Strong and gentle ode to horrible times

Page 205 some two-thirds of the way through and I am totally in its spell. I knew quite soon as I read that this was something special and something necessary.

"This isn't just 'another job'!" (Anil says on page 200) "I decided to come back. I wanted to come back."

Michael, Anil speaks for Michael, I think; at least for the Michael who wrote the novel.

Gripped in the spell, yet I have broken it, I know, writing this. But I must write this not to lose it. I do not want this to be just another frisson of consciousness rippling into this night. Because this is important to me.

'It may well be the capstone of his career' says one blurb. Feels to me that indeed it is - of the career to now, that is: who would want this extraordinary trajectory to end? Yet Shakespeare's did, seemingly of choice.

I want to sit quietly in this world, among the firm stone icons imagined into presence by an incandescent vision of the truth we all knew but could not utter, a vision I could only sit before in wonderment. Sit like Anil on the crucial night when she sat in flickering firelight before the sculpted head they had waited for so long, the head creatively evoked by Ananda, working from the skull of a bheeshana victim.

And I want my Pasan to be found worthy to sit quietly too and its song to be breathed out in quiet resonance in a corner of this garden where Vipul's poem and Jeyapalan's and Cheran's and Suresh's and Kamala's and the tales of Shyam Selvadurai and Sivanandan and Rita Sebastian sit in communion, where mesmerized cries of horror seem beyond the pale. And where, now, Michael's spare, strong, incredibly eloquent ode gently but authoritatively comes to claim a place with them all. I stop there to read on, finding thankfully that I am still bound by the spell. .

I am puzzled, as I sit back to think at the end of the part about Gamini, "the Mouse," halfway through "Between Heartbeats." Extraordinary scenes have struck me dumb with wonder and gratitude: Anil stepping, sliding towards her destiny and reason; Anil locking into a self-contained and self-containing dance, her body taut as an arm, the music brutal and loud in her head - giving every mental skill she has to the movement of her body.- A girl insane, a druid in moonlight, a thief in oil... (P-181)

Ananda trying to tear life out of his own gullet, and Anil desperately holding him to existence. ...

The scenes in the insurgent hospital with the abducted doctor and nurse becoming totally absorbed in inspired improvisations for the wounded brought to them at all hours; the no less tense and moving scenes in the city hospital where Gamini slaves away at emergencies in the time of terror. The extraordinary invention of the scenes in the forest retreat of the Paranavitana surrogate Palipane and his niece - scenes relating to no known facts of Senerath Paranavitana's life but marvellously right as evoking the patient scholar with the mind of a poet...

Scenes that made me humble and grateful and thirsty.

And then this long excursus of Gamini, spare telling as always with Michael Ondaatje's telling, but seeming somehow so deflecting, I read with half my mind in, yes, puzzlement, half struck anew with the power of such empathetic absorption in another psyche, and into the inner layers of our shameful recent history.

I am sure there will be a heart-wrenching justification, a revelation of inspired necessity of this excursus.

But just now I am in a half abeyance of trust in that to-be -unveiled necessity, puzzled as I return to reading......

Well, the thunderclap justification did come. Gamini and no other was the one perfectly placed for and capable of discovering and directing our response to, the vicious, vengeful extinction after torture of Sarath in a gratuitous exercise of power.

One expects something to happen to Anil, not this.

Anil, forensic archaeologist and a free, modern spirit, in Sri Lanka on a mission for a UN agency requested by the Lankan government to report on disappearances of people, in the time of terror, Bheeshana kalaya.

A skeleton uncovered at an archaeological dig is found to be far from ancient, bearing marks of vigilante violence. Young, skilled and intelligent, with an enlightened liberal commitment to human rights Anil perceives her duty and her mission's focus. She begins a search for an accurate description of the wounds and an identification of the victim, on the premise that one victim could stand for many victims. 'One village, for many villages' her mentor in the profession had taught her. Her quest for an identification is the central narrative, a quest that takes her far and wide across the country, from the city to a quiet hill village, from the city of gems to Palipane's forest retreat. It brings her finally to a confrontation she had not herself sought but which she doesn't flinch from, she is shanghaied into the nerve centre of "anti-terrorist" activities and finds herself in effect before a tribunal of "various officials, among them military and police officers trained in counter- insurgency methods." (P. 271). She presents her evidence:

" a lawyer's argument and, more important, a citizen's evidence, she was no longer a foreign authority" ( P. 272)

Then she tells them " think you murdered hundreds of us" (P. 272).

She does not seem to understand... or care..that she is in mortal danger.

Sarath Diyasena. the local archaeologist who has worked with her, does. He saves her life by seeming to oppose and discredit her, thus defusing the tension in the room. And he actually does much more. He puts the evidence (which had been stolen) back in her hands (did he help steal it in the first place, only now having a change of heart?) He also improvises a way of getting her damning recording of the tribunal back to her, adding to the tape a message clearly shows his commitment both to her truth-telling and to saving her life.

He knows he is risking his life: "erase this tape" he has whispered into the tape "do not leave the lab or call me" (P-284). He is tortured and murdered and would have "disappeared" had his brother not recognized the naked body among those found by a civil rights organisation. But Anil has got away, her mission accomplished though only because of Sarath's crucial intervention and because her survival and escape have been organised by him.

