank the last of it.
‘It was good to meet with you.’
‘Yes.’
Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on. When later he turned over the hands of a patient, he thought of the scar at her wrist, the way her fingers had slipped through her hair, what he wished to reveal to her. But it was his own heart that could not step into the world.
*
There is a break before the ward visits at six p.m. Gamini pulls down the registrar’s log from the shelf. Since the scribes have taken over, the entries are much better—the handwriting immaculate and small, green ink underlining the months and Sundays. He cannot remember the date so he looks for a flurry of entries, as there would have been around the time of the killings. Then goes down the list of interns and nurses.
Prethiko
Seela
Raduka
Buddhika
Kaashdya
He moves his fingers down the ledger to check the assignments, discovers her name.
He walks almost a mile to the event, in his only good jacket. The rest house is serving the usual bad food in the glassed-in dining room that hangs over the water. The children wait with unlit sparklers, in delirium for any kind of ceremony. Cake in one hand, a