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.
