‘Unusual.’
‘Mmm,’ Chitra said, as if eating chocolate. ‘Some butterflies also go to bone for moisture…’
‘Can I show you some of the bone?’
‘I go up-country tomorrow for a few days.’
‘Then later tonight? Is that all right?’
‘Mmm.’ Chitra sounded unconcerned, preoccupied with a clue, a timing on one of her charts. She turned from Anil to an array of insects, then selected one of the right plumpness and age with her forceps.
That night within the ship’s hold Sarath poured plastic that had been dissolved in acetone into a shallow dish, and brought out the camel-hair brush he would use on the bones. A diffuse light, the hum of the generator around him.
He moved to the lab table where a skeleton lay, picked up the alligator-clip lamp-the one source of focussed bright light here-and walked with it and the long cord, still lit, to a cupboard at the far end of the deep room. He opened it, poured himself three-quarters of a tumbler of arrack from a bottle and walked back to the skeleton.
The four skeletons from Bandarawela, revealed now to the air, would soon begin to weaken.
He loosened a new tungsten-carbide needle from its plastic container and attached it to a hand pick and began cleaning the bones of the first skeleton, drilling free the fragments of dirt. Then he turned on a slim hose and let it hover over each bone, air nestling into the evidence of the trauma as if he were blowing cool breath from a pursed mouth onto a child’s burn. He dipped the camel-hair brush into the dish and began painting a layer of protective plastic over the bones, moving down the spine and ribs. After that he carried the alligator-clip lamp to the second table and started on the second skeleton. Then the third. When he came to Sailor’s table he turned the heel bone sideways to find the centimetre-deep chip Anil had furrowed out of the calcaneus.
Sarath stretched and walked out of the light into the darkness, his hands out feeling for the arrack bottle, which he brought back with him to Sailor under the cone of light. It was about two in the morning. When he’d coated all four skeletons, he made notes on each of them and photographed three from anterior and lateral views.
He drank as he worked. The smell of the plastic was now strong in the room. There was no opening for fresh air. He unlocked the doors noisily and climbed up with the bottle of arrack onto the deck. Colombo was dark with curfew. It would be a beautiful hour to walk or cycle through it. The fraught quietness of the roadblocks, the old trees a panoply along Solomon Dias Mawatha. But in the harbour around him there was activity, the light from a tug rolling in the water, the white beams from tractors moving crates on the quay. Three or four a.m. He would lock up and sleep on the ship for the rest of the night.
The hold was still full of the smell of plastic. He pulled out a tied bundle of beedis from a drawer and lit one, then inhaled its rich mortal thirty-two rumours of taste. Picked up the clip lamp and walked over to Sailor. He still had to photograph him. Okay, do it now, he said to himself, and took two shots, anterior and lateral. He stood there as the Polaroids developed, waving them in the air. When Sailor’s image was fully revealed he put the pictures in a brown envelope, sealed and addressed it, and dropped it into his coat pocket.
The three other skeletons had no skulls. But Sailor had a skull. Sarath put the half-smoked beedi on the metal sink and leaned forward. With a scalpel he cut apart the ligaments that attached the skull to the neck vertebrae, and separated it. He brought the skull to his desk. The burning hadn’t reached the head, so the frontal, orbital and lacrimal plates were smooth, the knit marks on the skull tight. Sarath wrapped it in plastic and placed it in a large shopping bag that said ‘Kundanmal’s.’ He returned and photographed Sailor without the skull, twice, lateral and anterior.
He was aware now more than anything that he and Anil needed help.
The Grove of Ascetics
The epigraphist Palipana was for a number of years at the centre of a nationalistic group that eventually wrestled archaeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans. He had made his name translating Pali scripts and recording and translating the rock graffiti of Sigiriya.
The main force of a pragmatic Sinhala movement, Palipana wrote lucidly, basing his work on exhaustive research, deeply knowledgeable about the context of the ancient cultures. 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 1970s had witnessed the beginning of a series of international conferences. Academics flew into Delhi, Colombo and Hong Kong for six days, told their best anecdotes, took the pulse of the ex-colony, and returned to London and Boston. It was finally realized that while European culture was old, Asian culture was older. Palipana, by now the most respected of the Sri Lankan group, went to one such gathering and never went to another. He was a spare man, unable to abide formality and ceremonial toasts.
The three years Sarath spent as a student of Palipana’s were the most difficult of his academic life. All archaeological data proposed by a student had to be confirmed. Every rock cuneiform or carving had to be drawn and redrawn onto the pages of journals, in sand, on blackboards, until it was a part of dreams. Sarath had thought of Palipana during the first two years as someone mean with praise and mean (rather than spare) in the way he lived. He seemed incapable of handing out compliments, would never buy anyone a drink or a meal. His brother, Nārada, who had no car and was always cadging rides, at first appeared similar, but was generous with time and friendship, generous with his laughter. Palipana always seemed to be saving himself for the language of history. He was vain and excessive only in how he insisted on having his work published a certain way, demanding two-colour diagrams on good paper that would survive weather and fauna. And it was only when a book was completed that his terrierlike focus would shift away from a project, so he could go empty-handed into another era or another region of the country.
History was ever-present around him. The stone remnants of royal bathing pools and water gardens, the buried cities, the nationalistic fervour he rode and used gave him and those who worked with him, including Sarath, limitless subjects to record and interpret. It appeared he could divine a thesis at any sacred forest.
Palipana had not entered the field of archaeology until he was middle-aged. And he had risen in the career not as a result of family contacts but simply because he knew the languages and the techniques of research better than those above him. He was not an easily liked man, he had lost charm somewhere in his youth. He would discover among his students over the years only four dedicated protégés. Sarath was one of them. By the time Palipana was in his sixties, however, he had fought with each of them. Not one of the four had forgiven him for their humiliations at his hands. But his students continued to believe two things-no, three: that he was the best archaeological theorist in the country, that he was nearly always right, and that even with his fame and success he continued to live a life-style more minimal than any of them. Perhaps this was the result of being the brother of a monk. Palipana’s wardrobe was, apparently, reduced to two identical outfits. And as he grew older he linked himself less and less with the secular world, save for his continuing vanity regarding publication. Sarath had not seen him for several years.
During these years Palipana had been turned gracelessly out of the establishment. This began with his publication of a series of interpretations of rock graffiti that stunned archaeologists and historians. He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century. The work was applauded in journals abroad and at home, until one of Palipana’s protégés voiced the opinion that there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts. They were a fiction. A group of historians was unable to locate the runes Palipana had written about. No one could find the sentences he had quoted and translated from dying warriors, or any of the fragments from the social manifestos handed down by kings, or even the erotic verses in Pali supposedly by lovers and confidants of the court mentioned by name but never quoted in the Cūlavaṃsa.