It was on the Good Ship Venus—
By Christ, you should have seen us.
The figurehead was a whore in bed
Astride a rampant penis.
The girls, normally as secure in their school as women within the bounds of courtly love, had thus been startled at the age of twelve and thirteen by this strange choreography, but had no desire to stop listening. It was not until Anil was twenty and in England that she heard the song again. And there—at a post–rugby match party—it seemed a more natural context, in tune with the male braying around her. But the trick of the boys of St. Thomas’s had been to hold up sheet music, and at first the song had sounded like a carol, with trills and descants and preverbal humming, and in this way they had fooled the matron, who was not really listening to anything but the tone. It was only the girls of the fourth and fifth forms who heard every word.
The captain’s name was Mugger,
A dirty-minded bugger.
He wasn’t fit to shovel shit
From one deck to another.
Anil was fond of that verse, and its neatly packed rhyme slid back into her mind at odd moments. She loved songs of anger and judgement. So at six a.m., walking towards the hospital, she tried to recall the other verses to ‘The Good Ship Venus,’ singing the first out loud. The rest she was less certain about, and played them on her lips, a faux tuba. ‘One of the greats,’ she muttered to herself. ‘One of the crucial ones.’
The trainee in Colombo who had written about pupae research turned out to be working in one of the offices off the postmortem lab. It had taken Anil some time to remember the name, but she now found Chitra Abeysekera typing an application form, the paper limp from the humidity of the room. She was standing as she typed, wearing a sari, with what seemed a portable office beside her—two large cardboard boxes and one metal case. They contained research notes, lab specimens, petri dishes and test tubes. The metal case held growing bugs.
The woman looked up at her.
‘Am I disturbing . . . ?’ Anil looked down at the four lines the woman had just typed. ‘Why don’t you take a break and let me type it for you?’
‘You’re the woman from Geneva, right?’ The face was disbelieving.
‘Yes.’
Chitra looked at her hands and they both laughed. Her skin was covered with cuts and bites. They could probably slip easily into a beehive and come out with plunder.
‘Just tell me what to say.’
Anil sidled up and, as Chitra spoke, did a quick edit, adding adjectives, improving her request for funds. Chitra’s blunt description of her project would not have gone far. Anil gave it the necessary drama and turned Chitra’s list of abilities into a more suggestive curriculum vitae. When they finished she asked if Chitra would like to get something to eat.
‘Not the hospital cafeteria,’ Chitra said helpfully. ‘The cook moonlights in the postmortem labs. You know what I’d like? Chinese air-conditioned. Let’s go to Flower Drum.’
There were three businessmen eating at the restaurant, but otherwise it was empty.
‘Thank you for the application help,’ Chitra said.
‘It’s a good project. It’ll be important. Can you do all that here? Do you have facilities?’
‘I have to do it here . . . the pupae . . . the larvae. The tests have to be done in this temperature. And I don’t like England. I’ll go to India sometime.’
‘If you need help, contact me. God, I’d forgotten what cool air feels like. I might just move in here. I want to talk to you about your research.’
‘Later, later. Tell me what you like about the West.’
‘Oh—what do I like? Most of all I think I like that I can do things on my own terms. Nothing is anonymous here, is it. I miss my privacy.’
Chitra looked totally uninterested in this Western virtue.
‘I have to be back by one-thirty,’ she said, and ordered chow mein and a Coke.
The cardboard box with test tubes was open and Chitra was prodding a larva under the microscope. ‘This is two weeks old.’ She tweezered it out and placed it in a tray holding a piece of human liver, which Anil assumed must have been obtained illegally.
‘It’s necessary,’ Chitra said, aware of Anil’s gaze, trying to be casual about it. ‘A little got removed before someone was buried, a small favour. There is an important difference in the speed of growth when insects feed on this as opposed to organs from an animal.’ She dropped the rest of the liver into a picnic cooler, pulled out her charts and spread them over the central table. ‘So tell me how I can help you. . . .’
‘I’ve got a skeleton, partially burned. Can one still pick up information about pupae from it?’
Chitra covered her mouth and burped, as she had been doing continually since the meal. ‘It helps if it is in situ.’
‘That’s the problem. I’ve got earth from the location where we found it, but we think it was moved. We don’t know the first location. I’ve got earth only from the last site.’
‘I could look at the bone. Some insects are attracted to bone, not flesh.’ Chitra smiled at her. ‘So there might be pupae remains from the first location. We could reduce the site possibilities by knowing the type of insect. It’s strange, it’s just those first couple of months when bone attracts some creatures.’
‘Unusual.’
‘Mmm,’ Chitra said, as if eating chocolate. ‘Some butterflies also go to bone for moisture. . . .’
‘Can I show you some of the bone?’
‘I go up-country tomorrow for a few days.’
‘Then later tonight? Is that all right?’
‘Mmm.’ Chitra sounded unconcerned, preoccupied with a clue, a timing on one of her charts. She turned from Anil to an array of insects, then selected one of the right plumpness and age with her forceps.
