He walked the stretch of hospital, from wing to wing, open air on either side of him. There was the buzz of electricity close beside the pools of light as you passed them. You were aware of it only at night. You saw a bush and you sensed it growing. Someone came out and poured blood into a gutter and coughed. Everyone had a bad cough in Polonnaruwa.
He was aware of every sound. A shoe or sandal step, the noise of the bedspring when he lifted a patient, the snapping of an ampule. Sleeping in the wards, he could be one limb of a large creature, linked to the others by the thread of noises.
Later, if he was unable to sleep in the district medical officer’s building, he would walk back the two hundred yards along the empty curfewed main street to the hospital. The nurse stationed at a night desk would turn and see the look on him and find a bed for him. He would be asleep in seconds.
In the village clinic were twenty mothers and their infants. They filled out clinic records and the pregnant women were checked for diabetes and anemia. The doctors talked to each of the women, studying their forms as they moved forward in the queue. On a makeshift table a nurse wrapped vitamin pills in newspaper and gave them to the mothers. A pressure cooker was being used as a steam sterilizer for glass syringes and needles.
The screams began as soon as the first baby got a needle, and within seconds most of the babies in the small shack that served as a medical outpost were howling. After about five minutes they were silent again; breasts had been pulled out and mothers beamed at their infants and there was solution and victory for all. This one clinic served four hundred families from the area as well as three hundred from an adjoining region. No one from the Ministry of Health had ever come to the border villages.
For all of the doctors, Lakdasa was the great moral force, the rough brother of justice. ‘The problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem.’ He was thirty-seven and his hair was grey. When he drank he revealed an intricate set of confabulations, as if he were steering himself through a well-mapped harbour. ‘If I drink more than seventy-two millimetres, my liver plays up. If I drink less, my heart plays up.’
Lakdasa lived mostly on potato rotis. He smoked Gold Leaf cigarettes in his jeep where a fan rotating air was glued to the dashboard. He kept his sarong in the glove compartment and slept wherever he had to—the DMO’s office, a sofa in the living room of a friend. There were months when his weight would suddenly drop ten pounds. Obsessed with his blood pressure, he tested it daily, and any session at a clinic ended with his weighing himself on the scales and checking his blood sugar. He noted the bell curves and continued as usual driving through jungles and garrisoned land to meet his patients. It didn’t matter what state he was in as long as he knew what state he was in.
On Saturday mornings Gamini and Lakdasa drove back to Polonnaruwa listening to the cricket. A long day at a clinic. Sometimes along the road, now and then, there were thirty-foot strips of grain being dried on the tarmac, strips laid so narrow a car could pass over them without having the wheels touch the drying grain. A man with a broom stood nearby to signal to passing cars to be aware of it, and to sweep the grain back to the centre if they were not.
In the cafeteria of the base hospital—a half-hour break in his shift—a woman sat down at Gamini’s table and drank her tea, ate a biscuit with him. It was about four in the morning and he didn’t know her. He just nodded to her, he felt private and too tired to talk.
‘I helped you with an operation once, some months ago. The massacre night.’ His mind wheeled back a century.
‘I thought you got transferred.’
‘Yes, I was, then I came back here.’
He hadn’t recognized her at all. She’d had a mask on when he spent the crucial long hours with her over the boy. When she was not wearing a mask, in pre-op, he had probably only glanced at her. Their comradeship had been mostly anonymous.
‘You’re married to someone here, right?’ She nodded. There was a scar at her wrist. It was new, he would have noticed that during the surgery.
He looked up quickly at her face. ‘It is very good to meet you.’
‘Yes. For me too,’ she said.
‘Where did you go?’
‘He’—a cough—‘he got stationed in Kurunegala.’
Gamini kept watching her, the way she was selecting the words carefully. Her face was young and lean and dark, her eyes bright as if it were daylight.
‘Actually, I have passed you in the wards a lot!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. I know you didn’t recognize me. Why should you.’ A pause. She put her hand through her hair and then was very still.
