‘There are innocent Tamils in the south being killed too,’ Sarath said. ‘Terrible killings. You should read the reports.’
‘I get the reports.’ Gamini laid his head back. It was resting against her thigh but he seemed unaware of this. ‘We’re all fucked, aren’t we. We don’t know what to do about it. We just throw ourselves into it. Just no more high horses, please. This is a war on foot.’
‘Some of the reports . . .’ she said. ‘There are letters from parents who have lost children. Not something you can put aside, or get over in a hurry.’
She touched his shoulder. He brought his hand up for a moment and then his head slipped away and soon she saw he had fallen asleep. His skull, his uncombed hair, the weight of his tiredness on her lap. Sleep come free me. The words of a song in her head, she could not find the tune that went with it. Sleep come free me. . . . She would remember later that Sarath was looking out into the black shift of the sea.
Amygdala.
The name had sounded Sri Lankan when Anil first heard it. Studying at Guy’s Hospital in London, having cut tissue away to reveal a small knot of fibres made up of nerve cells. Near the stem of the brain. The professor standing beside her gave her the word for it. Amygdala.
‘What does it mean?’
‘Nothing. It’s a location. It’s the dark aspect of the brain.’
‘I don’t—’
‘A place to house fearful memories.’
‘Just fear?’
‘We’re not too certain of that. Anger too, we think, but it specializes in fear. It is pure emotion. We can’t clarify it further.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well—is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? Or fear if we commit a crime? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body.’
‘As in dreams.’
‘As in dreams,’ he agreed. ‘Though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don’t know we have.’
‘So it’s something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from a knot in another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past.’
He paused before speaking again, surprised at the degree of her interest. ‘I don’t think we know yet how similar the knots are, or if there are essential patterns. I’ve always liked those nineteenth-century novels where brothers and sisters in different cities could feel the same pains, have the same fears. . . . But I digress. We don’t know, Anil.’
‘It sounds Sri Lankan, the name.’
‘Well, check its derivation. It doesn’t sound scientific.’
‘No. Some bad god.’
She remembers the almond knot. During autopsies her secret habit of detour is to look for the amygdala, this nerve bundle which houses fear—so it governs everything. How we behave and make decisions, how we seek out safe marriages, how we build houses that we make secure.
Driving with Sarath once. He asked, ‘Is your tape recorder off?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘There are at least two unauthorized places of detention in Colombo. One of the locations is off Havelock Road in Kollupitiya. Some of those picked up are there for a month, but the torture itself doesn’t last that long. Most can be broken within an hour. Most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen.’
‘Is your tape recorder off?’ he had said. ‘Yes, it’s off.’ And only then had he talked.
‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear. . . .’
Anil’s name—the one she’d bought from her brother at the age of thirteen—had another stage to go through before it settled. By the time Anil was sixteen, she was taut and furious within the family. Her parents brought her to an astrologer in Wellawatta in an attempt to mollify these aspects of her nature. The man wrote down her birth hour and date, subtracted and fractioned them, considered her neighbouring stars and, not realizing the involved commerce behind it, said the problem resided in her name. Her tempestuousness could be harnessed with a name change. Unknown to him was the deal that had involved Gold Leaf cigarettes and rupees. He spoke with a voice that approached serenity and wisdom in the small cubicle, behind whose curtain other families waited in the hall hoping to overhear gossip and family history. What they heard were loud insistent refusals from the girl. The astrologer-soothsayer had eventually compromised his solution down to a simple appendage—the addition of an e, so she would be Anile. It would make her and her name more feminine, the e would allow the fury to curve away. But she refused even this.
Looking back, she could see her argumentativeness was only a phase. There is often a point in a person’s life where there is bodily anarchy: young boys whose hormones are going mad, young girls bouncing like a shuttlecock in the family politics between a father and a mother. Girls and their dad, girls and their mum. It was a minefield in one’s teens, and it was only when the relationship between her parents broke down completely that she calmed and sailed, or essentially swam, through the next four years.
The family wars continued to reside in her, and hadn’t left her when she went abroad to study medicine. In the forensic labs she made it a point to distinguish female and male traits as clearly as possible. She witnessed how women were much more easily discombobulated by the personal slights of a lover or husband; but they were better at dealing with calamity in professional work than men. They were geared to giving birth, protecting children, steering them through crisis. Men needed to pause and dress themselves in coldness in order to deal with a savaged body. In all her training in Europe and America she saw that again and again. Women doctors were more confident in chaos and accident, calmer in dealing with the fresh corpse of an old woman, a young beautiful man, small children. The times Anil would slip into woe were when she saw a dead child in clothes. A dead three-year-old with the clothes her parents had dressed her in.
