By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Anil's Ghost is a 2000 novel by Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje. Forensic pathologist Dr. Anil Tissera returns to Sri Lanka in 1991 on a seven-week assignment funded by the Centre for Human Rights, Geneva. Her brief is to investigate extrajudicial executions but even the funding organization is not hopeful that Anil will be able to break through the wall of secrecy. The Sri Lankan government has rented a small house at Ward Place for her, made available a desk (by the copier machine) at the Archaeological Offices, and handpicked a Colombo-based professional to help with her investigation. Her sherpa is not a government doctor or investigative journalist. Nor is he a police official or human rights activist or lawyer. He is forty-nine-year-old archaeologist Sarath Diyasena.
Sarath shows Anil his secret, private lab on the Oronsay, which is the permanently berthed husk of a passenger ship, now being used as storage space by Kynsey Road Hospital. There, in the ship lab, Anil notices a pile of bones. Sarath informs her that ancient human remains were excavated recently near the Bandarawela Caves. Apart from the loose bones, that dig also turned up fossilized wooden pots and three skeletons. Sarath believes that the skeletons were of Buddhist monks who had been given a burial in the natural hollows of the caves, back in the sixth century. However, Anil finds one bone in the pile which, she is positive, is not ancient at all.
Ondaatje's Acknowledgments reveal a fascinating tapestry of source materials. Everyone is an armchair forensic scientist nowadays, thanks to crime dramas on television, but few laymen ponder the imprint of forensic archaeology on scholarly hypotheses about what went wrong before, with other civilizations, why acts of mass violence erased villages and communities.
The Author’s Note explains the background of Anil's Ghost:
"From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Sri Lanka was in a crisis that involved three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerillas in the north. Both the insurgents and the separatists had declared war on the government. Eventually, in response, legal and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down the separatists and the insurgents.”
While waiting for Sarath to pry out a permit to visit the excavation site in Bandarawela, Anil visits her old nanny, Lalitha. During the fifteen years Anil has been away from Sri Lanka (at eighteen she won a scholarship to study Medicine in England), her parents died in a car accident, her only brother emigrated, and nanny Lalitha’s boatload of love sank in senility. Dr. Perera, who had worked with Anil’s father long ago, at Spittel’s Hospital, fazes Anil with his two-facedness. In a country in the thick of a three-way civil war, Anil can find no short-cuts to love. The country will neither give, nor take a passing love, and reaches out to Anil with her all: her National Atlas, her heroes, her ghouls, and archaeological and living symbols of a history of non-violence and ascetism.
Anil scans the reports of the Civil Rights Movement office. There is nothing there for a forensic pathologist. People simply vanished.
"Inside the Civil Rights Movement offices at the Nadesan Centre were the fragments of collected information revealing the last sighting of a son, younger brother, a father. In the letters of anguish from family members were the details of hour, location, apparel, activity …”
The entire country is living with ghosts, and the anguish of separation from loved ones.
Sharath gets a permit and travels with Anil to Bandarawela, where they take three rooms at a guest house, using the third one as an office. During the first few days at the archaeological preserve, they find nothing but ancient debris, but Anil eventually unearths a fourth skeleton whose age matches that of the bone which had puzzled her at Sharath’s ship lab. In her expert opinion, a man was probably burned alive somewhere else only four to six years ago. His body was then buried here, in a government-protected zone. Anil sees an opportunity to identify the remains and make the government own at least one disappearance.
They drive back to Colombo and carry all four skeletons to the ship lab. It was Sharath's strategy: "We keep all four [skeletons]. A unit. A disguise. We claim they’re all ancient.”
If you think the rest of the novel is about making an identification and thus drawing retribution from the government, you would be wrong. The novel is like a howling wind which tries to shut up, be still, but cannot. Neither altitude, nor depth, nor the long eye of Time can take away the energy of its grief. It gets a respite only once, at the 230-year-old Wickramasinghe house where Anil muses:
"One can die from private woes as easily as from public ones. Here various families had been solitary, might have begun speaking quietly to themselves while a pencil was being sharpened. Or they would listen to a transistor radio, hearing something faint at the farthest radius point of the antenna. When batteries died, it was sometimes a week before one of them walked to the village, that sea of electric light! For it was a grand house built in the era of lamps, built when there seemed to be only the possibility of private woe.”
Before Anil writes her report for the Centre for Human Rights, Geneva, the howling wind sweeps on, leaving shards of lives. We meet more ghosts of a never-ending War: the defamed epigraphist Palipana who was Sarath’s academic guide for three years, Palipana's monk brother, who was murdered, Gamini, Sarath’s brother, who is an Emergency Services doctor who gets through his 24/7 trauma on speed, Ananda the gem miner who used to paint eyes on images of the Buddha (the ancient tradition of Netra Mangala), and Ananda’s wife, Sirissa, who disappeared.
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize
Vintage International edition, 2000
Cover design: John Gall
Cover art: woman/ Michael Gesinger/Photonica
Painting: PIX/FPG International
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