He was in his seventies, his eyesight worrying him. He still wrote in cursive script, racing the truth out of himself. He was thin as a broom, wore the same cotton trousers bought along the Galle Road, the same two plum-coloured shirts, spectacles. He still had his dry, wise laugh that seemed, to those who knew them both, the only biological connection he had with his brother.
He lived in the forest grove with his books and writing tablets. But for him, now, all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain. Though as he worked he was conscious that the paper itself that held these histories was aging fast. It was insect-bitten, sun-faded, wind-scattered. And there was his old, thin body. Palipana too now was governed only by the elements.
*
Sarath drove with Anil north beyond Kandy, into the dry zone, searching for Palipana. There was no way the teacher could be told they were coming, and Sarath had no idea how they would be greeted—whether they would be spurned or grudgingly acknowledged. By the time they reached Anuradhapura they were in the heat of the day. They drove on and within an hour were at the entrance to the forest. They left the car and walked for twenty minutes along a path that snaked between large boulders, then opened unexpectedly into a clearing. There were abandoned stone-and-wood structures strewn in front of them—the dry remnants of a water garden, slabs of rock. There was a girl sifting rice, and Sarath went towards her and spoke with her.
The girl boiled water for tea over a twig fire and the three of them sat on a bench and drank it. The girl still had said nothing. Anil assumed Palipana was asleep in the darkness of a hut, and a while later an old man came out of one of the structures in a sarong and shirt. He went around to the side, pulled up a bucket from a well and washed his face and arms. When he returned he said, ‘I heard you talking, Sarath.’ Anil and Sarath both stood, but Palipana made no further gesture towards them. He just stood there. Sarath bent down and touched the old man’s feet, then led him to the bench.
‘This is Anil Tissera. . . . We’re working together, analyzing some skeletons that were found near Bandarawela.’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you do, sir?’
‘A most beautiful voice.’
And Anil suddenly realized he was blind.
He reached out and held her forearm, touching the skin, feeling the muscle underneath; she sensed he was interpreting her shape and size from this fragment of her body.
‘Tell me about them—how ancient?’ He let go of her.
Anil looked quickly at Sarath, who gestured to the forest around them. Who was the old man going to tell?
Palipana’s head kept tilting, as if trying to catch whatever was passing in the air around him.
‘Ah—a secret against the government. Or perhaps a government secret. We are in the Grove of Ascetics. We are safe here. And I am the safest secret-holder. Besides, it makes no difference to me whose secret it is. You already know that, don’t you, Sarath? Otherwise you would not have come all this way for help. Is that not correct?’
‘We need to think something through, perhaps to find someone. A specialist.’
‘As you can tell, I am unable to see anymore, but bring what you have over to me. What is it?’
Sarath went to his bag beside the twig fire, removed the plastic wrapping, and walked over and put the skull in Palipana’s lap.
Anil watched the old man as he sat in front of them, calm and still. It was about five in the evening and without the harsh sunlight the rock outcrops around them were now pale and soft. She became aware of the quieter sounds around them.
‘Bell and other archaeologists thought this place the location of a secular summer palace when he came upon it in the nineteenth century. But the Cūlavaṃsa describes the establishment of forest-dwelling fraternities—by monks who opposed rituals and luxuries.’
Palipana gestured to his left without moving his head. Of the five structures in the clearing, he was living in the simplest one, built against a rock outcrop, with a contemporary leaf roof.
‘They were not really poor, but they lived sparsely—you know the distinction between the gross material world and the “subtle” material world, don’t you? Well, they embraced the latter. Sarath has no doubt told you about the elaborate urinal stones. He always enjoyed that detail.’
Palipana pursed his lips. There was a tinge of dry humour to his expression and she supposed it was the closest he came to a smile.
‘We are safe here, but of course history teaches. During the reign of Udaya the Third, some monks fled the court to escape his wrath. And they came into the Grove of Ascetics. The king and the Uparaja followed them and cut their heads off. Also recorded in the Cūlavaṃsa is the population’s reaction to this. They became rebellious, “like the ocean stirred by a storm.” You see, the king had violated a sanctuary. There were huge protests all over the kingdom, all because of some monks. All because of a couple of heads . . .’
Palipana fell silent. Anil watched his fingers, beautiful and thin, moving over the outlines of the skull Sarath had given him, his long fingernails at the supraorbital ridge, within the orbital cavities, then cupping the shape as if warming his palms on the skull, as if it were a stone from some old fire. He was testing the jaw’s angle, the blunt ridge of its teeth. She imagined he could hear the one bird in the forest distance. She imagined he could hear Sarath’s sandals pacing, the scrape of his match, the sound of the fire roasting the tobacco leaf as Sarath smoked his beedi a few yards away. She was sure he could hear all that, the light wind, the other fragments of noise that passed by his thin face, that glassy brown boniness of his own skull. And all the while the blunt eyes looked out, piercing whatever caught them. His face was immaculately shaved. Had he done that, or was it the girl?
