‘You’re seventy-six.’
‘How?’ Palipana was disarmed. ‘My skin? Nails?’
‘I checked the Sinhala encyclopaedia before we left Colombo.’
‘Ah. Yes, yes. You’re lucky you got hold of an old edition. I’m erased from the new one.’
‘Then we will have to build a statue of you,’ Sarath said, a bit too gracefully.
There was an awkward silence.
‘I’ve lived around graven images all my life. I don’t believe in them.’
‘Temples have secular heroes too.’
‘So you removed the head. . . .’
‘We don’t know yet the year he was murdered. Ten years ago? Five years ago? More recently? We don’t have the equipment to discover that. And given the circumstances of where he was buried, we can’t ask for such assistance.’
Palipana was silent, sitting with his head down, his arms crossed. Sarath continued. ‘You have reconstructed eras simply by looking at runes. You’ve used artists to re-create scenes from just paint fragments. So. We have a skull. We need someone to re-create what he might have looked like. One way to discover when he was twenty-eight is to have someone identify him.’
No one moved. Even Sarath was looking down now. He went on. ‘But we don’t have a specialist or knowledge of how to do it. That’s why I brought the skull here. For you to tell us where to go, what to do. It is something we have to do quietly.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
Palipana stood, so they all did, and walked out of the leaf hall into the night. They were treating his sudden movements the way they would have given a dog rein. The four of them walked to the pokuna and stood by the dark water. Anil kept thinking of Palipana’s sightlessness in this landscape of dark green and deep gray. The stone steps and rock nestled into the inclines of earth just as the fragments of brick and wood nestled against rock. These bones of an old settlement. It felt to Anil as if her pulse had fallen asleep, that she was moving like the slowest animal in the world through grass. She was picking up intricacies of what was around them. Palipana’s mind was probably crowded with such things, in his potent sightlessness. I will not want to leave this place, she thought, remembering that Sarath had said the same thing to her.
‘Do you know the tradition of Nētra Mangala?’ He was asking them in a murmur, as if thinking aloud. Palipana raised his right hand and pointed it to his own face. He seemed to be talking to her more than to Sarath or the girl.
‘Nētra means “eye.” It is a ritual of the eyes. A special artist is needed to paint eyes on a holy figure. It is always the last thing done. It is what gives the image life. Like a fuse. The eyes are a fuse. It has to happen before a statue or a painting in a vihara can become a holy thing. Knox mentions it, and later on Coomaraswamy. You’ve read him?’
‘Yes, but I don’t remember.’
‘Coomaraswamy points out that before eyes are painted there is just a lump of metal or stone. But after this act, “it is thenceforward a God.” Of course there are special ways to paint the eye. Sometimes the king will do it, but it is better when done by a professional artificer, the craftsman. Now of course we have no kings. And Nētra Mangala is better without kings.’
Anil and Sarath and Palipana and the girl had reached and now sat within the square wooden structure of an ambalama, an oil lamp at the centre of it. The old man had gestured towards it and said they could talk there perhaps, even sleep within it this night. It was a structure of wood, with no walls and a high ceiling. Travellers or pilgrims used its shade and coolness during the day. At night it was simply a skeletal wooden form open to the dark, its few beams creating an idea of order. A structure built on rock. A home of wood and boulders.
It was almost dark, and they could smell the air that came towards them over the water of the pokuna, could hear the rustling of unseen creatures. Each evening Palipana and the girl walked from their forest clearing to sleep in the ambalama. He could relieve himself off the edge of the platform without having to wake the girl to lead him somewhere. He would lie there conscious of the noises from the surrounding ocean of trees. Farther away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war.
The girl was to his left, Sarath to his right, the woman across from him. He knew the woman was now standing up, either looking towards him or beyond, towards the water. He had also heard the splash. Some water creature on this calm night. There was a turkey vulture coming out of the trees. Between him and the woman—on the rock, beside the ochre lamp—was the skull they had brought with them.
‘There was one man who painted eyes. He was the best I knew. But he stopped.’
‘Painting eyes?’
He heard the fresh curiosity in her voice.
‘There is a ceremony to prepare the artificer during the night before he paints. You realize, he is brought in only to paint the eyes on the Buddha image. The eyes must be painted in the morning, at five. The hour the Buddha attained enlightenment. The ceremonies therefore begin the night before, with recitations and decorations in the temples.
‘Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence. Later he will be honoured with gifts. Lands or oxen. He enters the temple doors. He is dressed like a prince, with jewellery, a sword at his waist, lace over his head. He moves forward accompanied by a second man, who carries brushes, black paint and a metal mirror.
‘He climbs a ladder in front of the statue. The man with him climbs too. This has taken place for centuries, you realize, there are records of this since the ninth century. The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him—so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation. Around him the mantras continue. May thou become possessed of the fruits of deeds. . . . May there be an increase on earth and length of days. . . . Hail, eyes!
‘His work can take an hour or less than a minute, depending on the essential state of the artist. He never looks at the eyes directly. He can only see the gaze in the mirror.’
