She began with the room, then returned to the bathroom and filmed herself waving briefly into the mirror. A close-up of the texture of the towels, a close-up of the shower water still running. She stood on the bed and shot down at Cullis’s sleeping head, his left arm out to where she had been all night beside him. Her pillow. Back to Cullis, his mouth, his lovely ribs, back off the bed onto floor level, the camera steady, down to his ankles. Walked backwards to take in their clothes on the floor, and then to the table to his notebook. Close-up on his writing.
She removed the cassette from the machine and buried it under some clothes in his suitcase. She packed the camera in her bag, then got back into bed beside him.
They were lying in bed, in the sunlight. ‘I can’t imagine your childhood,’ he said. ‘You are a complete stranger to me. Colombo. Is the place languid?’
‘It’s languid indoors. Frenetic outside.’
‘You don’t go back.’
‘No.’
‘A friend of mine went to Singapore. All that air-conditioning! He said it was like being stuck in Selfridges for a week.’
‘I suspect people in Colombo would love it to be Selfridges.’
Their life together was best in these brief quiet times, lazily, postcoitally conversing. To him she was clear and funny and beautiful, to her he was married, always interesting, permanently defensive. Two out of three was not good.
They had met on another occasion, in Montreal. Anil was there for a convention, and Cullis had run into her in a hotel lobby quite by chance.
‘I’m sneaking away,’ she said. ‘Enough!’
‘Have dinner with me.’
‘I’ve got plans. I promised myself this evening with a group of friends. Join us. We’ve had days and days of papers. I promise you the worst meal in Montreal if you come with me.’
They drove through the suburbs.
‘Do you speak French?’ he asked.
‘No. Just English. I can write some Sinhala.’
‘Is that your background?’
A no-name plaza appeared on the side of the highway, and she parked beneath the blinking lights of a Bowlerama. ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘In the West.’
Cullis was introduced to seven other anthropologists, who looked him over carefully and considered his posture to assess whether he would be useful on their team. They seemed to come from all over the world. Having flown to Montreal from Europe and Central America, they had escaped another slide show and were now, like Anil, ready for bowling. Bad red wine from a machine dribbled into small paper cups like the ones dentists offered and was being consumed by them at great speed, along with chips and vinegar and canned hummus. A paleontologist organized the computer-scoring panels, and within ten minutes these forensic celebrities, probably the only non-French-speakers in the Bowlerama, were goblinlike in their bowling shoes, and indeed raucous. There was competitive cheating. There was the dropping of bowling balls onto the parquet lanes. Cullis did not wish for his dead body ever to be touched by such incompetents, who committed so many foot faults. More and more, as the contest progressed, he and Anil rushed to each other to give hugs of congratulations. He felt light in his speckled shoes, he flung the ball without aiming and knocked over what sounded like a bucketful of nails. She came over and kissed him, tentatively but precisely on the back of the neck. They left the arcade in each other’s arms.
‘Must be something in the hummus. Was that real hummus?’
‘Yes.’ She laughed.
‘A known aphrodisiac…’
‘I’ll never sleep with you if you say you don’t like The Artist Formerly Known As… Kiss me here. Do you have a difficult middle name I have to learn?’
‘Biggles.’
‘Biggles? As in Biggles Flies East and Biggles Wets His Bed?’
‘Yes, that Biggles. My dad grew up on his books.’
‘I never wanted to marry a Biggles. I always wanted to marry a tinker. I love that word…’
‘Tinkers don’t have wives. Not if they are true tinkers.’
‘You’ve got a wife, don’t you?’
In the ship’s lab in the harbour, one night, working alone, she cut herself badly with a surgical blade, slicing the flesh along her thumb. She poured Dettol over it and taped it, then decided to go to the hospital on the way home; she didn’t want it infected-there were those rats always in the hold, scurrying perhaps over the instruments when she and Sarath were not there. She was tired and hailed a late-night bajaj that dropped her off at Emergency Services.
There were about fifteen souls sitting or lying on the long benches. Now and then a doctor strolled in, signalled for the next patient and went off with him. She was there for more than an hour and in the end gave up, because more and more injured were coming in off the street and her wound began to seem insignificant in comparison. But that wasn’t why she left. A man wearing a black coat walked in and sat down among them, blood on his clothes. He remained there in silence, waiting for someone to help him, not bothering to pick up a number like the rest of them. Eventually there were three empty spaces on the bench and he stretched out, took off his black coat and used it as a pillow, but he couldn’t sleep and his open eyes stared across the room at her.
His face was red and wet from the blood on the coat. He sat up, pulled a book out of his pocket and began reading very fast, turning pages, taking it in quickly. He swallowed a tablet and lay down again and this time dropped off, his circumstances and surroundings lost to him. A nurse approached him and touched him on the shoulder; when he didn’t move she kept her hand there. Anil was to remember all this very well. He got up then, pocketed the book, and touched one of the other patients and disappeared with him. He was a doctor. The nurse picked up the coat and took it away. That was when Anil left. If she couldn’t tell who was who in a hospital, what chance did she have?
T he National Atlas of Sri Lanka has seventy-three versions of the island-each template revealing only one aspect, one obsession: rainfall, winds, surface waters of lakes, rarer bodies of water locked deep within the earth.
The old portraits show the produce and former kingdoms of the country; contemporary portraits show levels of wealth, poverty and literacy.
The geological map reveals peat in the Muthurajawela swamp south of Negombo, coral along the coast from Ambalangoda to Dondra Head, pearl banks offshore in the Gulf of Mannar. Under the skin of the earth are even older settlements of mica, zircon, thorianite, pegmatite, arkose, topaz, terra rossa limestone, dolomite marble. Graphite near Paragoda, green marble at Katupita and Ginigalpelessa. Black shale at Andigama. Kaolin, or china clay, at Boralesgamuwa. Plumbago graphite-veins and flakes of it-graphite of the greatest purity (ninety-seven percent carbon), which would be mined in Sri Lanka for one hundred and sixty years, especially during the World Wars, six thousand pits around the country, the main mines at Bogala, Kahatagaha and Kolongaha.
Another page reveals just bird life. The twenty species of bird out of the four hundred native to Sri Lanka, such as the blue magpie, the Indian blue chat, the six families of the bulbul, the pied ground thrush with its fading hoot, the teal, the shoveller, ‘false vampires,’ pintail snipes, Indian coursers, pale harriers in the clouds. On the reptile map are locations of the green pit viper pala-polanga, which in daylight, when it cannot see well, attacks blindly, leaping to where it thinks humans are, fangs bared like a dog, leaping again and again towards a now hushed and fearful quietness.