‘I’ve seen that boy.’
‘That boy?’
She looked down, smiling to herself now. ‘The boy we operated on. I have visited him. They . . . they renamed the boy Gamini. The parents. After you. It was a lot of trouble, red tape, for them to do that.’
‘Good. So I have an heir.’
‘Yes, you do. . . . I am training now extra hours in the children’s ward.’ She was about to continue, then stopped.
He nodded, suddenly tired. What he wanted in his life now seemed a huge thing. What he wished for would involve the lives of others, years of effort. Chaos. Unfairness. Lying.
She looked at her tea and drank the last of it.
‘It was good to meet with you.’
‘Yes.’
Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on. When later he turned over the hands of a patient, he thought of the scar at her wrist, the way her fingers had slipped through her hair, what he wished to reveal to her. But it was his own heart that could not step into the world.
*
There is a break before the ward visits at six p.m. Gamini pulls down the registrar’s log from the shelf. Since the scribes have taken over, the entries are much better—the handwriting immaculate and small, green ink underlining the months and Sundays. He cannot remember the date so he looks for a flurry of entries, as there would have been around the time of the killings. Then goes down the list of interns and nurses.
Prethiko
Seela
Raduka
Buddhika
Kaashdya
He moves his fingers down the ledger to check the assignments, discovers her name.
He walks almost a mile to the event, in his only good jacket. The rest house is serving the usual bad food in the glassed-in dining room that hangs over the water. The children wait with unlit sparklers, in delirium for any kind of ceremony. Cake in one hand, a sparkler in the other. Lakdasa is organizing the fireworks display and is on the raft lining up his catherine wheels and burning schoolrooms. Gamini has caught a glimpse of her in the distance. He hasn’t seen her since the cup of tea they shared two weeks earlier.
When she is close to him later, he sees the small red earrings against her darkness. They were her grandmother’s, and the shortness of her boyishly cut hair allows him to see them clearly, the red gem on each lobe tiny as a ladybug. ‘I bury them when I am not wearing them,’ she says. They stroll towards the ruins, away from the rest house. A sign says:
PLEASE DO NOT ENTER AND PUT YOUR FEET AGAINST THE IMAGE AND TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS
.
Behind her are old fragments of colour, the white-red borders on the painted stone he can see even in this moonlight. From the promontory they watch the start of the fireworks. Some of the extravagant explosions are cut short, crashing too soon into the water, or they skitter dangerously like flung lit stones towards the rest house.
He turns to her. She is wearing his jacket over her ruffled shirt.
And she realizes there is an emotional seriousness in this distant man. She needs to step backwards out of the maze they have innocently entered. He is content to be near her, the beauty of this ear and earring, then a comparison with the other side of her head, the way the moon is over them and also in water, the way the water holds the night lilies and their reflection. The false and true alternatives surround them.
She takes his hand and brings it to her forehead. ‘Feel that. Do you feel that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That’s my brain. I’m not as drunk as you, so I am smarter than you. Or even if you were not drunk I might be clearer about this than you. A little.’ Then a smile from her that will make him forgive anything she says.
She talks to him, more strongly than what the scar on her wrist suggests, her shirt open in a billow at the neck.
‘You look, at some moments, like my brother’s wife.’ He laughs.
‘You are going to be my husband’s brother, then. That’s how I’ll treat you. That is a kind of love.’
He leans back against the pavilion of stone, someone or other’s cosmic mountain, and she moves forward, he thinks it is to him, but she is only returning his black jacket.
He remembers swimming later that evening, entering the dark water naked and climbing out onto the abandoned firework raft. He sees a few silhouettes in the glassed room over the water. The Queen of England came to this rest house years ago, when she was young. He sits out there clearing his head of the way she disappeared into the throng with the subtlest of courtesies. The way . . .
A year from now he will return to Colombo and meet his future wife.