Anil was standing on the wood ledge that she would later sleep on, thinking of Cullis. Where he might be. No doubt in the arms of his busy marriage. She would avoid thinking of him there. He had not allowed her much room in that world, and her view of him had always been a partially blindfolded one.
‘Why don’t you let go, Cullis? Let’s stop. Why carry on? After two years I still feel like your afternoon date.’
She was beside him on the bed. Not touching him. Just needing to look into his eyes, to talk. He reached out and clutched her hair with his left hand.
‘Whatever happens, don’t let go of me,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ She pulled her head back but he would not release her.
‘Let go!’
He held on to her.
She knew where it was. She reached back and her fingers grabbed it, and she swung the small knife he had been cutting an avocado with earlier in a sure arc and stabbed it into the arm holding her. There was an escape of breath from him. Ahhh. All emphasis on the h’s. She could almost see the letters coming out of him in the darkness, and the stem of the weapon in his arm muscle.
She looked at his face, his grey eyes (they were always bluer in daylight), and saw the softness he had accepted into his looks during his forties disappear, suddenly go. The face taut, his emotion open. He was weighing everything, this physical betrayal. Her right hand was still curled around the knife, not quite touching it, grazing it.
They looked at each other, neither of them giving in. She wouldn’t step back from her fury. Wh
en she pulled back this time he released her wet dark hair out of his fingers. She rolled away and picked up the telephone. Carrying it into the light of the bathroom she dialed a taxi. She turned to him. ‘Remember this is what I did to you in Borrego Springs. You can make a story out of it.’
Anil dressed in the bathroom, put on makeup, and returned to the bedroom. She switched on all the lights so nothing, no piece of clothing, would escape her while she repacked her bag. Then she switched the lights off and sat and waited. He was on the twin bed, not moving. She heard the taxi draw up and sound its horn.
When she walked to the cab she could feel that her hair was still damp. The car took off under the Una Palma Motel sign. Their romance had been a long intimacy that had existed mostly in secrecy, the good-bye was quick and fatal, though in the taxi to the bus station she put a hand to her breast and felt her heart thumping, as if blurting out the truth.
She had one arm up, holding on to the rafter above her head. She herself felt like a whip that could leap out and catch something in its long finger. Palipana faced the woman who had come with Sarath. Hail, eyes! He said it again. Sarath was conscious of her pale arm in the light of the oil lamp as he listened to Palipana. ‘When he is finished, the painter of eyes is blindfolded and led out of the temple. The king would endow all those responsible with goods and land. All this is recorded. He defined boundaries for new villages—high and low lands, jungles and ponds. He directed the artificer to be allowed thirty amunu of seed-paddy, thirty pieces of iron, ten buffaloes from the fold and ten she-buffaloes with calves.’ Palipana’s conversation always seemed to include remembered phrases from historical texts.
‘She-buffaloes with calves,’ Anil said quietly to herself. ‘Seed-paddy . . . You were rewarded for the right things.’ But he heard her.
‘Well, kings also caused trouble in those days,’ he said. ‘Even then there was nothing to believe in with certainty. They still didn’t know what truth was. We have never had the truth. Not even with your work on bones.’
‘We use the bone to search for it. “The truth shall set you free.” I believe that.’
‘Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.’
There was a crackle of thunder far away, as if earth and trees were being torn and moved. The wooden ambalama felt like a raft or four-poster bed drifting in the black clearing. Perhaps they were not nestled on rock but unmoored, on a river. She was lying on the lip of the structure, on one of the sleeping platforms. She had woken and could hear Palipana turning every few minutes as if it was difficult for him to find the precise location and posture for sleep.
Anil turned back into her own privacy, to Cullis. She felt there was this physical line to him wherever he was on the planet, beyond ocean or storm, some frail telephone cord that one had to tug clear of branches or rocks deep in the sea. And did he hold the image of her stride from that room in Borrego? They had both hoped for a seven-bangled night. She’d decided when she left him that she would call later to make sure he had not given in to sleep, but the fury was still taut in her and she did not.
Sarath struck a match against the rock beside the ambalama. So it was not a river down there. Light flickered up and she smelled the smoke of his beedi. An insect chirped like the sound of a watch being wound, one of the inhabitants in this forest of ascetics. ‘There has always been slaughter in passion,’ she heard Palipana say.
In the dark he continued speaking: ‘Even if you are a monk, like my brother, passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of it, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat. My brother entered temple life. He escaped the world and the world came after him. He was seventy when he was killed by someone, perhaps someone from the time when he was breaking free—for that is the difficult stage, when you leave the world. I am the last of my siblings. For my sister too is dead. This girl is her daughter.’
A few years before, the girl Lakma had seen her parents killed. A week after their murder, the twelve-year-old child was taken to a government ward run by nuns, north of Colombo, that looked after children whose parents had been killed in the civil war. The shock of the murder of the girl’s parents, however, had touched everything within her, driving both her verbal and her motor ability into infancy. This was combined with an adult sullenness of spirit. She wanted nothing more to invade her.