We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn’t take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries. In Sri Lanka one is surrounded by family order, most people know every meeting you have during the day, there is nothing anonymous. But if I meet a Sri Lankan elsewhere in the world and we have a free afternoon, it doesn’t necessarily happen, but each of us knows all hell could break loose. What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?’
Anil is talking to Sarath, who in his path from youth to manhood, she suspects, remained held within parental principles. He, she is sure, obeyed while not necessarily believing the rules. He would not have known the realities of sexual freedom available to him, though his head might have loafed through anarchy. He, she suspects, is a shy man, in that sense of lacking the confidence to approach and proposition. In any case, she knows they both come from a society that has involved hazardous intrigues of love and marriage and an equally anarchic system of planetary influence. Sarath told her about the henahuru in his family during a rest-house meal. . . .
To be born under a certain star made people unsuitable as marriage partners. A woman born with Mars in the Seventh House was ‘malefic.’ Whoever she married would die. Meaning, in the minds of Sri Lankans, she would in essence be responsible for his death, she would kill him.
Sarath’s father, for instance, had two brothers. The older brother married a woman their family had known for years. He was dead within two years of a harsh fever, during which she nursed him day and night. There had been one child. The woman’s grief and retreat from the world at this death were terrible. The second brother was called upon by the family to bring her back into the world, for the sake of the boy. He brought the child gifts, insisted on taking mother and son on his vacations up-country, and eventually he and the woman, the former wife of his brother, fell in love. In many ways it was a greater and more subtle love than had existed in the first marriage. The intention of passion and sharing had not been there at the start. The woman had been brough
t back into the world. There was gratefulness towards the younger and good-looking brother. So when, during a car ride, the fragment of desire emerged with her first laughter in a year, it must have seemed a betrayal of his former motive, which was simply generous concern for his brother’s widow. They married, he cared for his brother’s child. They had a daughter, and within a year and a half he too fell ill and died in the arms of his wife.
It turned out, of course, that the woman was malefic. The only one she could have married safely was a man with the same star pattern. Thus any man born under such a star was sought after by such women. Men who were malefic also had to marry a woman with the same star, but it was believed that women in this state were considerably more dangerous than men. When a malefic man married a nonmalefic woman, she did not necessarily die. But if a woman did, the man would always die. She was henahuru, literally ‘a pain in the neck.’ Though more dangerous.
Ironically, Sarath, the son of the third brother, born some years later and having no connection with the wife of the first two brothers, was born with Mars in the Seventh House. ‘My father married the woman he fell in love with,’ Sarath says. ‘He did not even consult her stars. I was born. My brother was born. I heard the story years later. I saw it as just an old wives’ tale, random celestial positioning. Such beliefs seem a medieval comfort. I could say, for instance, that during the years I studied abroad I had Jupiter in my head and it helped me pass my exams. And when I returned, Venus replaced it and I fell in love. Venus is sometimes not good, it can make you frivolous in judgement. But these are not beliefs I hold.’
‘Neither do I,’ she says. ‘We do it to ourselves.’
Anil had come out of her first class at Guy’s Hospital in London with just one sentence in her exercise book: The bone of choice would be the femur.
She loved the way the lecturer had stated it, offhand, but with the air of a pompatus. As if this piece of information were the first rule needed before they could progress to greater principles. Forensic studies began with that one thighbone.
What surprised Anil as the teacher delineated the curriculum and the field of study was the quietness of the English classroom. In Colombo there was always a racket. Birds, lorries, fighting dogs, a kindergarten’s lessons of rote, street salesmen—all their sounds entered through open windows. There was no chance of an ivory tower existing in the tropics. Anil wrote Dr. Endicott’s sentence down and a few minutes later underlined it with her ballpoint in the hushed quiet. For the rest of the hour she just listened and watched the lecturer’s mannerisms.
It was while studying at Guy’s that Anil found herself in the smoke of one bad marriage. She was in her early twenties and was to hide this episode from everyone she met later in life. Even now she wouldn’t replay it and consider the level of damage. She saw it more as some contemporary fable of warning.
He too was from Sri Lanka, and in retrospect she could see that she had begun loving him because of her loneliness. She could cook a curry with him. She could refer to a specific barber in Bambalapitiya, could whisper her desire for jaggery or jakfruit and be understood. That made a difference in the new, too brittle country. Perhaps she herself was too tense with uncertainty and shyness. She had expected to feel alien in England only for a few weeks. Uncles who had made the same journey a generation earlier had spoken romantically of their time abroad. They suggested that the right remark or gesture would open all doors. Her father’s friend Dr. P. R. C. Peterson had told the story of being sent to school in England as an eleven-year-old. On the first day he was called a ‘native’ by a classmate. He stood up at once and announced to the teacher, ‘I’m sorry to say this, sir, but Roxborough doesn’t know who I am. He called me a “native.” That’s the wrong thing to do. He is the native and I’m the visitor to the country.’
