The boy was watching him. Ananda nodded to acknowledge he was all right. They still did not speak. He had probably about another hour to go.
The noise of his hammering stopped and there was just the wind around them, its tugs and gusts and whistles. He handed the tools to his nephew. Then he drew from a satchel the colours for the eye. He looked past the vertical line of cheek into the landscape. Pale greens, dark greens, bird movement and their nearby sounds. It was the figure of the world the statue would see forever, in rainlight and sunlight, a combustible world of weather even without the human element.
The eyes, like his at this moment, would always look north. As would the great scarred face half a mile away, which he had helped knit together from damaged stone, a statue that was no longer a god, that no longer had its graceful line but only the pure sad glance Ananda had found.
And now with human sight he was 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 Gonagola 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 forest. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him. Grasses being burned, bamboo, the smell of petrol and grenade. The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat. The face open-eyed in the great rainstorms of May and June. The weather formed in the temperate forests and sea, in the thorn scrub behind him in the southeast, in the deciduous hills, and moving towards the burning savanna near Badulla, and then the coast of mangroves, lagoons and river deltas. The great churning of weather above the earth.
Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him here. The eyes he had cut and focussed with his father’s chisel showed him this. The birds dove towards gaps within the trees! They flew through the shelves of heat currents. The tiniest of hearts in them 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. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared.
He felt the boy’s concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the doctors and nurses, archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, and members of the human rights and civil rights organizations with whom I met in Sri Lanka and in other parts of the world. This novel could not have been written without their generosity and their knowledge and experience in archaeological sites, in hospitals of chaos and dedication, in archives of terrible sadness. This book is for these people and these organizations. It is especially for Anjalendran, and Senake, and Ian Goonetileke.
Thanks to the following for the help they gave me during the research and writing of this book: Gillian and Alwin Ratnayake, K. H. R. Karunaratne, N. P. Sumaraweera, Manel Fonseka, Suriya Wickremasinghe, Clyde Snow, Victoria Sanford, K. A. R. Kennedy, Gamini Goonetileke, Anjalendran C., Senake Bandaranayake, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Tissa Abeysekara, Jean Perera, Neil Fonseka, L. K. Karunaratne, R. L. Thambugale, Dehan Gunasekera, Ravindra Fernando, Roland Silva, Ananda Samarasingha, Deepika Udagama, Gunasiri Hewepatura, Vidyapathy Somabandu, Janaka Weeratunga, Diluni Weerasena, D. S. Liyanarachchi, Janaka Kandamby, Dominic Sansoni, Katherine Nickerson, Donya Peroff, H. Rousseau, Sara Howes, Milo Beech, David Young and Louise Dennys.
Also: the Kynsey Road Hospital, the Base Hospital Polonnaruwa, the Karapitiya General Hospital, the Nadesan Centre, the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka, Amnesty International and the Conference on Human Rights organized by the Colombo Medical Faculty and the Colombo University Centre for the Study of Human Rights in May 1996.
The following works were invaluable in the writing of this book: The National Atlas of Sri Lanka (Survey Department, 1988); Cūlavaṃsa; Asiatic Art in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, ed. Pauline Scheurleer (Rijksmuseum, 1985); Bells of the Bronze Age, a documentary film produced by Archaeological Magazine; Mediaeval Sinhalese Art by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Pantheon Books, 1956), especially his writing on ‘eye ceremonies’; Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton, ed. Mehmet Yaar İcan and Kenneth A. R. Kennedy (Wiley, 1989), especially Kennedy’s work on markers of occupational stress; ‘Upper Pleistocene Fossil Hominids from Sri Lanka’ by Kennedy, Deraniyagala, Roertgen, Chiment and Disotell, American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1987); Stones, Bones, and the Ancient Cities by Lawrence H. Robbins (St. Martin’s Press, 1990); pamphlets on war surgery, es-pecially “Injuries Due to Anti-Personnel Landmines in Sri Lanka” by G. Goonetileke; ‘Senarat Paranavitana as a Writer of Historical Fiction in Sanskrit’ by Ananda W. P. Guruge, Vidyodaya Journal of Social Sciences (University of Sri Jayawardenapura); Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover (Little, Brown, 1991); ‘A Note on the Ancient Hospitals of Sri Lanka’ (Department of Archaeology); ‘Restoration of a Vandalized Bodhisattva Image at Dambogoda’ by Roland Silva, Gamini Wijeysuriya and Martin Wyse (Konos Info, March 1990); P. R. C. Peterson’s memoir of his years as a doctor in Sri Lanka, Great Days! Memoirs of a Government Medical Officer of 1918, compiled and edited by Manel Fonseka; reports from Amnesty International, Asia Watch, the Commission of Human Rights.
The epigraph is made up of two poems from the essay ‘Miner’s Folk Songs of Sri Lanka’ by Rex A. Casinander, Etnologiska Studier (Goteborg), no. 35 (1981).
The partial list of the ‘disappeared’ is drawn from Amnesty International reports.
The line by Robert Duncan is from The HD Book, chapter 6, “Rites of Participation” (Caterpillar, October 1967).
Lines from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and from Alexander Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask appear on page 54.
Italicized sentences from H. Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse (Bollingen Series XI, Princeton University Press, 1956) appear on page 56.
The italicized line on page 135 is from Plainwater by Anne Carson (Knopf, 1995).
The italicized remark on page 43 is from Great Books by David Denby (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
The remark on Jung on page 230 is by Leonora Carrington during an interview with Rosemary Sullivan.
Thank you to David Thomson for his genealogical unearthing of American western heroes.
A special thank you to Manel Fonseka.
Much forensic and medical information was also drawn from interviews with Clyde Snow in Oklahoma and Guatemala; Gamini Goonetileke in Sri Lanka; and K. A. R. Kennedy in Ithaca, New York, as well as from many persons listed above.
Thank you to Jet Fuel. To Rick/Simon and Darren Wershler-Henry and Stan Bevington at Coach House Press. To Katherine Hourigan, Anna Jardine, Debra Helfand and Leyla Aker. Also to Ellen Levine, Gretchen Mullin and Tulin Valeri.
And finally, thanks to Ellen Seligman, Sonny Mehta, Liz Calder. And Linda, Griffin and Esta.
A Note About the Author
Michael Ondaatje is the author of three previous novels, one memoir, and eleven books of poetry. Born in Sri Lanka, he lives in Toronto.
