Anil's Ghost

If she were to step into another life now, back to the adopted country of her choice, how much would Gamini and the memory of Sarath be a part of her life? Would she talk to intimates about them, the two Colombo brothers? And she in some way like a sister between them, keeping them from mauling each other’s worlds? Wherever she might be, would she think of them? Consider the strange middle-class pair who were born into one world and in mid-life stepped waist-deep into another?

At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for the place. ‘But I could never leave here,’ Gamini had whispered.

‘American movies, English books-remember how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’

The worker from the civil rights organization came in with the Friday reports of victims-the fresh, almost-damp black-and-white photographs, seven of them this week. Faces covered. The reports were left for Gamini on the table by his window. By the time he got to them the shifts were changing. He turned on the tape recorder and began describing the wounds and how they were probably caused. When he got to the third picture he recognized the wounds, the i

Gamini didn’t know how long he stood there. There were seven bodies in the room. There were things he could do. He didn’t know. There were things he could do perhaps. He could see the acid burns, the twisted leg. He unlocked the cupboard that held bandages, splints, disinfectant. He began washing the body’s dark-brown markings with scrub lotion. He could heal his brother, set the left leg, deal with every wound as if he were alive, as if treating the hundred small traumas would eventually bring him back into his life.

The gash of scar on the side of your elbow you got crashing a bike on the Kandy Hill. This scar I gave you hitting you with a cricket stump. As brothers we ended up never turning our backs on each other. You were always too much of an older brother, Sarath. Still, if I had been a doctor then, I could have sewn the stitches up more carefully than Dr. Piachaud. It’s thirty years later, Sarath. It’s late afternoon-with everyone gone home except me, your least favourite relative. The one you can never relax with or feel secure with. Your unhappy shadow.

He was leaning over the body, begi

There are pietàs of every kind. He recalls the sexual pietà he saw once. A man and a woman, the man having come and the woman stroking his back, her face with the acceptance of his transformed physical state. It was Sarath and Sarath’s wife he had witnessed, and then her eyes had looked up at him, in his madness, her hand not pausing in its stroke of the body within her arms.

There were other pietàs. The story of Savitra, who wrestled her husband away from Death so that in the startling paintings of the myth you saw her hold him-joy filling her face, while his face looked capsized, in the midst of his fearful metamorphosis, this reversal back into love and life.

But this was a pietà between brothers. And all Gamini knew in his slowed, scrambled state was that this would be the end or it could be the begi

He opened his brother’s shirt so the chest was revealed. A gentle chest. Not hard and feral like his own. It was the generous chest of a Ganesh. An Asian belly. The chest of someone who in his sarong would stroll into the garden or onto the verandah with his tea and newspaper. Sarath had always sidestepped violence because of his character, as if there had never been a war within him. He drove people around him mad. If Gamini had been the Mouse, his brother was the Bear.

Gamini placed the warmth of his hand against the still face. He had never worried about the fate of his one brother, had always thought he himself would be the fatal one. Perhaps they had each assumed they would crash alone in the darkness they had invented around themselves. Their marriages, their careers on this borderland of civil war among governments and terrorists and insurgents. There had never been a tu

Sarath’s chest said everything. It was what Gamini had fought against. But now this body lay on the bed undefended. It was what it was. No longer a counter of argument, no longer an opinion that Gamini refused to accept. Oh, there seemed to be a mark like that made with a spear. A small wound, not deep in his chest, and Gamini bathed it and taped it up.

He had seen cases where every tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with liquids, the ears entered. He had been, as he ran down that hospital hallway, most frightened of seeing his brother’s face. It was the face they went for in some cases. They could in their hideous skills sniff out vanity. But they had not touched Sarath’s face.

The shirt they had dressed Sarath in had giant sleeves. Gamini knew why. He ripped the sleeves down to the cuffs. Below the elbows the hands had been broken in several places.

It was dark now. It looked as if the room were full of grey water. He walked to the entrance and touched the switch, and seven central lights came on. He came back and sat with his brother.

He was still there an hour later when the bodies started coming in from a bombing somewhere in the city.

President Katugala was in a white cotton outfit, looking old, not at all like the giant posters of him throughout the city that had celebrated and idealized him for years. When you looked at the real image of the man, the lean face below the thi

The week before, there had been warnings from the special forces of the police and army for him not to go among the crowds. He had in fact promised he would not do so. But around three-thirty in the afternoon, it was discovered the President was out meeting the people. The head of Katugala’s special unit, with a few other officials, leapt into a jeep and went looking for him. They located him reasonably quickly in the crowded Colombo streets and had just reached him and were standing behind him at the moment the bomb went off.