In the courtyard a torch of twigs was stuck into the earth. Sailor’s head was on a chair. Nothing else, only the two of them and the presence of the head.
The firelight set the face in movement. But what affected her—who felt she knew every physical aspect about Sailor, who had been alongside him now in his posthumous life as they travelled across the country, who had slept in a chair all night while he lay on the table in the Bandarawela rest house, who knew every mark of trauma from his childhood—was that this head was not just how someone possibly looked, it was a specific person. It revealed a distinct personality, as real as the head of Sarath. As if she was finally meeting a person who had been described to her in letters, or someone she had once lifted up as a child who was now an adult.
She sat on the step. Sarath was walking towards the head and then walking backwards, away from it. Then he would turn, as if to catch it unawares. She just watched it point-blank, coming to terms with it. There was a serenity in the face she did not see too often these days. There was no tension. A face comfortable with itself. This was unexpected coming from such a scattered and unreliable presence as Ananda. When she turned she saw that he had gone.
‘It’s so peaceful.’ She spoke first.
‘Yes. That’s the trouble,’ Sarath said.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘I know. It’s what he wants of the dead.’
‘He’s younger-looking than I expected. I like the look on him. What do you mean by that? “What he wants of the dead”?’
‘We have seen so many heads stuck on poles here, these last few years. It was at its worst a couple of years ago. You’d see them in the early mornings, somebody’s night work, before the families heard about them and came and removed them and took them home. Wrapping them in their shirts or just cradling them. Someone’s son. These were blows to the heart. There was only one thing worse. That was when a family member simply disappeared and there was no sighting or evidence of his existence or his death. In 1989, forty-six students attending school in Ratnapura district and some of the staff who worked there disappeared. The vehicles that picked them up had no number plates. A yellow Lancer had been seen at the army camp and was recognized during the roundup. This was at the height of the campaign to wipe out insurgent rebels and their sympathizers in the villages. Ananda’s wife, Sirissa, disappeared at that time. . . .’
‘My God.’
‘He told me only recently.’
‘I . . . I feel ashamed.’
‘It’s been three years. He still hasn’t found her. He was not always like this. The head he has made is therefore peaceful.’
Anil rose and walked back into the dark rooms. She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda’s wife in every aspect of it. She sat down in one of the large cane chairs in the dining room and began weeping. She could not face Sarath with this. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see the rectangular shape of a painting and beside it Ananda standing still, looking through the blackness at her.
Who were you crying for? Ananda and his wife?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Ananda, Sailor, their lovers. Your brother working himself to death. There’s only a mad logic here, no resolving. Your brother said something, he said, “You’ve got to have a sense of humour about all this—otherwise it makes no sense.” You must be in hell if you can seriously say things like that. We’ve become medieval. I saw your brother once before that night in the hospital with Gunesena. I’d cut myself badly and gone to Emergency Services to get some stitches. Your brother was there in a black coat and he was covered in blood, covered in blood reading a paperback. I’m sure now it was Gamini. I thought he looked familiar when I saw him with you. I thought he was a patient, part of an attempted murder. Your brother’s on speed, isn’t he?’
‘He’s been on various things. I don’t know now.’
‘He’s so thin. Someone needs to help him.’
‘He embraces it, what he does to himself. He’s reached a balance with it.’
‘What are you going to do with the head?’
‘He might have come from one of these villages. I can see if anyone recognizes it.’
‘Sarath, you can’t do this. You said . . . these are communities that lost people. They’ve had to deal with beheaded bodies.’
‘What’s our purpose here? We’re trying to identify him. We have to start somewhere.’
‘Please don’t do this.’
. . .
He had been standing, listening to them speaking in English in the courtyard. But now he faced her, not knowing that the tears were partly for him. Or that she realized the face was in no way a portrait of Sailor but showed a calm Ananda had known in his wife, a peacefulness he wanted for any victim.
She would have turned on a light but she had noticed Ananda never stepped into electrically lit areas. He worked always with flare torches in his room if it was too overcast. As if electricity had betrayed him once and he would not trust it again. Or maybe he was of that generation of battery lovers unaccustomed to official light. Just batteries or fire or moon.
He moved two steps forward and with his thumb creased away the pain around her eye along with her tears’ wetness. It was the softest touch on her face. His left hand lay on her shoulder as tenderly and formally as the nurse’s had on Gamini that night in the emergency ward, which was why, perhaps, she recalled that episode to Sarath later. Ananda’s hand on her shoulder to quiet her while the other hand came up to her face, kneaded the skin of that imploded tension of weeping as if hers too was a face being sculpted, though she could tell that wasn’t in his thoughts. This was a tenderness she was receiving. Then his other hand on her other shoulder, the other thumb under her right eye. Her sobbing had stopped. Then he was not there anymore.
In all of her time with Sarath, she realized, he had hardly touched her. With Sarath she felt simply adjacent. Gamini’s shaking her hand in the night hospital, his sleeping head on her lap that one night had been more personal. Now Ananda had touched her in a way she could recollect no one ever having touched her, except, perhaps, Lalitha. Or perhaps her mother, somewhere further back in her lost childhood. She slipped into the courtyard and saw Sarath still there facing the image of Sailor. He would already know as she did that no one would recognize the face. It was not a reconstruction of Sailor’s face they were looking at.
