The wind takes you and the world swings by at the speed of a rickshaw, faces and figures flutter past, some less terrified than others, most with feet that don’t touch the ground. You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.
‘Are you following that thing?’
It is an old man with a hook for a nose and marbles for eyes, who appears to be travelling the same wind. His head is not between his shoulders as heads prefer to be. It is held with both hands in front of his stomach like a rugger ball.
‘I wouldn’t, son. Unless you want to be stuck here.’
As you pass the heads of trees and the cheeks of buildings, he tells you he has been in the In Between for over a thousand moons.
‘What’s the In Between?’ you ask.
He says he was a teacher at Carey College who used to cycle from Kotahena to Borella every day. His clothing is tattered and stained with blood.
‘Were you in a car crash?’ you say.
‘No need to be rude.’
He says all ghosts wear clothing from previous lives and that it is better than being naked.
‘Those leaflets at the counter say you wear your sins or your traumas or your guilt. One thing I’ve learned in a thousand moons: if it smells like bullshit, don’t swallow it.’
He recognises you from political rallies and you say you did not attend political rallies and he calls you a liar. He says that you photographed his headless corpse, but didn’t include his name in the caption. That the papers called it a political murder when it wasn’t. ‘Most political murders have nothing to do with politics,’ he says.
The thing with the hood stands on a rooftop and watches you chatting. You do not see it jump the wind, though it always appears to be a few steps before you.
‘If you follow that thing, you’re a bloody fool.’
You look at the blood on his shirt and fail to think of a wisecrack.
‘It will make you promises and it will not keep them.’
Sounds like every boy I ever kissed, you think, but do not say.
‘That thing promised to hunt down my killer for me. My killer just bought a house with my money. That’s another story.’
Down There are people who look like ants, if ants were clumsy and unresourceful. You hang onto the wind as dead Colombo air blows at your feet.
The head smirks at you from the crook of the elbow.
‘Were you a believer?’
‘Only in stupid things.’
‘Like heaven?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
You shrug.
‘I bet you thought the afterlife was like an Air Lanka commercial? With golden beaches and elephants in costumes and tea pluckers grinning for the camera.’
He is right to think you a liar:
a) You weren’t a believer.
b) You do remember him.
The school teacher that ran for provincial council, whose gangster brother had him shot and won the election in his stead. There wasn’t much left of his face when you photographed him, but recognise him you do.
‘Did you believe in an afterlife of milk and kithul honey and virgins sucking you off? Or an afterlife of mysteries and riddles and questions that shouldn’t be asked.’
‘Do you know why deluded men crave virgins?’ You repeat one of DD’s stupid theories and rush to the punchline. ‘Because a virgin can’t know how bad in the bed you are.’
The wind carries you in swirls over parapets and bus tops. The world has fuzzy edges, colours where there shouldn’t be any, and spirits wherever you look. Up ahead, the figure in the hood skims over the face of the Beira and lands like a crow on the headstone at the temple’s entrance. It depicts an elephant chasing a cow chasing a peacock across the circle of time. His garbage bags flap like wings against the concrete carving. He stands with arms folded and eyes squarely upon you. He is making a gesture that you cannot read.
Your travel companion watches you watch the figure. He places his head on his collarbone. The hooded figure turns its back on you and drops towards the shores of the Beira Lake. Amber flecks of sunrise turn the surface into a mirror. The bending branches and office buildings check their reflections in the ripples.
The old man sighs. ‘Or maybe you pictured a torture chamber of an afterlife? A civilian-caught-between-government-bombs-and-Tiger-mines afterlife? A picked-up-and-beaten-with-sticks-because-of-your-surname afterlife? Hell is all around us and is in session as we speak.’
He places his head on his shoulder and swivels it like a periscope. ‘I, of course, believed in nothing. In an afterlife that never was, in an afterlife that wasn’t in a service area. Why should there be anything? Why not nothing? Oblivion made more sense than heaven or rebirth or living the same sad shit over and over.’ He tilts the head towards you. ‘What I didn’t expect was this bloody mess.’
‘Who’s the hoodlum?’
‘JVP communist scum. Dead and still talking revolution. Another killer that got killed. You shouldn’t be talking to it. You should go and find your Light and get out of here while you can. It’s what I should’ve done.’
The Dead Atheist looks out to the Beira Lake as if pondering afterlives and things undone.
‘What have you done for a thousand moons?’
‘I’ve gone to every holy house to watch people pray.’
‘Why?’
‘I enjoy how stupid they look.’
‘That doesn’t sound bad.’
‘Seven moons is shorter than you think,’ he says. ‘If you stop following that thing, then it will stop following you. If you stay here, you will run out of things to do.’
You line up the headless man with your camera and take a snap of him with the lake and the rising sun at his back. His voice evaporates like good intentions do. You look around and see neither him nor the thing in the hood. All you see are three bodies lying on the banks of that muddy lake. Beira Lake
On Tuesday 4 December 1989, a few minutes after 4 a.m., two men in sarongs dump four bodies in the Beira Lake. It is not the first time either of them have done this, or done it drunk, or done it at this hour.
On this day, the Beira Lake smells like a powerful deity has squatted over it, emptied its bowels in its waters, and forgotten to flush. The men get plastered on stolen arrack, not because years of dumping bodies have broken their nerve or grieved their conscience, but because breathing the stench sober feels like inhaling a public urinal.
The first body is wrapped in rubbish bags. It wears a safari jacket with five large pockets filled with bricks. Stylishly accessorised with one sandal, three chains and a camera around the neck. The men use coir rope to tie bricks to the battered torso. They think they know knots, despite being neither sailors nor Cub Scouts.
They hurl the body with the grace of shotputters, and it lands with a splash that barely clears the distance of a schoolyard jump. The first bottle of arrack robs them of disgust; the second takes away their motor skills. The knots give way as soon as the body hits the warmth of the Beira and the bricks sink into the black waters.
They try the same with the other corpses. One sinks and one floats. Columns of stone Buddhas from the floating temple stare down at the buoyant dead with neither interest nor alarm. Monitor lizards slither past the corpses during their morning dip. River birds argue over who gets to eat the eyes.
The Beira Lake used to be three times this size and was used to hide all manners of vice. Much lies buried in the centuries since the Portuguese merchant Lopo de Brito diverted the Kelani river to thwart a marauding King Vijayabahu. It used to stretch through Panadura, out by Colombo’s backside, to join Bolgoda Lake. The Dutch seized it and squeezed it into canals. The English purloined it and put it to work. Corpses of traders, sailors, prostitutes, gangsters and innocents lie rotting in its belly. And every decade it lets out a belch that covers Slave Island in its rancid breath.
‘You fool,’ burps Balal Ajith. ‘You didn’t put tape?’