That night within the ship’s hold Sarath poured plastic that had been dissolved in acetone into a shallow dish, and brought out the camel-hair brush he would use on the bones. A diffuse light, the hum of the generator around him.
He moved to the lab table where a skeleton lay, picked up the alligator-clip lamp—the one source of focussed bright light here—and walked with it and the long cord, still lit, to a cupboard at the far end of the deep room. He opened it, poured himself three-quarters of a tumbler of arrack from a bottle and walked back to the skeleton.
The four skeletons from Bandarawela, revealed now to the air, would soon begin to weaken.
He loosened a new tungsten-carbide needle from its plastic container and attached it to a hand pick and began cleaning the bones of the first skeleton, drilling free the fragments of dirt. Then he turned on a slim hose and let it hover over each bone, air nestling into the evidence of the trauma as if he were blowing cool breath from a pursed mouth onto a child’s burn. He dipped the camel-hair brush into the dish and began painting a layer of protective plastic over the bones, moving down the spine and ribs. After that he carried the alligator-clip lamp to the second table and started on the second skeleton. Then the third. When he came to Sailor’s table he turned the heel bone sideways to find the centimetre-deep chip Anil had furrowed out of the calcaneus.
Sarath stretched and walked out of the light into the darkness, his hands out feeling for the arrack bottle, which he brought back with him to Sailor under the cone of light. It was about two in the morning. When he’d coated all four skeletons, he made notes on each of them and photographed three from anterior and lateral views.
He drank as he worked. The smell of the plastic was now strong in the room. There was no opening for fresh air. He unlocked the doors noisily and climbed up with the bottle of arrack onto the deck. Colombo was dark with curfew. It would be a beautiful hour to walk or cycle through it. The fraught quietness of the roadblocks, the old trees a panoply along Solomon Dias Mawatha. But in the harbour around him there was activity, the light from a tug rolling in the water, the white beams from tractors moving crates on the quay. Three or four a.m. He would lock up and
sleep on the ship for the rest of the night.
The hold was still full of the smell of plastic. He pulled out a tied bundle of beedis from a drawer and lit one, then inhaled its rich mortal thirty-two rumours of taste. Picked up the clip lamp and walked over to Sailor. He still had to photograph him. Okay, do it now, he said to himself, and took two shots, anterior and lateral. He stood there as the Polaroids developed, waving them in the air. When Sailor’s image was fully revealed he put the pictures in a brown envelope, sealed and addressed it, and dropped it into his coat pocket.
The three other skeletons had no skulls. But Sailor had a skull. Sarath put the half-smoked beedi on the metal sink and leaned forward. With a scalpel he cut apart the ligaments that attached the skull to the neck vertebrae, and separated it. He brought the skull to his desk. The burning hadn’t reached the head, so the frontal, orbital and lacrimal plates were smooth, the knit marks on the skull tight. Sarath wrapped it in plastic and placed it in a large shopping bag that said ‘Kundanmal’s.’ He returned and photographed Sailor without the skull, twice, lateral and anterior.
He was aware now more than anything that he and Anil needed help.
The Grove of Ascetics
The epigraphist Palipana was for a number of years at the centre of a nationalistic group that eventually wrestled archaeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans. He had made his name translating Pali scripts and recording and translating the rock graffiti of Sigiriya.
The main force of a pragmatic Sinhala movement, Palipana wrote lucidly, basing his work on exhaustive research, deeply knowledgeable about the context of the ancient cultures. While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia.
The 1970s had witnessed the beginning of a series of international conferences. Academics flew into Delhi, Colombo and Hong Kong for six days, told their best anecdotes, took the pulse of the ex-colony, and returned to London and Boston. It was finally realized that while European culture was old, Asian culture was older. Palipana, by now the most respected of the Sri Lankan group, went to one such gathering and never went to another. He was a spare man, unable to abide formality and ceremonial toasts.
The three years Sarath spent as a student of Palipana’s were the most difficult of his academic life. All archaeological data proposed by a student had to be confirmed. Every rock cuneiform or carving had to be drawn and redrawn onto the pages of journals, in sand, on blackboards, until it was a part of dreams. Sarath had thought of Palipana during the first two years as someone mean with praise and mean (rather than spare) in the way he lived. He seemed incapable of handing out compliments, would never buy anyone a drink or a meal. His brother, Nārada, who had no car and was always cadging rides, at first appeared similar, but was generous with time and friendship, generous with his laughter. Palipana always seemed to be saving himself for the language of history. He was vain and excessive only in how he insisted on having his work published a certain way, demanding two-colour diagrams on good paper that would survive weather and fauna. And it was only when a book was completed that his terrierlike focus would shift away from a project, so he could go empty-handed into another era or another region of the country.
History was ever-present around him. The stone remnants of royal bathing pools and water gardens, the buried cities, the nationalistic fervour he rode and used gave him and those who worked with him, including Sarath, limitless subjects to record and interpret. It appeared he could divine a thesis at any sacred forest.