Once she and Sarath had entered the forest monastery in Arankale and spent a few hours there. A corrugated overhang was nailed into the rock of a cave entrance to keep out sun and rain. Beyond was a curved road of sand to a bathing pool. A monk swept his way along the path for two hours each morning and removed a thousand leaves. By late afternoon another thousand leaves and light twigs had fallen upon it. But at noon its surface was as clear and yellow as a river. To walk this sand path was itself an act of meditation.
The forest was so still that Anil heard no sounds until she thought of listening for them. Then she located the noisemakers in the landscape, as if using a sieve in water, catching the calls of orioles and parrots. ‘Those who cannot love make places like this. One needs to be in a stage beyond passion.’ It was practically the only thing Sarath had said that day in Arankale. Most of the time he walked and slept in his own thoughts.
They had wandered within the forest, discovering remnants of sites. A dog followed them and she remembered Tibetans believed that monks who hadn’t meditated properly became dogs in the next life. They circled back to the clearing, a clearing like a kamatha, the threshing circle in a paddy field. On a ledge of stone a small statue of the Buddha rested, a cut plantain leaf protected him from glare and rain. The forest towering over them so they felt they were within a deep green well. The corrugated overhang by the cave rattled and shook whenever the wind came down through the trees.
There was no wish in her to step away from this place.
Kings and those who are powerful desire what weighs them to the ground. Historical honour, measured own
ership, their sure truths. But in Arankale, Sarath told her, in the last years of the twelfth century, Asanga the Wise and his followers lived for decades in solitude, the world unaware of them. When they died the monastery and then the forest were stilled of humans. And in those uninhabited years the paths were leaf-filled, there was no song of sweeping. No odour of saffron or margosa came from the baths. Arankale perhaps became more beautiful, Anil thought, and more subtle without humans in the structure they had designed when they were no longer in the currents of love.
Four centuries later monks began living again in the caves above what had once been the temple clearing. It had been a long era of humanlessness, religiouslessness. The knowledge of such a monastery had vanished from people’s minds and the site was an abandoned forest sea. What was left of wooden altars was eaten by colonies of insects. Generations of pollen silted the bathing pool and then rough vegetation consumed it, so it was invisible to any passerby who did not know its sudden loose depth, which was a haven for creatures that scurried on the warmth of the cut rock and on unnamed plants in this nocturnal world.
For four hundred years the unheard throat calls of birds. The hum of some medieval bee motoring itself into the air. And in the remnant of the twelfth-century well, under the reflected sky, a twist of something silver in the water.
Sarath said this to her, the night on Galle Face Green:
‘Palipana could move within archaeological sites as if they were his own historical homes from past lives—he was able to guess the existence of a water garden’s location, unearth it, reconstruct its banks, fill it with white lotus. He worked for years on the royal parks around Anuradhapura and Kandy. He’d take one imagined step and be in an earlier century. Standing in the Forest of Kings or at one of the rock structures in the western monasteries, he must have found it difficult to distinguish the present age from ancient times. The season was identifiable—temperature, rainfall, humidity, the odour of the grass, its burned colours. But that was all. Nothing else gave away an era. . . . So I can understand what he did. It was just the next step for him—to eliminate the borders and categories, to find everything in one landscape, and so discover the story he hadn’t seen before.
‘Don’t forget, he was going blind. In the last years of partial sight, he thought he finally saw the half-perceived interlinear texts. As letters and words began to disappear under his fingers and from his eyesight, he felt something else, the way those who are colour-blind are used to see through camouflage during war, to see the existing structure of the figure. He was living alone.’
There was a laugh from Gamini, who was also listening.
Sarath paused, then continued. ‘In his youth Palipana was mostly solitary while he learned Pali and other languages.’
‘But he was very fond of women,’ Gamini said. ‘One of those men who have three women on three hills. Of course you’re right, he was living alone. . . . You’re probably right.’
Gamini, by repeating the phrase, cancelled out his agreement. He lay back on the grass and looked up. A quiet crash of the combers against the breakwater along Galle Face Green. His brother and the woman had become silent as a result of his interruption, so he went on. ‘This was a civilized country. We had “halls for the sick” four centuries before Christ. There was a beautiful one in Mihintale. Sarath can take you around its ruins. There were dispensaries, maternity hospitals. By the twelfth century, physicians were being dispersed all over the country to be responsible for far-flung villages, even for ascetic monks who lived in caves. That would have been an interesting trek, dealing with those guys. Anyway, the names of doctors appear on some rock inscriptions. There were villages for the blind. There are recorded details of brain operations in the ancient texts. Ayurvedic hospitals were set up that still exist—I’ll take you there and show them to you sometime. Just a short train journey. We were always good with illness and death. We could howl with the best. Now we carry the wounded with no anaesthetic up the stairs because the elevators don’t work.’
‘I think I met you before.’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve never seen you.’
‘Do you remember everyone? You have a black coat.’
He laughed. ‘We don’t have time to remember. Get Sarath to show you Mihintale.’