She lay hidden there for over a month, silent, non-reacting, physically forced from her room to do exercises in sunlight. The nightmares continued for Lakma, who was unable to deal with the possible danger around her. A child who knew the falseness of the supposed religious security around her, with its clean dormitories and well-made beds. When Palipana, her only remaining relative, came to visit her he saw she was immune to any help in this place. Any sudden sound was danger to her. She would finger through every meal looking for insects or glass, would not sleep in the safety of her bed but hidden underneath it. It was the time of Palipana’s own crisis in his career, and his eyes were in the last stages of glaucoma. He had bundled her up and travelled by train up to Anuradhapura, the girl terrified during the whole journey, then brought her in a cart to the forest monastery, the leaf hall and ambalama, in the Grove of Ascetics. They slipped this way out of the world, not noticed by anyone—an old man, a twelve-year-old girl who was scared of the evidence of anything human, even of this person who had brought her into the dry zone.
He wished more than anything to deliver her from the inflicted isolation. Whatever skills she learned from her parents had been abandoned too deep within her. Palipana, the country’s great epigraphist, began to educate her on two levels—gave her the mnemonic skills of alphabet and phrasing, and conversed with her at the furthest edge of his knowledge and beliefs. All this occurred as his own vision darkened and he began to move slowly, with exaggerated gestures. (It was later, when he trusted the dark and the girl more, that his movement became minimal.)
He supposed he had always trusted her, in spite of her fury and rejection of the world. He weaved into her presence his conversations about wars and medieval slokas and Pali texts and language, and he spoke of how history faded too, as much as battle did, and how it could exist only with remembrance—for even the slokas on papyrus and bound ola leaves would be eaten by moths and silverfish, dissolved by rainstorms—how only stone and rock could hold one person’s loss and another’s beauty forever.
She took journeys with him—a two-day walk to a chapter house in Mihintale, climbing the 132 steps, clinging to this blind man with her fear when he insisted they go once by bus to Polonnaruwa so he could be in the presence of the Stone Book, his hands upon the ducks—that were for eternity—for the last time. They rode in bullock carts and he would sniff the air or hear the hum within the gum trees and know where he was, would know there was a half-buried temple nearby, and his lean body would be off the cart and she would follow him. ‘We are, and I was, formed by history,’ he would say. ‘But the three places I love escaped it. Arankale. Kaludiya Pokuna. Ritigala.’
So they journeyed south as far as Ritigala, getting rides in slow bullock carts, where she felt safer, and climbed the holy mountain for hours up through the hot forest alongside the noise of cicadas. They came upon the footpath that curved uphill in a giant S. They broke a small branch as the two of them entered the forest and dedicated that as an offering, and took nothing else from there.
Every historical pillar he came to in a field he stood beside and embraced as if it were a person he had known in the past. Most of his life he had found history in stones and carvings. In the last few years he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie.
He had deciphered the shallowly incised lines during lightning, had written them down during rain and thunder. A portable sulphur lamp or a thorn brushfire by
the overhang of cave. The dialogue between old and hidden lines, the back-and-forth between what was official and unofficial during solitary field trips, when he spoke to no one for weeks, so that these became his only conversations—an epigraphist studying the specific style of a chisel-cut from the fourth century, then coming across an illegal story, one banned by kings and state and priests, in the interlinear texts. These verses contained the darker proof.
Lakma watched him and listened, never speaking, a silent amanuensis for his whispered histories. He blended fragments of stories so they became a landscape. It did not matter if she could not distinguish between his versions and the truth. She was safe, finally, with him, this man who was her mother’s elder brother. They slept on mats in the leaf hall in the afternoon, within the frames of the ambalama at night. As his vision left him he gave more and more of his life to her. The last days of his sight he spent simply gazing at her.
With his blindness she gained the authority he had been unable to give her. She rearranged the paths of the day. What she did in proximity to him was now a part of the invisible world. Her new semi-nakedness in a way represented her state of mind. She wore a sarong as a man would. Palipana would not see this, or her left hand on her pubis tugging the new hair or playing with it while he talked to her. The only governor to her manner was to do with his safety and comfort. She would bound over to him if he was walking towards a root. Every morning she wet his face with water she had boiled over a fire, and then shaved him. They were early risers and early sleepers, aligned to the sun and moon. She was with him this way for two years before the appearance of Sarath and Anil. With their arrival the girl stepped back, although by then they were invading what was her home more than Palipana’s. It was her pattern of the day that was broken. If Anil witnessed politeness or kindness in the old man, it was only in his hand gestures and murmurs to Lakma, just loud enough to be heard a step away, so Anil and Sarath were excluded from most of their conversation. In the late afternoon the girl sat between his legs, and his hands were in her long hair searching for lice with those thin fingers and combing it while the girl rubbed his feet. When he walked she steered him away from any obstacle in his path with a slight tug of the sleeve.