Palipana had not entered the field of archaeology until he was middle-aged. And he had risen in the career not as a result of family contacts but simply because he knew the languages and the techniques of research better than those above him. He was not an easily liked man, he had lost charm somewhere in his youth. He would discover among his students over the years only four dedicated protégés. Sarath was one of them. By the time Palipana was in his sixties, however, he had fought with each of them. Not one of the four had forgiven him for their humiliations at his hands. But his students continued to believe two things—no, three: that he was the best archaeological theorist in the country, that he was nearly always right, and that even with his fame and success he continued to live a life-style more minimal than any of them. Perhaps this was the result of being the brother of a monk. Palipana’s wardrobe was, apparently, reduced to two identical outfits. And as he grew older he linked himself less and less with the secular world, save for his continuing vanity regarding publication. Sarath had not seen him for several years.
During these years Palipana had been turned gracelessly out of the establishment. This began with his publication of a series of interpretations of rock graffiti that stunned archaeologists and historians. He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century. The work was applauded in journals abroad and at home, until one of Palipana’s protégés voiced the opinion that there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts. They were a fiction. A group of historians was unable to locate the runes Palipana had written about. No one could find the sentences he had quoted and translated from dying warriors, or any of the fragments from the social manifestos handed down by kings, or even the erotic verses in Pali supposedly by lovers and confidants of the court mentioned by name but never quoted in the Cūlavaṃsa.
The detailed verses Palipana had published seemed at first to have ended arguments and debates by historians; they were confirmed by his reputation as the strictest of historians, who had always relied on meticulous research. Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world. Though perhaps it was more than a trick, less of a falsehood in his own mind; perhaps for him it was not a false step but the step to another reality, the last stage of a long, truthful dance.
But no one admired this strange act. Not his academic followers. Not even protégés like Sarath, who had been consistently challenged by his mentor during his academic years for crimes of laxness and inaccuracy. The gesture, ‘Palipana’s gesture,’ was seen as a betrayal of the principles on which he had built his reputation. A forgery by a master always meant much more than mischief, it meant scorn. Only when seen at its most innocent could it be regarded as an autobiographical or perhaps chemical breakdown.
The graffiti at the great rock fortress of Sigiriya was located on an overhang at the first quarter-mile mark of ascent. Older than the more famous paintings of goddesslike women on the Mirror Wall, it had been cut into the rock most probably in the sixth century. The faded moth-coloured writings had always been a magnet and a mystery for historians—they were enigmatic statements with no context—and Palipana himself had studied them and worried over them for fifteen years of his life. As a historian and a scientist he approached every problem with many hands. He was more likely to work beside a stonemason or listen to a dhobi woman washing clothes at a newly discovered rock pool than with a professor from the University of Peradeniya. He approached runes not with a historical text but with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills. His eyes recognized how a fault line in a rock wall might have insisted on the composure of a painted shoulder.
Having studied languages and text until he was forty, he spent the next thirty years in the field—the historical version already within him. So that approaching a site Palipana knew what would be there—whether a distinct pattern of free-standing pillars in a clearing or a familiar icon drawn on a cave wall high above. It was a strange self-knowledge for someone who had always been humble in his assumptions.
He spread his fingers over every discovered rune. He traced each letter on the Stone Book at Polonnaruwa, a boulder carved into a rectangle four feet high, thirty feet long, the first book of the country, laid his bare arms and the side of his face against this plinth that collected the heat
of the day. For most of the year it was dark and warm and only during the monsoons would the letters be filled with water, creating small, perfectly cut harbours, as at Carthage. A giant book in the scrub grass of the Sacred Quadrangle of Polonnaruwa, chiselled with letters, bordered by a frieze of ducks. Ducks for eternity, he whispered to himself, smiling in the noon heat, having pieced together what he had picked up in an ancient text. A secret. His greatest joys were such discoveries, as when he found the one dancing Ganesh, possibly the island’s first carved Ganesh, in the midst of humans in a frieze at Mihintale.
He drew parallels and links between the techniques of stonemasons he met with in Matara and the work he had done during the years of translating texts and in the field. And he began to see as truth things that could only be guessed at. In no way did this feel to him like forgery or falsification.
Archaeology lives under the same rules as the Napoleonic Code. The point was not that he would ever be proved wrong in his theories, but that he could not prove he was right. Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water, they allowed a leap from treetop to treetop. The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unprovable truth emerged.
However much he himself had stripped worldly goods and social habits from his life, even more was taken from him in reaction to his unprovable theories. There was no longer any respect accorded to his career. But he refused to give up what he claimed to have discovered, and made no attempt to defend himself. Instead he retreated physically. Years earlier, on a trip with his brother, he had found the remaining structures of a forest monastery, twenty miles from Anuradhapura. So now, with his few belongings, he moved there. The rumour was that he was surviving in the remnants of a ‘leaf hall,’ with little that was permanent around him. This was in keeping with the sixth-century sect of monks who lived under such strict principles that they rejected any religious decoration. They would adorn only one slab with carvings, then use it as a urinal stone. This was what they thought of graven images.