‘I tied only. You said hurry. What time for tape?’ says Kottu Nihal.
‘Those knots were looser than your Amma’s redda.’
‘What you say?’
‘Just there. Navam Mawatha, that hardware store sells masking tape. Would’ve taken five minutes.’
‘It’s not open.’
‘So go open it.’
‘Aiyo I can’t. The abhithiyas are waking. Can’t be punching priests early morning.’
Balal Ajith takes off his T-shirt and tucks the front of his sarong between his legs and over his arse crack. He lets out another burp. Curried cow stomach exits Balal Ajith’s gut and then his throat. He relives the taste of babath marinated in old arrack.
‘This is why, Kottu Aiya, you and me need to put a swim.’
The body has also become shirtless, its ribs cave-in like a broken coconut. You try not to look at the battered bones, the flesh in the beard, or the chunks missing from the face.
But you do. You know these animals. They work at the casino and are paid to beat those who beat the house and collect from those the house has beaten. You didn’t know that they worked as garbage men. ‘Kunu kaaraya’ is a euphemism for those who dispose of bodies that can’t get death certificates. A garbage man is cheaper to hire than a dirty magistrate.
Since Lanka’s 1987 peace accord with India, garbage men have been in high demand. The government forces, the eastern separatists, the southern anarchists and the northern peacekeepers are all prolific producers of corpses.
Kottu Nihal and Balal Ajith got their nicknames from Welikada Prison, both owing to the culinary arts. Kottu Nihal worked in the kitchen, where he specialised in shredding roti to make kottu. The cooking utensils he smuggled into the compound effectively made him the prison arms dealer. He earned his stripes by pointing the sharp ends of two kottu plates at a prison bully’s throat. Balal Ajith was known to boil cats or balalas and serve them as curry in exchange for cigarettes.
You stand on the corpse as if it were a surfboard. Did you ever surf in your former life? Looks like you had the build for it. What a fabulous-looking man you were. What a stupid waste. You sob like you never did when Dada left your Amma, and then you stop.
You don’t disagree with the Headless Atheist. For thirty-four years, you passionately believed in nothing. Not the best explanation for the pandemonium, just the only plausible one. You thought you were smarter than the sheep that flocked to temples and mosques and churches, and now it appears that the sheep made the smarter bet.
Over a short and useless existence, you examined evidence and drew conclusions. We are a flicker of light between two long sleeps. Forget the fairy tales of gods and hells and previous births. Believe in odds and in fairness and in stacking decks that are already stacked, in playing your hand as best you can for as long as you can. You were led to believe that death was sweet oblivion and you were wrong on both counts.
The only god you ever believed in was a low-caste yaka called Narada. Narada yaka’s peculiar job description was to think up problems for humanity. If he failed, his head exploded. He received a standard immortality package and an omniscience allowance. Though you suspect his main motivation was keeping his skull intact.
Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.
How else to explain the world’s madness? If there’s a heavenly father, he must be like your father: absent, lazy and possibly evil. For atheists there are only moral choices. Accept that we are alone and strive to create heaven on earth. Or accept that no one’s watching and do whatever the hell you like. The latter is by far easier.
So here you are, watching men who burned Tamil homes in 1983 trying to drown your corpse. So much for sweet oblivion and dreamless sleep. You are doomed to stay awake. Doomed to look but never touch, to witness but never record. To be the impotent homo, the ponnaya, as the dead kid at the counter just called you.
The figure in the hood emerges from the shadow. It floats on wind and perches cross-legged next to the stone Buddhas. It does not move its lips when it speaks, but sits on a shadow and plants words in your head; its voice is a serpent clearing its throat. ‘Sorry for your loss, Maali-Sir. Must be a great shock. You must meditate on your body.’
‘Does that help?’
‘Not really.’
Who hasn’t seen a photo of themselves and realised how much chubbier and uglier they actually are. Mirrors lie as much as memories do. Why lie: you were a gorgeous creature. Trim, neat, with good hair and decent skin. And now you are a carcass on a slab sucked clear of breath and colour. Above you, a butcher of cats raises his cleaver.
‘Are you my Helper?’ you ask and receive no reply. The figure has vanished and you wait for it to creep up on you once more.
‘No, sir. Forget Helpers. All bullshit. Those morons in white are bureaucrats and prison guards. They have turned the In Between into an asylum. Pathetic.’
The World Bank and the Dutch government once donated money towards rebuilding these canals. A bulk of it ended up in well-stitched pockets. A feasibility study was rejected and filed next to plans for unbuilt highways and skyscrapers. In Sri Lanka, everything is built by the lowest bidder or, most profitably, not at all.
Kottu holds down your body, hoping liquid will seep through the holes in the skull. The water baptises the brain, but the corpse still floats. Kottu swears and spits. Balal paddles towards the corpse, cleaver balanced over his head, like a frog playing a waiter. The cleaver is big and brown, dulled, no doubt, by the blood of a thousand cats.
You have studied these men, you have avoided them in streets and in jungles, you know who they are and that there are too many to count. They too think that no one is watching, unaware that you are spitting in their hair. The goons work for the goon-master, who is hired by the cops on the instruction of the task force, which is funded by the ministry, that answers to the Cabinet, that lives in the house that JR built.
1988 was about JVP Marxists holding the nation by the throat, and the following year was about the government crackdown. If you were politically inclined, the goons picked you up and handed you to an interrogator and, depending on your session with him, to an executioner. These are usually ex-army sadists and most of them wear black hoods with holes in them, like the Ku Klux Klan, except for the black bit obviously.
Follow any turd upstream and it leads to a member of parliament. Dr Ranee Sridharan of Jaffna University famously mapped out the ecosystem of a Tigers terror cell and of a government death squad. Those with dirty hands are unconnected to those in power, so those in power could blame whoever they chose. The good doctor used your photos in her book without permission. She was shot while cycling to a lecture. Probably more for speaking out against the Tigers than for stealing your snaps.
Besides, there are more serious things happening before you. Your body has been chopped at the spinal cord, as has that of the other corpse whose face you cannot see. You are used to seeing blood and guts but this you cannot stomach.
You watch as the other corpse is beheaded and relieved of its hands and feet. Balal chops while Kottu runs a hose from a tap by the temple. The blood disappears into the black of the Beira. The figure in the hood leads you away as the goon approaches your bisected corpse. He takes off his hood and you see his face. It is young and not unpleasant to look at, despite the scars and the peeled-off scabs.
‘Are you OK, hamu?’ he asks.
‘Not really,’ you reply.
He frowns and shakes his head.
‘Sir does not remember me.’
You look down on the bruises on his neck and the burns on his shoulders.
‘Can you stop calling me “sir”?’
He reminds you of railway tracks that connect Dehiwela with Wellawatte, he reminds you of a fight at a Wennappuwa Communist Rally, of a dark beach in Negombo. You don’t recall his chocolate skin, his slender frame, or his thin lips, nor do you know his name.