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The thieves pried the stomach open with metal rods but found no treasure, and so they left. Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life. This was for once not a political act or an act perpetrated by one belief against another. The men were trying to find a solution for hunger or a way to get out of their disintegrating lives. And the ‘neutral’ and ‘i
The artisan brought to Buduruvagala to attempt a reconstruction of the Buddha statue was a man from the south. Born in a village of stonecutters, he had been an eye painter. According to the Archaeological Department, which oversaw the project, he was a drinker but would not begin drinking until the afternoons. There was a small overlap of working and drinking but it was only in the evenings that he was unapproachable. He had lost his wife some years earlier. She was one of the thousands who had disappeared.
Ananda Udugama would be on the site by dawn, would peg the blueprints into the earth and assign duties to the seven men who worked with him. The workers had dug out the base, which held the lower legs and thighs of the statue. These had not been damaged. They were pulled out and stored in a field where there were bees and left there until the rest of the body was reconstructed. A quarter of a mile away, and simultaneously with the reconstruction of this large broken Buddha, another statue was being built-to replace the destroyed god.
It was assumed that Ananda would be working under the authority and guidance of foreign specialists but in the end these celebrities never came. There was too much political turmoil, and it was unsafe. They were finding dead bodies daily, not even buried, in the adjoining fields. Victims picked up as far away as Kalutara were brought here, out of family range. Ananda appeared to stare past it all. He gave two of the men on his team the job of dealing with the bodies-tagging them, contacting civil rights authorities. By the time the monsoon came the murders had subsided, or at least this area was no longer being used as a killing field or a burial ground.
Later it came to be seen that the work done by Ananda was complex and i
Ananda brought in some of the villagers to work, ten more men. It was safer to be seen working for a project like this, otherwise you could be pulled into the army or you might be rounded up as a suspect. He got more of the village involved, women as well as men. If they volunteered, he put them to work. They had to be there by five in the morning and they packed it in by two in the afternoon, when Ananda Udugama had his own plans for the day.
The women distinguished the stones, which slid wet from their hands into the grid. It rained for more than a month. When the rain stopped, the grass steamed around them and they could finally hear one another and began to talk, their clothes dry in fifteen minutes. Then the rain would come again and they were back within its noise, silent, solitary in the crowded field, the wind banging and loosening a corrugated roof, trying to unpeel it from a shed. The distinguishing of the stones took several weeks, and by the time the dry season came most of the limbs had been assembled. There was now one arm, fifty feet long, an ear. The legs still safe in the field of bees. They began to move the sections towards each other in the cicada grass. Engineers came and with a twenty-foot drill burrowed through the soles of the feet and moved up the limbs of the body, till there was a path for metal bones to be poured in, tu
During the months of assembly, Ananda had spent most of his time on the head. He and two others used a system of fusing rock. Up close the face looked quilted. They had pla
On the horizon the other statue of the Buddha rose gradually into the sky, while Ananda’s reconstruction stretched out along a sandy path. The path sloped, the head remaining the lowest part of the body-essential for the final stage of knitting it together.
Five cauldrons of boiling iron hissed under the slight rainfall. The men brought out the prepared corrugated troughs and poured the iron along them and watched it disappear into the feet of the statue, the red metal sliding into the path drilled within the body-giant red veins slipping down the hundred-foot length. When it hardened it would lock all the limbs together. Then it rained again, this time for two days, and the village workers were sent home. Everyone left the site.
Ananda sat in a chair next to the head. He looked up at the sky, into the source of the storm. They had built a walk ledge ten feet off the ground with bamboo. Now this forty-five-year-old man got up and climbed up onto the ledge to look down at the face and torso, which held inside it the cooling red iron.
He was there again the next morning. It was still raining, then it suddenly stopped, and the heat began to draw out steam from the earth and the statue. Ananda kept pulling off and drying his wired-together spectacles. He was on the platform most of the time now, wearing one of the Indian cotton shirts Sarath had given him some years back. His sarong was heavy and dark from the rain.
He stood over what they had been able to re-create of the face. It was a long time since he had believed in the originality of artists. He had known some of them in his youth. You slipped into the old bed of the art, where they had slept. There was comfort there. You saw their days of glory, then their days of banishment. He had always liked them and their art more during their years of banishment. He himself did not create or invent faces anymore. Invention was a sliver. Still, all the work he had done in organizing the rebuilding of the statue was for this. The face. Its one hundred chips and splinters of stone brought together, merged, with the shadow of bamboo lying across its cheek. All its life until now the statue had never felt a human shadow. It had looked over these hot fields towards green terraces in the distant north. It had seen the wars and offered peace or irony to those dying under it. Now sunlight hit the seams of its face, as if it were sewn roughly together. He wouldn’t hide that. He saw the lidded grey eyes someone else had cut in another century, that torn look in its great acceptance; he was close against the eyes now, with no distance, like an animal in a stone garden, some old man in the future. In a few days the face would be in the sky, no longer below him as he walked on this trestle, his shadow moving across the face, the hollows holding rain so he could lean down and drink from it, as if a food, a wealth. He looked at the eyes that had once belonged to a god. This is what he felt. As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.