Forensic work during a political crisis was notorious, she knew, for its three-dimensional chess moves and back-room deals and muted statements for the ‘good of the nation.’ In the Congo, one Human Rights group had gone too far and their collection of data had disappeared overnight, their paperwork burned. As if a city from the past had been reburied. The investigative team, which included Anil in a lowly role as a programme assistant, had nothing left to do but get on a plane and go home. So much for the international authority of Geneva. The grand logos on letterheads and European office doors meant nothing where there was crisis. If and when you were asked by a government to leave, you left. You took nothing with you. Not a slide tray, not a piece of film. At the airport, while they searched her clothing, she’d sat almost naked on a stool.
One postcard from Leaf. One American bird. She pulled some cutlets and a beer out of the fridge. There would be a book to read, a shower to take. Later she might go to Galle Face Green and have a drink at one of the newer hotels, watch the drunk members of a touring English cricket team sing karaoke.
Was the partner assigned to her neutral in this war? Was he just an archaeologist who loved his work? The day before, on a road trip out of Colombo, he had shown her a few temples and then, passing some of his students working in a historic area, had joyfully joined them and was soon collecting slivers of mica, telling them where they were likely to find fragments of iron in the ground, as if he were a gifted and natural finder of things. Most of what Sarath wished to know was in some way linked to the earth. She suspected he found the social world around him irrelevant. His desire, he had told her, was to write a book someday about a city in the south of the island that no longer existed. Not a wall of it remained, but he wanted to tell the story of that place. It would emerge out of this dark trade with the earth, his knowledge of the region in chronicles—its medieval business routes, its presence as a favourite monsoon town of a certain king, as revealed in poems that celebrated the city’s daily life. He’d quoted a few lines from one of the poems which his teacher, a man named Palipana, had taught him.
That was Sarath at his most expressive, almost enthusiastic, one evening after a crab dinner in Mount Lavinia. He stood by the surf drawing the shape of the city with his hands, sketching it in the dark air. Through the imaginary lines she could see the waves, their curl and roll, like his sudden excitement moving towards her.
T
here were police officers all over the train. The man got on carrying a bird cage with a mynah in it. He walked through carriages, glancing at other passengers. There were no seats left and he sat on the floor. He was wearing a sarong, sandals, a Galle Road T-shirt. It was a slow train, travelling through rock passes, then emerging into sudden vistas. He knew that a mile or so before they got to Kurunegala there would be a tunnel and the train would curve into the dark claustrophobia of it. A few windows would remain open—they needed fresh air, though it meant the noise would be terrible. Once past the tunnel, back into sunlight, they would be getting ready to disembark.
He stood just as the train went into darkness. For a few moments there was the faint muddy light of the bulbs and then they went out. He could hear the bird talking. Three minutes of darkness.
The man moved quickly to where he remembered the government official was, beside the aisle. In the darkness he yanked him forward by his hair and wrapped the chain around his neck and began strangling him. He counted the seconds to himself in the darkness. When the man’s weight fell against him he still didn’t trust him, didn’t release his hold on the chain.
He had a minute left. He stood and lifted the man into his arms. Keeping him upright, he steered him towards the open window. The yellow lights flickered on for a second. He might have been a tableau in somebody’s dream.
He jerked the official off the ground and pushed him through the opening. The buffet of wind outside flung the head and shoulders backwards. He pushed him farther and then let go and the man disappeared into the noise of the tunnel.
W
hile Anil was working with the forensic team in Guatemala, she’d flown into Miami to meet Cullis. She arrived exhausted, her face and body drawn out. Dysentery, hepatitis, dengue fever, they were all going around. She and her team were eating in the villages where they were exhuming bodies; they had to eat the food they were given because it was the only way the villages could participate—by cooking for them. ‘You pray for beans,’ she murmured to Cullis, removing the work clothes she still had on—she had rushed to catch the last plane out—then climbing into her first hotel bath in months. ‘You avoid the seviche. If you have to eat it you throw up somewhere privately, as quick as you can.’ She stretched out in the miracle of a foam bath, a tired smile towards him, glad to have reached him. He knew that exhausted and focussed look, the drawl of her slurring voice as she told her stories.
