Anil's Ghost

“Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads.”

Sarath’s explanation of the civil war in Sri Lanka implicates all factions—including the government—in the violence. He also notes the importance of secrecy, a tactic that he utilizes to keep himself safe, and the dependence on foreign entities. Anil initially represents an emissary of such foreign powers.

“‘You have a hang-up about journalists, don’t you.’

“‘That’s how we get seen in the West. It’s different here, dangerous. Sometimes law is on the side of power not truth.’”

The ways in which the mostly Western journalists portray the country and its war have an outsized impact on who receives assistance or justice. The Western gaze, even in the postcolonial context, remains potent and central. Reporting an incident to the wrong people or misidentifying a body can lead to the persecution or assassination.

“In her years abroad, during her European and North American education, Anil had courted foreignness, was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the highways around Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad.”

Anil is divorced from her racial, cultural, and linguistic heritage. Living abroad allows her to invent and reinvent herself and hide from her past. This contrasts with how Anil feels in Sri Lanka, with “only one arm of language among uncertain laws and a fear that was everywhere” (54). The chances of miscommunication, as well as unspeakable consequences, abound.

“She stopped responding when called by either of her given names, even at school. In the end her parents relented, but then they had to persuade her irritable brother to forfeit his second name. He, at fourteen, claimed he might need it someday. Two names gave him more authority, and a second name suggested perhaps an alternative side to his nature.”

Anil’s determination is on full display in her campaign to take her brother’s middle name. She finds her own names too feminine and sets out to define herself. In taking one of his names, her brother suggests, she takes some of his potential and makes it her own.

“While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia.”

The relative importance of any given culture is a matter of perspective, this passage suggests. From Palipana’s point of view, Asia is central to world history, whereas Europe is merely a faraway afterthought, contrary to the typical view in the West. Gamini echoes this later, when he remarks on the sophistication of early Sri Lankan society in comparison to medieval Europe.

“Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence.”

Palipana illuminates the importance of the eye painter’s job; it is one of sacred significance. This statement both conflates sight with truth and gestures to the prominence of the eyewitness (as versus the outsider, imperial gaze). There is irony here, too: Palipana himself—like many prophets and poets before him—is blind. Palipana’s pronouncement foreshadows both Ananda’s entry to the narrative and the end of the novel.

“Every historical pillar he came to in a field he stood beside and embraced as if it were a person he had known in the past.”

This simile turns pillars of stone into familiar acquaintances, revealing that the historical is personal, at least for Palipana. He is invested in uncovering the truth and humanity in his own cultural history.

“In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears. It has already become an old legend.”

The ebb and flow of the tides reveal and cover the inscription that Palipana’s niece carves into the rock upon his death, only to reveal it again. Thus, in death, Palipana not only becomes part of the natural world but also the Indigenous history and legends he once uncovered. The niece carves his epitaph in rock to honor his own title as epigraphist, a reader of stone.

“During autopsies her secret habit of detour is to look for the amygdala, this nerve bundle which houses fear—so it governs everything. How we behave and make decisions, how we seek out safe marriages, how we build houses that we make secure.”

With Anil’s interest in the amygdala, Ondaatje suggests the primacy of fear in the patterns of human and her own decision-making. Fear, for example, explains her early marriage to a fellow Sri Lankan while living in London. It also explains Sri Lankan civil war: Everyone is afraid, so secrecy proliferates, and retaliation is the only weapon regularly at one’s disposal. In a culture of fear and secrecy, the truth is lost.

“In the southwestern deserts you needed to look twice at emptiness, you needed to take your time, the air like ether, where things grew only with difficulty. On the island of her childhood she could spit on the ground and a bush would leap up.”

This passage uses simile and exaggeration to describe the juxtaposition between the arid desert landscape of the US southwest and the fertile jungles of Sri Lanka. The lushness of the island nation is overwhelming to Anil, who whittles herself down in the leaner environs of the desert.

“Anil would not understand this old and accepted balance. Sarath knew that for her the journey was in getting to the truth. But what would the truth bring them into? It was a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol.”

This passage uses metaphor to illustrate that the truth is dangerous in a place beleaguered by violence, counterviolence, government treachery, and secrecy. Sarath notes that the smallest bit of truth in a piece of journalistic reporting can lead to more violence and revenge. Anil and Sarath’s search for the truth is merely fuel for the fires that already smolder.

“Still, on this night, without words, there seemed to be a pact. The way he had respected the order of her tools, touching nothing, the way he raised Sailor in his arms. She saw the sadness in Ananda’s face below what might appear a drunk’s easy sentiments.”

Anil recognizes that Ananda’s tender embrace of Sailor’s remains parallels her own attachment to him. Sailor echoes Anil’s search for identity and belonging, along with her desire to uncover the truth and to seek justice. For Ananda, he represents the many people who have suffered due to the violence, including his own murdered wife. Both inscribe meaning onto the skeleton, and both respect each other’s claims to it.

