Chapter One
She arrived in early March,
the plane landing at Katunayake airport before the dawn. They had raced
it ever since coming over the west coast of India, so that now passengers
stepped onto the tarmac in the dark.
By the time she was out of
the terminal the sun had risen. In the West she'd read, The dawn comes
up like thunder, and she knew she was the only one in the classroom
to recognize the phrase physically. Though it was never abrupt thunder
to her. It was first of all the noise of chickens and carts and modest
morning rain or a man squeakily cleaning the windows with newspaper in
another part of the house.
As soon as her passport with
the light-blue UN bar was processed, a young official approached and moved
alongside her. She struggled with her suitcases but he offered no help.
'How long has it been? You
were born here, no?'
'Fifteen years.'
'You still speak Sinhala?'
'A little. Look, do you mind
if I don't talk in the car on the way into Colombo -- I'm jet-lagged.
I just want to look. Maybe drink some toddy before it gets too late. Is
Gabriel's Saloon still there for head massages?'
'In Kollupitiya, yes. I knew
his father.'
'My father knew his father
too.'
Without touching a single
suitcase he organized the loading of the bags into the car. 'Toddy!' He
laughed, continuing his conversation. 'First thing after fifteen years.
The return of the prodigal.'
'I'm not a prodigal.'
An hour later he shook hands
energetically with her at the door of the small house they had rented
for her.
'There's a meeting tomorrow
with Mr. Diyasena.'
'Thank you.'
'You have friends here, no?'
'Not really.'
Anil was glad to be alone.
There was a scattering of relatives in Colombo, but she had not contacted
them to let them know she was returning. She unearthed a sleeping pill
from her purse, turned on the fan, chose a sarong and climbed into bed.
The thing she had missed most of all were the fans. After she had left
Sri Lanka at eighteen, her only real connection was the new sarong her
parents sent her every Christmas (which she dutifully wore), and news
clippings of swim meets. Anil had been an exceptional swimmer as a teenager,
and the family never got over it; the talent was locked to her for life.
As far as Sri Lankan families were concerned, if you were a well-known
cricketer you could breeze into a career in business on the strength of
your spin bowling or one famous inning at the Royal-Thomian match. Anil
at sixteen had won the two-mile swim race that was held by the Mount Lavinia
Hotel.
Each year a hundred people
ran into the sea, swam out to a buoy a mile away and swam back to the
same beach, the fastest male and the fastest female fêted in the
sports pages for a day or so. There was a photograph of her walking out
of the surf that January morning — which The Observer had
used with the headline 'Anil Wins It!' and which her father kept in his
office. It had been studied by every distant member of the family (those
in Australia, Malaysia and England, as well as those on the island), not
so much because of her success but for her possible good looks now and
in the future. Did she look too large in the hips?
The photographer had caught
Anil's tired smile in the photograph, her right arm bent up to tear off
her rubber swimming cap, some out-of-focus stragglers (she had once known
who they were). The black-and-white picture had remained an icon in the
family for too long.
She pushed the sheet down
to the foot of the bed and lay there in the darkened room, facing the
waves of air. The island no longer held her by the past. She'd spent the
fifteen years since ignoring that early celebrity. Anil had read documents
and news reports, full of tragedy, and she had now lived abroad long enough
to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze. But here it was a more
complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens
remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest
Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads
on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil
had translated lines from Archilochus — In the hospitality of
war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was
no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information
of who the enemy was.
Excerpted from Anil's Ghost © Copyright 2009 by Michael Ondaatje. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.
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