Which is part of the reality of our terrible Kali Yugaya and, equally, of the migrant experience. The Anils, the Michaels, can arrive, probe, exacerbate or expose- and leave. (I don't think Michael will mind me saying this: writing this now he is not taking the risk Richard de Zoysa took- and paid for with his torture and murder). Michael has created an Anil who is an interventionist, a researcher who, in effect, turns activist, a conscience. But he works out the plan of her survival, bringing enormous ingenuity to bear on its elaboration.

Did he want to have it both ways? Express both the tragic horror of fascist rage for "order" meaning control - the true face of counter-insurgency with its devilish excessiveness, and also hold out the hope that humane conscience would finally carry the day and truth be told to some purpose?

So one is compelled to wonder whether this book was really necessary now, whether the realities of bheeshana kalaya and the need to tell that truth are not, both of them, a past that we can put behind us? One is compelled, too, to wonder what made Michael Ondaatje persist with this particular project when other traumas had already overtaken us.

Anil does not explain why she " wanted to come back" or why she felt this was not" just 'another job', where she could use her professional skills.

The book does that. I feel entitled to surmise here. The novel has been extremely carefully researched, and it also throbs with a sense of the Lanka to which Michael gave the Gratiaen Prize seven years ago. To my mind it relates to a major phase of the re-engagement with the country which began rather light-heartedly.. and beautifully - with Running in the Family and has also given us The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife and much of Handwriting.

He has not explained why nor, I think, do we need to ask. Sufficient unto us that such a wonderful and gifted spirit yielded to that compulsion and began to search himself and search for the reality of that terrible time when a miasma of fear and the reek of blood and burnt flesh clogged our noses and even more our tongues, when every movement of compassion or concern was fraught with a conscious courage and tremors of trepidation, mingled with guilt at not doing more.

Was this book really necessary now, I asked a while ago, when I had begun by saying that this was something necessary. Yes, I say now, yes.

The reason is put very simply and cogently in a line from Elie Wiesel that Anne Ranasinghe has quoted to us: "It is evil to forget." We should not forgive and forget. Forgive we must indeed, but we must never ever forget what we have done and what... therefore we are still capable of perpetrating.

Our collective consciousness must carry, it may be forever, the vibration of those cries, those shots, those silences; and the images of those inhumanities hacked into the flesh of our flesh. And only our artistic and literary testimonies can ensure that those nerves remain forever raw and our amazed, self-loathing guilt be terrifyingly immediate until (if ever ) such occasions cease to inform against us.

In Anil's Ghost the chords have been struck, the themes woven, into a symphonic ode of inescapable power. It is more than a poetry of the memorable phrase. This poet is also "a maker of plots not only of verses". One thinks of the capacity for scenic invention, the fertile yet meaningful proliferation of storylines which finally uncover their organic relatedness, one admires the reality imparted to both destroyers and creators to the Dionysiacs Ananda and Gamini and to the Appolonians Sarath and Anil, to the doctors in the North-eastern hospitals, at the borders of public concern, and to "President Katugaha" as he steps towards his day of doom.

Every episode is touched at some crucial point into incandescence. As with the novel's extraordinary coda, which the reviewers seem to bypass with embarrassed side glances.

For instance, the coda is gratuitous in the true sense - an added gift, or vision, when the telling could well have ended with Anil's story and no reader could have felt a lack.

But Michael puts us back with Ananda, the sculptor and ritual artificer who had been engaged by Anil and Sarath to recreate from the skull the head of the bheeshana victim whose case would bring to focus the thousands of torturing and 'disappearances'. When the head was done it turned out in Ananda's patient, inspired hands an icon rather than a person, with precise lineaments yet not a portrait but an icon of peace, the peace he sought, for his own wife was one of the "disappeared." And when the head was done he tried to tear his gullet open....

Michael puts us in the last chapter back with Ananda in his creative and ritual roles, restoring a colossal Buddha that had been vandalized and then performing the ritual of "placing the eyes" on the replica he had been commissioned to fashion. The entire sequence, slowly unfolded and lovingly detailed, lifts the reader above the fog of horror that has thickened around him.

Like Ananda, poised high above the earth as he finishes his task, he sees briefly as the statue would see, standing above the landscape:

Pale greens, dark greens, bird movement and their nearby sounds. It was the figure of the world the estate would see forever, in rain, light and sunlight, a combustible world of weather (p.306)

And then with "human sight" is drawn out of himself, 'seeing all the fibres of natural history around him".

He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wing, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagala and skirting to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud. There was a girl moving in the forests. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him... ( p.307)

The reader too is caught up into this seeing, given a healing vision, his lacerated sensibility is slaved. Ananda who had worked maniacally to save his soul from being possessed by demons, finds "a seduction for him here", the peace he had sculpted into the head he had created for Anil, a peace which can enfold the thought of his wife, her heart "beating exhausted and fast, the way Sirissa had died in the story he invented for her in the vacuum of her disappearance A small brave heart".

And then Michael Ondaatje gives us a wonderful last touch- literally the novel's last geste. Ananda's assistant, his nephew and craft-inheritor, is up on a ladder beside him, and

'He felt the boy's concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world.'

That closing cadence gathers up and directs us back to the novel's many episodes of creative commitment - of doctors, artisans, truth -seekers - its many moments of healing sense-alive touch, like the pieta of brothers, Anil holding Ananda's head, Palipane in his forest retreat, Sarath placing his palm on sun-warmed remains of anciently sculpted rock.

The coda is titled "Distance". Michael offers the reader too the seduction he had provided for Ananda. Peace, after all we have been subjected to, wrung by. A peace that encompasses understanding.

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