“One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. She and Sarath both knew that in all the turbulent history of the island’s recent civil wars, in all the token police investigations, not one murder charge had been made during the troubles. But this could be a clear case against the government.”

This passage reinforces Sailor’s role as representative for the victims of the various factions in the war. The fact that he was most likely assassinated by the state elevates the importance of identifying him, though his positive identification could implicate the government in war crimes—an dangerous accusation.

“Standing in the Forest of Kings or at one of the rock structures in the western monasteries, he must have found it difficult to distinguish the present age from ancient times.”

Here, Sarath speaks of his teacher, Palipana: For him, the past is always present, cultural memories layered upon one another. Without understanding the past, there is no way to interpret the present. The past permeates the present and explains the future.

“Gamini had chosen not to deal with the dead. He avoided the south-wing corridors, where they brought the torture victims to be identified.”

Gamini’s decision allows him to avoid bearing witness to the tragedies befalling family and friends. He does not want to identify dead bodies, especially should he recognize them. This passage also foreshadows Sarath’s death.

“Where did the secret war begin between him and his brother? It had begun with the desire to be the other, even with the impossibility of emulating him. Gamini would always remain in spirit the younger, unable to catch up, nicknamed ‘Meeya.’ The Mouse.”

Ironically, the conflict between the brothers originates with each one’s desire to be more like the other. Anil notes, later, that the two brothers are much more alike than different. This echoes the larger conflict within the country, which, like all civil wars, it pits brother against brother.

“He had been in love with just one woman and she was not the one he married. Later there was another woman, a wife in a field hospital near Polonnaruwa. Eventually he felt himself on a boat of demons and himself to be the only clearheaded and sane person there. He was a perfect participant in the war.”

Gamini’s alienation from love and family, coupled with his dedication to his work, relieves him from compassion and empathy. In a sense, even though he heals others, he has lost his humanity. His inability to connect with others renders him the ideal “participant” in mutual brutality.

“In those villages the father of a family of seven earned one hundred rupees a day working in a wood shop. That meant each of them could have a five-rupee meal a day. For that you could buy a toffee. When political entourages came up to the provinces and received tea and lunch, the visit cost forty thousand rupees.”

Though the novel does not focus on the economic inequality that underpins the conflict, this passage reveals the stark economic divide between villagers and politicians. The elite benefit from marginalized, impoverished masses while the war magnifies the poverty and hunger that ignite conflict.

“All the wards were busy that night, he continued. Shootings, others to be operated on. There are always a lot of suicides during a war. At first that seems strange, but you learn to understand it.”

On the train, Gamini tells Anil about watching the woman he loves—presumably his brother’s wife—die after drinking lye. He uses it as an example of the deaths of despair that accompany the violence, displacement, and hopelessness of conflict—the unspoken casualties of war.

“And whom would he talk to if not her at midnight through several time zones? As if she were the stone in the temple grounds used by priests as the object of confession. Well, for now, they both had no destiny. They only had to escape the past.”

Anil remembers her former lover Cullis Wright in this simile that describes her as a place where her lover can confess his transgressions, both objectifying and sanctifying her. She breaks the connection, but her desire to escape the past, the novel implies, is impossible.

“Sarath in the back row, unseen by her, listened to her quiet explanations, her surefootedness, her absolute calm and refusal to be emotional or angry. It was a lawyer’s argument and, more important, a citizen’s evidence; she was no longer just a foreign authority.”

Sarath sees Anil’s testimony to the government as a declaration of her allegiance to her Sri Lanka and the victims of its war. Her compassion for Sailor and her commitment to the investigation have repatriated her.

“Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea.”

Sarath occupies a liminal, or in-between, space, like that of his mentor, Palipana. While Palipana is caught between the past and the present, however, Sarath is caught between the concrete and the ephemeral, between hard rocks and lofty ideals. His archeological investigations move him between the earthly and the eternal. His own faith—in what, Ondaatje does not reveal—renders him immortal.

“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.”

Despite the violence and deception, both Sarath and Gamini remain patriots. Sarath is committed to uncovering the secrets of Sri Lanka’s past, while Gamini attempts to save as many of its citizens as he can. This love is a matter of perspective, Gamini suggests, as a Westerner who has never lived through war might not understand why someone like Gamini—educated, talented, dedicated—does not flee a war zone.

“So these stone bodies rising out of the earth, their faces high in the sky, often were the only human aspect a farmer would witness in his landscape during the day. They gazed over the stillness, over the buzz-scream of cicadas which were invisible in the parched grass. They brought a permanence to brief lives.”

Ananda gazes at the statues of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas lining the rural landscape in Buduruvagala. The farmer toils in the earth while these representatives of the divine watch over. Here, the sacred bears witness to the temporal, the fleeting lives of humans, rendering them eternally significant.