‘Tell me what you think—you.’ He turned his head in Anil’s direction.
‘Well . . . We’re not in full agreement. But we both know the skeleton this skull comes from is contemporary. It was found in a cache of nineteenth-century bones.’
‘But the pedicle on the back of the neck was recently broken,’ the old man said.
‘He—’
‘I did that,’ Sarath said. ‘Two days ago.’
‘Without my permission,’ she said.
‘Sarath always does what he does for a reason, he is not a random man. He travels in mid-river, always.’
‘A visionary decision while drunk, we are calling it for now,’ she said as calmly as she could.
Sarath looked between them, at ease with this wit.
‘Tell me more. You.’ He turned his head towards her again.
‘My name is Anil.’
‘Yes.’
She saw Sarath shaking his head and grinning. She ignored Palipana’s question and gazed into the darkness of the structure he lived in.
They were not surrounded by verdant landscape. Ascetics always chose outcrops of living rock and cleared the topsoil away. There was just the roof of thatch and palm. His leaf hall. Old pissed-off ascetics.
Still, it was calm here. Cicadas noisy and invisible. Sarath had told her that the first time he visited a forest monastery he had not wanted to leave. He had guessed that his teacher in exile would select one of the leaf halls that ringed Anuradhapura, a traditional home for monks. And Palipana had said once how he wished to be buried in this region.
Anil walked past the old man and stood by the well, looking down into it. ‘Where is she going?’ she heard Palipana say, no real annoyance in his voice. The girl came out of the house with some passion fruit juice and cut guava. Anil drank from a glass quickly. Then she turned to him.
‘It’s likely he was buried twice. What’s important is that the second time it was in a restricted area—accessible only to the police or the army or some high-level government officials. Someone at Sarath’s level, for example. No one else has access to such places. So this doesn’t seem a crime by an average citizen. I know that murders are sometimes committed during a war for personal reasons, but I d
on’t think a murderer would have the luxury of burying a victim twice. The skeleton this head is part of was found by us in a cave in Bandarawela. We need to discover if we’re talking about a murder committed by the government.’
‘Yes.’
‘The trace elements on Sailor’s bones do not—’
‘Who is Sailor?’
‘Sailor is a name we have given the skeleton. The trace elements of soil in his bones do not match the soil where we found him. We don’t necessarily agree about the exact bone age, but we are certain he was buried somewhere else first. That is, he was killed and then buried. Then he was dug up, moved to a new location and buried again. Not only do the trace elements of soil not match, but we suspect the pollen that adhered to him before he was buried comes from a totally different region.’
‘Wodehouse’s Pollen Grains . . .’
‘Yes, we used that. Sarath has located the pollen to two possible places, one up near Kegalle and another in the Ratnapura area.’
‘Ah, an insurgent area.’
‘Yes. Where many villagers disappeared during the crisis.’
Palipana stood and held out the skull for one of them to take. ‘It’s cooler now, we can have supper. Can you stay the night?’
‘Yes,’ Anil said.
‘I will help Lakma cook, we cook the meals together—while you both rest, perhaps.’
‘I’d like a well bath,’ she told him. ‘We’ve been on the road since five this morning. Is that all right?’
Palipana nodded.
Sarath went into the darkness of the leaf hall and lay down on a floor mat. He seemed exhausted from the long drive. Anil returned to the car and pulled two sarongs out of her bag, then walked back to the clearing. She undressed by the well, unstrapped her watch and got into the diya reddha cloth, and dropped the bucket into the depths. There was a hollow smash far below her. The bucket sank and filled. She jerked the rope so the bucket flew up, and caught the rope near the handle. Now she poured the cold water over herself and its glow entered her in a rush, refreshing her. Once more she dropped the bucket into the well and jerked it up and poured it over her hair and shoulders so the water billowed within the thin cloth onto her belly and legs. She understood how wells could become sacred. They combined sparse necessity and luxury. She would give away every earring she owned for an hour by a well. She repeated the mantra of gestures again and again. When she had finished she unwrapped the wet cloth and stood naked in the wind and the last of the sunlight, then put on the dry sarong. She bent over and beat the water off her hair.
Sometime later she woke and sat up on the bench. She heard splashing and turned to see Palipana at the well, the girl pouring water over his naked body. He stood facing Anil, his arms straight down. He was thin, like some lost animal, some idea. Lakma kept pouring water over him, and they were both gesturing and laughing now.
At five-fifteen in the morning those who had woken in the dark had already walked a mile, left the streets and come down into the fields. They had blown out the one lantern among them and now moved confidently in the darkness, their bare feet in the mud and wet grass. Ananda Udugama was used to the dark paths. He knew they would soon come upon the scattering of sheds, the mounds of fresh earth, and the water pump and the three-foot-diameter hole in the ground that was the pit head.