‘I never actually dug before. I’m usually just in the labs. But we were doing exhumations in the field. Manuel, he gave me a brush and a chopstick and said break up the ground and brush it away. We got five skeletons the first day.’
He was on the edge of the tub watching her, closed eyes, away from the world. She’d cut her hair short. She was much thinner. He could see she had fallen even more in love with her work. Tired out but also refreshed by it.
She leaned forward and pulled the plug out, lay back again to feel the water disappear around her. Then she stood on the tiles, her body passive as he pressed the towel against her dark shoulders.
‘I know the name of several bones in Spanish,’ she boasted. ‘I know some Spanish.
Omóplato
is this. Shoulder blade.
Maxilar—
your upper jaw bone.
Occipital—
the bone at the back of the skull.’ She was slurring words, as if counting backwards with anaesthetic in her. ‘You’ve got a mixed bag of characters working on those sites. Big-shot pathologists from the States who can’t reach for salt without grabbing a woman’s breast. And Manuel. He is part of that community, so he has less protection than the others like us. He told me once,
When I’ve been digging and I’m tired and don’t want to do any more, I think how it could be
me in the grave I’m working on. I wouldn’t want someone to stop digging for me. . . .
I always think of that when I want to quit. I’m sleepy, Cullis. Can hardly talk. Read me something.’
‘I’ve written a piece on Norwegian snakes.’
‘No.’
‘A poem, then.’
‘Yes. Always.’
But Anil was already asleep, with a smile on her face.
Cúbito. Omóplato. Occipital.
Cullis wrote the names into his notebook, sitting at the table across the room from her. She was deep in the white linen bed. Her hand moving constantly, as if brushing earth away.
She woke at about seven in the morning, the room dark and hot, and slid naked from the large bed where Cullis was still dreaming. She already missed the labs. Missed the thrill that got knocked into her when they snapped lights on over the aluminum tables.
The Miami bedroom had the atmosphere of a boutique, with its embroidered pillows and carpeting. She entered the bathroom and washed her face, ran some cold water through her hair, wide awake. She climbed into the shower and turned it on but after a minute came out with an idea. Not bothering to dry herself, she unzipped her travelling bag and pulled from it the large, outdated videocamera she had brought with her to Miami to get a new microphone part installed. It was a secondhand television camera that the forensic team used, a remnant from the early eighties. She used it on sites and was accustomed to its weight and its weaknesses. She inserted a cassette and hoisted it onto her wet shoulder. Switched it on.
She began with the room, then returned to the bathroom and filmed herself waving briefly into the mirror. A close-up of the texture of the towels, a close-up of the shower water still running. She stood on the bed and shot down at Cullis’s sleeping head, his left arm out to where she had been all night beside him. Her pillow. Back to Cullis, his mouth, his lovely ribs, back off the bed onto floor level, the camera steady, down to his ankles. Walked backwards to take in their clothes on the floor, and then to the table to his notebook. Close-up on his writing.
She removed the cassette from the machine and buried it under some clothes in his suitcase. She packed the camera in her bag, then got back into bed beside him.
They were lying in bed, in the sunlight. ‘I can’t imagine your childhood,’ he said. ‘You are a complete stranger to me.
Colombo.
Is the place languid?’
‘It’s languid indoors. Frenetic outside.’
‘You don’t go back.’
‘No.’
‘A friend of mine went to Singapore. All that air-conditioning! He said it was like being stuck in Selfridges for a week.’
‘I suspect people in Colombo would love it to be Selfridges.’
Their life together was best in these brief quiet times, lazily, postcoitally conversing. To him she was clear and funny and beautiful, to her he was married, always interesting, permanently defensive. Two out of three was not good.
They had met on another occasion, in Montreal. Anil was there for a convention, and Cullis had run into her in a hotel lobby quite by chance.
