Anil's Ghost

Anil arrives in Sri Lanka, where she was born but hasn’t lived for 15 years. While she still has relatives in Colombo, she is not particularly interested in reaching out to them. She reflects upon her teenage years as a gifted swimmer and how much she has changed since leaving. The island, too, has changed, plunged into a bloody civil war with atrocities committed on all sides.

Anil agrees to examine and determine the cause of death for a recently dead body for the students at the local hospital. The corpse’s “freshness” bothers her, along with the fact that the deceased most likely died by a politically motivated assassination. The next morning, however, as the monsoon rains break, Anil feels happy to be home.

Anil is a representative of the Centre for Human Rights out of Geneva, in Sri Lanka to work with an archeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to determine the extent of political violence in the country. The expectations are low for the seven-week project, especially given that the country’s leader, President Katugala, denies any involvement in the war, or even that a war is ongoing. When they meet, Sarath immediately mentions Anil’s past as a celebrated swimmer and asks about her personal life. She confirms that she is unmarried and no longer swims. His overtures put Anil off, but she wants to work well with him.

Sarath explains the current political tensions: Three groups, including the government, are vying for power. He takes Anil to the Oronsay, the decommissioned ship where they will be working. He has already unearthed some skeletons from a nearby cave, a centuries-old burial site for monks, though some of the bone fragments from there appear to be much more recent.

Anil visits her former nanny, Lalitha, though they no longer speak the same language. Lalitha’s granddaughter translates but seems to resent Anil. Anil also meets the hospital’s senior medical officer, Dr. Perera. He brings up her swimming and mentions that he knew her father, who was also a doctor. Anil receives a postcard from her American friend, Leaf, and wonders about Sarath’s loyalties. Is he neutral, simply looking for archeological evidence, or is he ideologically aligned with a faction in the war? He seems enthusiastic about his work, quoting from poetry he learned from his beloved teacher, Palipana.

Anil reminisces about her affair with Cullis Wright, a married photojournalist who she used to meet in various parts of the world. He tried to pry into her background but she kept him at arm’s length. When he went bowling with her and her fellow forensic scientists, he noted that he would not want his dead body touched by such clumsy people. Anil remembers this after she cuts herself in the lab. She goes to the hospital. She notices a man, covered in blood, who collapses in the waiting room, falling asleep on some chairs. He turns out to be a doctor. Anil leaves after seeing so many seriously wounded people.

Interspersed throughout the main narrative are italicized vignettes that either illuminate relevant past events or explore adjacent concurrent events. Here, the narrator includes a snapshot of an archeological site in Shanxi province, China, with centuries-old Bodhisattvas lining the walls; an assassination of a political official on a train in Sri Lanka; and a description of the National Atlas of Sri Lanka, which depicts natural resources.

Anil reflects on the war in Sri Lanka, now ongoing for almost 20 years, and how difficult it is to identify the bodies or prove how (or why) they were killed. The war continues because that is the nature of war, she thinks. Later, Sarath suggests that there are no innocent participants left in the war. She and Sarath set out for the caves of Bandarawela, where the skeletons are. Sarath warns Anil to be cautious about their work and what they find, noting that procuring the permit to work there was “difficult.” On the drive, Sarath confides that his wife died by suicide some years ago. Anil’s tells him that her parents died in an automobile accident after she left the country.

The two set up a makeshift lab in a nearby hotel and begin examining the remains from the caves. Anil immediately determines that one of the skeletons was recently killed, most likely by politically-motivated murder. She believes that this murder implicates the government because the site is off-limits to those outside of the government, which also granted her and Sarath’s permit. Sarath is nervous about Anil’s determination to discover the truth, while Anil is suspicious of Sarath, who has a relative in the government. As she examines the body, which she ultimately refers to as “Sailor,” Anil reflects on past mass-casualty events like the eruption at Pompeii or the bombing of Hiroshima.

Anil discovers that Sarath lied about his wife’s death, either to the innkeeper or to Anil. Her head begins to hurt and she becomes feverish, in and out of consciousness. She awakes to find herself in the van with Sarath, who is taking her to the hospital in Colombo. She asks where Sailor is, and Sarath says she told him to load the body into the van, where it is safe with them. Once Anil’s fever breaks, she and Sarath take the body, along with three much older skeletons, to their lab onboard the Oronsay.

Anil thinks about her name and how it was not always her name. She lobbied to take her brother’s middle name as her own. It took some convincing, but Anil stood firm. Eventually, her parents, brother, and all official documentation recognized her name as Anil.

She consults with a lab technician, an entomologist, to help her identify Sailor. She believes he died elsewhere and was moved to the cave. Meanwhile, Sarath works on all four skeletons, drinking steadily. Sailor is the only skeleton that still has a skull. He carefully takes pictures of all four, then removes Sailor’s head, taking a final picture of his recent body without its skull. He stashes the skull in a shopping bag. He knows that he and Anil have discovered something important and dangerous.