With the dark-green light of morning around them the men appeared to float over the open landscape. They could hear and almost see the birds that shot out of the fields with life in their mouths. They began stripping off their vests. They were all gem-pit workers. Soon they would be under the earth, on their knees digging into walls, feeling for any hardness of stone or root or gem. They would move in the underground warrens, sloshing barefoot in mud and water, combing their fingers into the wet clay, the damp walls. Each shift was six hours long. Some entered the earth in darkness and emerged in light, some returned to dusk.
Now the men and women stood by the pump. The men doubled their sarongs and retied them at the waist, hung their vests on the beams of the shed. Ananda took a mouthful of petrol and sprayed it onto the carburetor. When he pulled the cord, the motor jumped to life, thudding against the earth. Water began pouring out of a hose. They heard another motor start up half a mile away. In the next ten minutes the dawn landscape became visible, but by then Ananda and three others had disappeared down a ladder into the earth.
Before the men went down, seven lit candles were lowered in a basket through the three-foot-diameter hole, forty feet below into the darkness by rope. The candles gave light as well as a warning in case the air was unsafe. At the base of the pit, where the candles rested, were three tunnels that disappeared into deeper darkness where the men would go.
Alone now on the surface the women began arranging the silt baskets and within fifteen minutes they heard the whistles and started pulling baskets of mud from below. By the time there was full light in the fields the entire flat region of Ratnapura district was sputtering into life as pumps drained water from the pits and the women used it to flush mud free from what had been sent up in the search for anything of value.
The men in the earth worked in a half-crouch, damp with sweat and tunnel water. If someone cut an arm or a thigh with a digging blade the blood looked black in the tunnel light. When candles smoked out because of the ever-present moisture, the men would lie there in the water, while the digger closest to the entrance would drag himself through darkness and send the candles up to the dry daylight of the pit head to be lit and returned.
At noon Ananda’s shift was over. He and the men with him climbed the ladder and paused ten feet below the surface to accustom themselves to the glare, then continued and stepped out onto the fields. Helped by the women, they moved to the mound where they could be hosed off, beginning with hair and shoulders, the water jetting onto their almost naked bodies.
They dressed and began their walk home. By three in the afternoon, in the village where he lived with his sister and brother-in-law, Ananda was drunk. He would roll off the pallet he had been put on, would move in his familiar half-crouch out the door and piss in the yard, unable to stand or even look up to be aware who might be watching him.
In the leaf hall, shade-filled and muted in colour, the only bright object Anil was conscious of was Sarath’s wristwatch. There were two rolled mats and a small table where Palipana still wrote, in spite of blindness, in large billowing script that was half language, half pageantry—the borders between them blurred. This was where he sat most mornings while his thoughts circled and then were caught in the dark room.
The girl placed a cloth on the floor, and they sat around it and leaned towards their food, eating with their fingers. Sarath remembered how Palipana used to travel around the country with his students, how he would eat in silence, listening to them, and suddenly expose his opinions in a twenty-minute monologue. So Sarath had eaten his first meals in silence, never putting forward a theory. He was learning the rules and methods of argument the way a boy watching a sport from the sidelines learns timing and skills with his still body. If the students ever assumed something, their teacher would turn on them. They had trusted him because of his severity, because he was incorruptible.
You, Palipana would say, pointing. Never using anyone’s name, as if that were immaterial to the discussion or search. Just, When was this rock cut? The missing letter? The name of the artificer who drew that arm?
They would travel on side roads, stay at third-rate rest houses, drag chiselled slabs from brush into sunlight, and at night draw maps of courtyards and palace sites based on the detritus of pillars and archways they had seen during the day.
‘I removed the head for a reason.’
Palipana’s hand kept moving towards the bowl.
‘Have some brinjals, this is my pride. . . .’
Sarath knew that Palipana’s interruptions at moments like this meant he was eager. It was a little taunt. The reality of life versus a concept.
‘I photographed the skeleto
n with and without the head for a record. Meanwhile we’ll continue analyzing the skeleton—its soil traces, palymology. The brinjals are very good. . . . Sir, you and I work on ancient rocks, fossils, rebuild dried-up water gardens, concern ourselves with why an army moved into the dry zone. We can identify an architect by his habit of building winter and summer palaces. But Anil lives in contemporary times. She uses contemporary methods. She can cut a cross-section of bone with a fine saw and determine the skeleton’s exact age at death that way.’
‘How is that?’
Sarath said nothing in order that Anil would answer. She used her food-free hand to emphasize her method. ‘You put the cross-section of bone under a microscope. It’s got to be one-tenth of a millimetre—so you can see the blood-carrying canals. As people get older, the canals, channels really, are broken up, fragmented, more numerous. If we can get hold of such a machine, we can guess any age this way.’
‘Guess,’ he muttered.
‘Five-percent margin of error. I’d guess that the person whose skull you inspected was twenty-eight years old.’
‘How certain . . .’
‘More certain than what you could know feeling the skull and the brow ridges and measuring the jaw.’
‘How wonderful.’ He turned his head to her. ‘What a wonder you are.’
She flushed with embarrassment.
‘I suppose you can tell how old a geezer like me is too, with a piece of bone.’