Gamini?
A woman named Chrishanti will say, approaching him.
Chrishanti.
He knew her brother at school. It is another fancy-dress party. Neither of them is wearing a costume, but they are both disguised by the past.
T
here were some passengers on the train squatting in the aisles with wrapped bundles, pet birds.
I was the one she should have loved, Gamini said.
Anil sitting beside him assumed she was to get a confession. The mercurial doctor about to expose his heart. That category of seduction. But there was nothing he did or said during the remaining journey—to the ayurvedic hospital he had offered to show her—that used the reins of seduction. Just his slow drawl as the train swept unhesitatingly into the darkness of tunnels and he would turn from looking at his hands towards his reflection in the glass. That was how he told her, looking down or away from her, and she seeing him only in a wavering mirror image lost when they moved back into light.
I saw her often. More than most people knew. With her job at the radio station, my strange hours, it was easy. And we were ‘related.’ . . . It wasn’t a courtship. That suggests two people in a dance. Well, maybe one dance at my wedding, I suppose. ‘The Air That I Breathe.’ Remember that song? A romantic moment. It was a wedding after all, you could embrace each other. I was getting married. She was married already. But I was the one she should have loved. I was already on speed, in those days, when I would see her.
Who are you speaking of, Gamini?
I’m always awake. I’m good at what I do. So when she was brought in to Dean Street Hospital, I was there. She had swallowed
lye. Suiciders decide on that method of death because, since it’s the most painful, they might stop themselves doing it. The throat is burned out, then the organs. She was unconscious, even when she woke she didn’t know where she was. I ran her through into Emergency with a couple of nurses.
With one hand I was giving her painkillers and with the other using ammonia to snap her awake. I needed to reach her. I didn’t want her to feel alone, in this last stage. I overloaded her with painkillers but I didn’t want her asleep. It was selfishness on my part. I should have just knocked her out, let her go. But I wanted her to be comforted by me being there. That it was me, not him, not her husband.
I held her eyelids up with my thumbs. I shook her until she saw who it was. She didn’t care. I’m here. I love you, I said. She closed her eyes, it seemed to me in disgust. Then she was in pain again.
I can’t give you any more, I said, I’ll lose you completely. She put her hand up and made a gesture across her throat.
The train was sucked into the tunnel and they moved within it, shuddering in the darkness.
Who was she, Gamini? She could not see him. She touched his shoulder and could feel him turn towards her. He brought his face close to her. She could see nothing in spite of the muddy flicker of light now and then.
What would you do with a name? But it wasn’t a question. He spat it out.
The train came into daylight for a few seconds, then slid into the darkness of another tunnel.
All the wards were busy that night, he continued. Shootings, others to be operated on. There are always a lot of suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it. And she, I think, was overcome by it. The nurses left me with her and then I was called into the triage wards. She was full of morphine,
asleep. I found a kid in the hall and I got him to watch her. If she woke he was to come and find me in D wing. This was three a.m. I didn’t want him falling asleep, so I broke a Benzedrine and gave him half. He found me later and told me she was awake. But I couldn’t save her.
There was a train window open and the sound of the clatter doubled. She could feel the gusts.
What would you do with her name? Would you tell my brother?
Someone kicked her ankle and she drew in her breath.
W
hen Leaf left Arizona Anil didn’t hear from her for more than six months. Although during every moment of her farewell she had promised to write. Leaf, who was her closest friend. Once there was just a postcard of a stainless-steel pole. Quemado, New Mexico, the postmark seemed to read, but there was no contact address. Anil assumed she’d abandoned her, for a new life, for new friends.
Watch out for the armadillos, señorita!
Still, Anil left a snapshot on her fridge of the two of them dancing at some party, this woman who had been her echo, who watched movies with her in her backyard. They’d sway in the hammock, they’d consume rhubarb pie, they’d wake up at three in the morning entangled in each other’s arms, and then Anil would drive home through the empty streets.