You feel the stab in the appendix as you see Albert Kabalana and Lakshmi Almeida at Pasikuda Beach holding hands on the eve of their boy’s tenth birthday. Back when they still played mixed doubles badminton. Bertie is a few years from leaving; Lucky, a few years from drinking in the afternoons. He is unaware of the disease already inside, she is unaware of Aunty Dalreen.
You click the silent Nikon and see a man stripped and beaten while a laughing mob gathers sticks for a bonfire. That’s the picture that made the dark lady with the big lips call you. The Queen of Spades whose name does not arrive no matter how much you wince or groan.
You press down on the cracked button and see an unexploded suicide bomber jacket, whose owner was killed while ‘trying to escape’, filmed using candlelight. You didn’t need any lights at the Sooriyakanda mass grave where the sunrise turned the paddy fields golden. You squint and stare at skeletons stretched to the horizon, dead children as far as the eyes could see. Young boys made to write suicide notes to their families before being executed. For the crime of taunting the son of the school principal who knew a colonel in the STF.
You don’t remember how many times you cheated on DD, only that you felt guilt only once. You don’t remember voting for JR or losing thirteen lakhs in three minutes or telling your father the thing that broke him. But you know you did all three.
You do not remember Sena. Neither meeting him, nor attending rallies, nor trying to smooch him. You do not remember dying. How it happened or who was around. And why you’d rather not know.
Maybe you were taken for doing your job too well, like all those journos and activists over the last decade. Maybe you were snuffed for taunting someone whose father knew someone. Maybe you did it yourself, not like you hadn’t tried before. All scenarios are plausible.
Though, as every gambler knows, the biggest killer in this godless universe is the random roll of the dice. Plain stinking jungle variety bad luck. The thing that gets us all.
The camera fills with mud. You shake it like you’re not supposed to and pull at the things around your neck. You hold the Nikon to your face and it is no longer brown. There is broken glass and blurred colours. You see the dead after the shelling at Kilinochchi. You see a broken dog, a bleeding man, a mother and child. You took this photo from the top of a crumbling building, and as you watch a hole grows larger in your stomach, until you feel it pushing at your throat. It is not the most gruesome photo in your box by a long stretch, but for some reason for you it is the saddest.
You switch back to the last thing you remember. Being in a casino and putting everything you had on something black. Do Not Visit Cemeteries
‘Oi! Where you going?’
The van stalls in traffic by the Borella cemetery. The garbage thugs have dozed off and Drivermalli is humming to himself. It is a tuneless version of the Lambada theme tune. So, exactly like the original.
‘I have work,’ says Sena. ‘And I get the feeling, sir is wasting my time.’
‘And what am I supposed to be doing?’
You’d rather not spend your seven moons in a van full of human meat. The garbage bags in the back rustle in the wind.
‘No one can make anyone do anything. That’s the problem.’
Sena jumps from the hood of a trishaw to the side of a bus and leaps onto the railings of the Borella Kanatte. You wonder if you are capable of leaping from a semi-moving vehicle. Sounds like the sort of thing that gets you killed. He calls out from the pavement. ‘If you don’t care why you died, why should I?’
You hear a rumble behind Balal and Kottu, who are snoring and drooling, respectively. Two apparitions rise from the bags of meat. Their clothing is torn, their eyes are empty, they both have mullets, they are familiar and you know why. You have seen their bodies on the banks on the Beira, chopped into eighths, placed next to yours and Sena’s. They look like young men who have been beaten senseless. Their eyes roll in their sockets as they lurch towards you.
You leap like a triple-jumping ballerina and end up at the cemetery gates next to a laughing Sena. You look back and see the two ghosts following you. You shriek and Sena laughs some more.
They float behind you, looking deader than most and not speaking. Their fingernails gone; always a sign. As is the bruising under the feet, and the I’ve-just-swallowed-my-brain stare. You’ve seen a few in your time, strung upside down from telephone poles, baking on roadsides, nailed to trees. All with the same expression as these two. Except those corpses didn’t move.
‘Innocent buggers. Sin men,’ says Sena. ‘The fat one is an Engineering student from Moratuwa. The other is an agriculture student from Jaffna. Rounded up, tortured and killed.’
‘For what?’
‘The big question. Because they were Sinhala or Tamil? Or because they were poor?’
‘Bullets can also find the middle class. The journalist Richard de Zoysa, the activist Dr Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Me, as you’ve pointed out. Though I don’t remember being shot.’
You don’t remember being dragged from your bed like Richard while his mother pleaded for his life. You don’t remember getting death threats from boys you’d taught like Dr Ranee.
‘These are innocent fellows. That’s the point. At least you and me were involved.’
‘I wasn’t involved.’
‘Keep saying that.’
‘I wasn’t JVP. How was I involved? I wasn’t LTTE.’
You raise your voice, though the zombie engineers don’t seem to notice.
‘You said you worked for the British?’
‘Did I?’
The mistakenly killed engineers let out gasps and you see the shadow before you see its source. The thing is large and ambles on four legs like a hound. It leaps along the roofs of cars, but all you see is a mass of hair, teeth and eyes.
It is what you hear that terrifies. Voices caked in fear, imprisoned in flesh, like souls beyond help. A cacophony of mewling, like duelling synthesisers played badly. As if synthesisers could be played any other way.
The thing has a head of a bull on the body of a bear and it lumbers towards you at a quickening pace. It has a necklace of skulls and faces trapped beneath its skin. Faces that you cannot draw your eyes away from.
‘Move slowly,’ says Sena. ‘And move now.’
‘What is it?’
‘A naraka. A hell-being. Something worse than a yaka.’
Sena drags you onto a wind as you hear the growl. It projects to the space between your ears. The sound of a thousand voices shrieking off-key. The creature stands on a moving truck and watches you. It is more shadow than form and emits static like an old TV playing every channel at once, the dead souls in its belly screaming at clashing frequencies. You follow Sena’s wind as it whistles through the cemetery.
The Borella Kanatte is a picturesque collection of trees and serpents and gravestones. You’ve stopped here many times for a peaceful walk. Today it is anything but. The cemetery teems with cripples and ghosts and horned figures, and it is difficult to know where to look and where not to. They are perched on graves, they hover behind mourners, they occupy the trees and the railings. They lurch like the damned, with eyes of every shade and a talcum hue to their peeling skin. The mistakenly killed Engineering students halt at the gate. Sena looks back and scoffs.
‘What are you scared of? You’re already dead! The worst has already happened.’
That’s a Sinhala phrase you hear a lot, especially around war zones. You’ve heard it uttered by aid workers, soldiers, terrorists and villagers. All bad things have happened already. It cannot get worse than this.
‘Aren’t we supposed to avoid cemeteries?’ you ask Sena as he floats down the pathway.
‘The Mahakali can’t enter here,’ he replies.
‘The what?’
‘It has many names,’ whispers Sena. ‘Maruwa, Maha Sona, Kalu Balla, Kuveni. I know it as the Mahakali, the swallower of souls. It’s the most powerful thing roaming these winds. It is a deity whom demons and yakas kneel before. Not a humble ghost like you or me. But, remember, demons or yakas, or those who command them, cannot go where they’re not invited.’