But acceptance was harder than that. Having been a mild celebrity in Colombo because of her swimming, Anil was shy without the presence of her talent, and found it difficult to enter conversations. Later, when she developed her gift for forensic work, she knew one of the advantages was that her skill signalled her existence—like a neutral herald.
In her first month in London she’d been constantly confused by the geography around her. (What she kept noticing about Guy’s Hospital was the number of doors!) She missed two classes in her first week, unable to find the lecture room. So for a while she began arriving early each morning and waited on the front steps for Dr. Endicott, following him through the swing doors, stairways, grey-and-pink corridors, to the unmarked classroom. (She once followed him and startled him and others in the men’s bathroom.)
She seemed timid even to herself. She felt lost and emotional. She murmured to herself the way one of her spinster aunts did. She didn’t eat much for a week and saved enough money to phone Colombo. Her father was out and her mother was unable to come to the phone. It was about one in the morning and she had woken her ayah, Lalitha. They talked for a few minutes, until they were both weeping, it felt, at the far ends of the world. A month later she fell within the spell of her future, and soon-to-be, and eventually ex-, husband.
It seemed to her he had turned up from Sri Lanka in bangles and on stilts. He too was a medical student. He was not shy. Within days of their meeting he focussed his wits entirely on Anil—a many-armed seducer and note writer and flower bringer and telephone-message leaver (he had quickly charmed her landlady). His organized passion surrounded her. She had the sense that he had never been lonely or alone before meeting her. He had panache in the way he could entice and choreograph the other medical students. He was funny. He had cigarettes. She saw how he mythologized their rugby positions and included such things in the fabric of their conversations until they were familiar touchstones—a trick that never left any of them at a loss for words. A team, a gang, that was in fact only two weeks deep. They each had an epithet. Lawrence who had thrown up once on the Underground, the siblings Sandra and Percy Lewis whose family scandals were acknowledged and forgiven, Jackman of the wide brows.
He and Anil were married quickly. She briefly suspected that for him it was another excuse for a party that would bond them all. He was a fervent lover, even with his public life to choreograph. He certainly opened up the geography of the bedroom, insisting on lovemaking in their nonsoundproof living room, on the wobbly sink in the shared bathroom down the hall, on the boundary line quite near the long-stop during a county cricket match. These private acts in an almost public sphere echoed his social nature. There seemed to be no difference for him between privacy and friendship with acquaintances. Later she would read that this was the central quality of a monster. Still, there was considerable pleasure on both their parts during this early period. Though she realized it was going to be crucial for her to come back to earth, to continue her academic studies.
When her father-in-law visited England he swept them up and took them out to dinner. The son was for once quiet, and the father attempted to persuade them to return to Colombo and have his grandchildren. He kept referring to himself as a philanthropist, which appeared to give him a belief that he was always on higher moral ground. As the dinner progressed she felt that every trick in the Colombo Seven social book was being used against her. He objected to her having a full-time career, keeping her own name, was annoyed at her talking back. When she described classroom autopsies during the trifle, the father had been outraged. ‘Is there nothing you won’t do?’ And she had replied, ‘I won’t go to crap games with barons and earls.’
The next day the father lunched alone with his son, then flew back to Colombo.
At home the two of them fought now over everything. She was suspicious of his insights and understanding. He appeared to spend all his spare energy on empathy. When she wept, he would weep. She never trusted weepers after that. (Later, in the American Southwest, she would avoid those television shows with weeping cowboys and weeping priests.) During this time of claustrophobia and marital warfare, sex was the only mutual constant. She insisted
on it as much as he. She assumed it gave the relationship some normality. Days of battle and fuck.
The disintegration of the relationship was so certain on her part that she would never replay any of their days together. She had been fooled by energy and charm; he had wept and burrowed under her intelligence until she felt she had none left. Venus, as Sarath would say, had been in her head, when it should have been the time of Jupiter.
She would return from the lab in the evenings and be met by his jealousy. At first this presented itself as sexual jealousy, then she saw it was an attempt to limit her research and studies. It was the first handcuff of marriage, and it almost buried her in their small flat in Ladbroke Grove. After she escaped him she would never say his name out loud. If she saw his handwriting on a letter she never opened it, fear and claustrophobia rising within her. In fact, the only reference to the era of her marriage she allowed into her life was Van Morrison’s ‘Slim Slow Slider’ with its mention of Ladbroke Grove. Only the song survived. And only because it referred to separation.
Saw you early this morning
With your brand-new boy and your Cadillac . . .
She would sing along hoping that he did not also join in with his sentimental heart, wherever he was.