‘I’m sneaking away,’ she said. ‘Enough!’
‘Have dinner with me.’
‘I’ve got plans. I promised myself this evening with a group of friends. Join us. We’ve had days and days of papers. I promise you the worst meal in Montreal if you come with me.’
They drove through the suburbs.
‘Do you speak French?’ he asked.
‘No. Just English. I can write some Sinhala.’
‘Is that your background?’
A no-name plaza appeared on the side of the highway, and she parked beneath the blinking lights of a Bowlerama. ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘In the West.’
Cullis was introduced to seven other anthropologists, who looked him over carefully and considered his posture to assess whether he would be useful on their team. They seemed to come from all over the world. Having flown to Montreal from Europe and Central America, they had escaped another slide show and were now, like Anil, ready for bowling. Bad red wine from a machine dribbled into small paper cups like the ones dentists offered and was being consumed by them at great speed, along with chips and vinegar and canned hummus. A paleontologist organized the computer-scoring panels, and within ten minutes these forensic celebrities, probably the only non-French-speakers in the Bowlerama, were goblinlike in their bowling shoes, and indeed raucous. There was competitive cheating. There was the dropping of bowling balls onto the parquet lanes. Cullis did not wish for his dead body ever to be touched by such incompetents, who committed so many foot faults. More and more, as the contest progressed, he and Anil rushed to each other to give hugs of congratulations. He felt light in his speckled shoes, he flung the ball without aiming and knocked over what sounded like a bucketful of nails. She came over and kissed him, tentatively but precisely on the back of the neck. They left the arcade in each other’s arms.
‘Must be something in the hummus. Was that real hummus?’
‘Yes.’ She laughed.
‘A known aphrodisiac . . .’
‘I’ll never sleep with you if you say you don’t like The Artist Formerly Known As. . . . Kiss me here. Do you have a difficult middle name I have to learn?’
‘Biggles.’
‘Biggles? As in
Biggles Flies East
and
Biggles Wets His Bed
?’
‘Yes, that Biggles. My dad grew up on his books.’
‘I never wanted to marry a Biggles. I always wanted to marry a tinker. I love that word. . . .’
‘Tinkers don’t have wives. Not if they are true tinkers.’
‘You’ve got a wife, don’t you?’
*
In the ship’s lab in the harbour, one night, working alone, she cut herself badly with a surgical blade, slicing the flesh along her thumb. She poured Dettol over it and taped it, then decided to go to the hospital on the way home; she didn’t want it infected—there were those rats always in the hold, scurrying perhaps over the instruments when she and Sarath were not there. She was tired and hailed a late-night
bajaj
that dropped her off at Emergency Services.
There were about fifteen souls sitting or lying on the long benches. Now and then a doctor strolled in, signalled for the next patient and went off with him. She was there for more than an hour and in the end gave up, because more and more injured were coming in off the street and her wound began to seem insignificant in comparison. But that wasn’t why she left. A man wearing a black coat walked in and sat down among them, blood on his clothes. He remained there in silence, waiting for someone to help him, not bothering to pick up a number like the rest of them. Eventually there were three empty spaces on the bench and he stretched out, took off his black coat and used it as a pillow, but he couldn’t sleep and his open eyes stared across the room at her.
His face was red and wet from the blood on the coat. He sat up, pulled a book out of his pocket and began reading very fast, turning pages, taking it in quickly. He swallowed a tablet and lay down again and this time dropped off, his circumstances and surroundings lost to him. A nurse approached him and touched him on the shoulder; when he didn’t move she kept her hand there. Anil was to remember all this very well. He got up then, pocketed the book, and touched one of the other patients and disappeared with him. He was a doctor. The nurse picked up the coat and took it away. That was when Anil left. If she couldn’t tell who was who in a hospital, what chance did she have?
T
he National Atlas of Sri Lanka has seventy-three versions of the island—each template revealing only one aspect, one obsession: rainfall, winds, surface waters of lakes, rarer bodies of water locked deep within the earth.