‘Oh, he did, he showed me a joke there. At the top of that flight of steps leading to the hill temple was a sign in Sinhala that must have once said, WARNING: WHEN IT RAINS, THESE STEPS ARE DANGEROUS. Sarath was laughing at it. Someone had altered one Sinhala syllable on the sign, so it now read, WARNING: WHEN IT RAINS, THESE STEPS ARE BEAUTIFUL.’
‘This is my serious brother? He’s usually the one in our family with historical irony. We are prime examples for him of why cities become ruins. The seven reasons for the fall of Polonnaruwa as a political centre. Twelve reasons why Galle became a major port and survived into the twentieth century. We don’t agree much, my brother and I. He thinks my ex-wife was the best thing that happened to me. He probably wished to fuck her. But didn’t.’
‘Stop it, Gamini.’
‘I didn’t, anyway. Not much. I got diverted. The bodies were coming in by truckloads. She didn’t love the smell of scrub lotion on my arms. The fact that I would use medicinal aids during my shifts. So that later I was not fully awake in her company. Not great courtship. I’d get into a bath and pass out. My honeymoon was at a base hospital. The country was falling apart and my wife’s family complained about my unavailability. I was supposed to have my shirt ironed and go to a dinner party, hold her hand as we waited for the car. . . . Maybe I would have laughed if I’d seen that sign about the steps. Dangerous . . . beautiful . . . Lucky for you both to be there. He’—Gamini pointed into the dark—‘took me there when he was studying with Palipana. I liked Palipana. I liked his strictness. He was right in the heart of our age. No small talk. What did he call himself?’
‘An epigraphist,’ Sarath said.
‘A skill . . . to decipher inscriptions. Wonderful! To study history as if it were a body.’
‘Of course your brother does that too.’
‘Of course. And then Palipana went mad. What do you say, Sarath?’
‘Hallucinations, perhaps.’
‘He went mad. Those over-interpretations, what we must call lies, over the interlinear stuff.’
‘He isn’t mad.’
‘Okay, then. Same as you and me. But no one in his clique supported him when it was revealed. He was certainly the only great man I met, but he was just never a “sacred” guy for me. You see, in the heart of any faith is a history that teaches us not to trust—’
‘Sarath at least went to see him,’ Anil interrupted.
‘Did he. Did he . . . ?’
‘I didn’t. Not till this last week.’
‘So he’s alone.’ Gamini said. ‘Just his three women on three hills.’
‘He lives with his niece. It’s his sister’s daughter.’
Anil came out of a deep sleep. Some bird-scramble on the roof or a truck in the distance must have woken her. She removed the silent earphones from her hair, groped for her Prince T-shirt and walked into the courtyard. Four a.m. The beacon from her flashlight went straight towards Sailor’s skeleton. So he was safe. She flicked the light to the chair and saw the head wasn’t there. Sarath must have moved it. What had woken her? Someone with a nightmare? Was it Gamini in his black coat? She’d been dreaming about him. Or perhaps Cullis in the distance. It was about the same hour she had left him wounded in Borrego. Her funny valentine.
The courtyard was a layer lighter.
A wind in the roof tiles, a stronger wind and rustle high in the tall darkness of the trees. She had not brought one picture of him when she packed, was proud of that. She sat down on a step. She thought there had been birdsong and was listening for more of it. Then she heard the gasp and was running to Ananda’s door and pushing it open into the dark.
There were sounds she had never heard before. She ran back for the flashlight,
yelled to Sarath and came back in. Ananda was lying against a corner, trying with what energy he had left to stab himself in the throat. The blood on the knife and in his fingers and down his arm. His eyes like a deer in her light. The sound coming from God knows where. Not his throat. It couldn’t be his throat. Not now.
‘How quick were you?’ It was Sarath.
‘Quick. I was outside. Rip some cloth off the bed.’
She moved towards Ananda. The eyes open, not blinking, and she thought he might already be dead. She waited for eye movement, and after what felt like a long time it came. His hand was still half gestured into the air. ‘I need the cloth fast, Sarath.’ ‘Right.’ She tried pulling the knife out of Ananda’s grip but couldn’t, and let it be. The blood coming off his elbow onto her sarong, she was close enough to smell it, the flashlight held between her thighs, aimed up as she crouched there.
Sarath began to tear the pillowcase and passed her strips of cloth, which she wrapped around Ananda’s neck. She put the large flap of skin flat against his neck and bound it tight.
‘I need some antiseptic. Do you know where it is?’ When he brought it she soaked the cloth in it so it would reach the wound. The windpipe was still intact, but she needed to tighten the bandage so less blood would be lost, even though he was having difficulty breathing already. She leaned forward and pressed the wound with her fingers, the knife in his hand now behind her.
‘You need to phone Gamini and get him to send someone.’
‘The cell phone’s dead. I’ll phone from the village. If I can’t get someone, I’ll drive him to Ratnapura.’
‘Light a lamp, will you, for us. Before you go.’
He returned with an oil lamp. It was too bright for them at that hour, and he turned down the wick, because what he could see was terrible.
‘He called forth the dead,’ she whispered.