ANIL'S GHOST
By MICHAEL ONDAATJE
New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000. 311 pages, $25
Ranjini Obeyesekere
For Anil, the Western-trained forensic surgeon and human rights activist who returns to the country of her birth to investigate the carnage taking place there, truth is hard evidence: secrets revealed in a laboratory, facts gleaned from bones or from the chemical residues of trace elements. She analyzes the skeleton of a recently buried man found in a restricted archaeological site to which only the government had access. She believes that if she can fix the identity of this one skeleton, prove by forensic evidence that he was tortured, killed, burned, and buried, she can give an identity to all those other missing persons: "One village can speak for many villages, one victim can speak for many victims."
Sarath, a government archaeologist, is happiest when immersed in his digs, discovering cities long buried. The present for him is a minefield that has to be carefully maneuvered. He has learned "to travel in mid-river always," believes that fear is life's governing law and that in "the face of torture "most of us can be broken by just the possibility of what might happen." Unlike Anil in her obsessive quest for truth, he knows that in the present context the truth is "a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol" and may do no good to anyone.
Palipane, a venerated epigraphist, scholar, and teacher (based on the real-life scholar Paranavitarane), is a brilliant, incorruptible man who has instilled in his students the need for absolute accuracy and meticulous research. Yet, in his old age, he claims to have discovered an interlinear text, found on a rock, which only he can read. The work is debunked by his colleagues. With compassionate insight, Ondaatje writes, "perhaps it was . . . 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."
Gamini, Sarath's brother, is a doctor whose world slowly shrinks into the confines of the hospital emergency room where he works, sleepless, attending to the sick, the wounded, and the dying, whoever they happen to be. "He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one's land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. . . . He believed only in mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so children could be confident and safe during the night."
Ondaatje skillfully depicts the intricate relationship between the two brothers-their love for one woman, their rivalry, and their deep sibling bonds-a relationship which accounts for some of the most moving scenes in the book.
Finally, there is Ananda, the traditional eye-painter. Devastated by the loss of his wife, an innocent victim of political violence, he retreats to the depths of the plumbago (graphite) mines and surfaces only to lose himself in the amnesia of drink. His task is to recreate the face of the skeleton for identification; he is also the one who restores an ancient stone Buddha destroyed by vandals in their search for treasure.
Ondaatje weaves the tenuous relationships between these characters into a slight story. But his vivid recreation of the sights and smells of the Sri Lankan world brings the novel to life. In particular, there is the incident of Sirissa, suddenly faced with the decapitated heads of the teenage boys she passed each day on her way to work, a brilliant retelling of an actual event experienced on a university campus during the killings of the 1980s.
The Sri Lankan world of violence and human trauma is the context of the novel. But by focusing on the incredible resilience of the human spirit, which enables each character to face the horrors of that world in his or her own way, Ondaatje reveals his compassionate worldview, and for Sri Lankans, has provided a poetic retrieval of a violent period in their history. In the retrieval and the remembering lie the seeds of understanding, and with understanding, perhaps a glimmer of hope.
Ranjini Obeyesekere, who teaches in the anthropology department at Princeton University, is a writer and translator. Her latest book is Sri Lankan Theater in a Time of Terror: Political Satire in a Permitted Space.