Anil's Ghost

Part 4 explores The Presence of the Past, suggesting the past is impossible to escape, especially during war, when old grudges and unhealed wounds hover just below the surface. Everywhere they go, Sarath and Ananda find the fragments of another place from another time. Further, in one sense, Sailor is one of Anil’s ghosts, haunting her with his unknowability, with his promise of uncovering the truth: “So the wind and all the night were in Sailor. After the burnings and the burials, he was on a wooden table washed by the moon” (169). The past lingers just below the surface but remains unknowable.

The government’s role in the war requires them to uncover the truth about the past in secrecy, connecting the search for the past to The Perversion of Politics. Even a routine drive from Ananda’s village to Sarath’s family estate reminds them of the perilousness of existence in war, when soldiers stop and search them, taking batteries to make homemade bombs. Reinforcing this theme is Anil’s chafing against the claustrophobic (and somewhat paranoic) world she is in: “She needed communication with the outside world. There was too much solitude in her head. Too much Sarath. Too much Ananda” (180). In a world of perverse politics, however, this kind of contact is perilous because anyone she talks to could get her killed. She reaches out to Dr. Perera in Colombo, but quickly hangs up when she fears it is a mistake. She ultimately finds release only through wild dancing that allows her body to exhaust her mind, suggesting the toll such an environment takes on those living in it.

Sarath’s family estate is yet another sanctuary, like the forest monastery where Palipana lives. Sarath’s family first stayed here when Gamini was sick with diphtheria as a child. His unlikely survival symbolically links the estate to healing and endurance. The estate’s history in Sarath’s family also links it to the theme of Rootlessness and Return. Sarath, feeling increasingly rootless, returns to the comfortable estate of his youth, but his dangerous, secretive project of identifying Sailor complicates and subverts that return. The estate, as the one-time home to a well-known artist, also connects to Ananda. Inscriptions in the artist’s studio bearing the words “MAKAMKRUKA” and “MADNARAGA,” which refer to an agitator who guards sacred ground and “sexual arousal,” respectively. Both words gesture to acts of creation. The artist both disturbs the status quo, defending the sacredness of culture, and generates sexual energy, birthing something new. Ondaatje therefore links Ananda’s project with these contrasting and conflating ideals.

In reconstructing Sailor’s head, Ananda disrupts the silence behind the assassination and creates something new—the head, as Anil immediately realizes, is not a faithful reproduction of Sailor. Ananda himself has a difficult relationship to truth. His work as a miner, surrounded by darkness, parallels Anil and Sarath’s work with the skeletal remains; extractive excavation is the dark twin of archeology. The narrator describes the backbreaking labor of trying “to flush mud free from what had been sent up in the search for anything of value” (92). The outcome of mining, like that of identifying Sailor, is uncertain. Ananda’s suicide attempt serves to jolt Anil out of her self-absorption while reinforcing the artist’s sacred role. Anil realizes she must save him because “He called forth the dead” (196). His work gives new life to his own dead, now peaceful, wife and brings a version of Sailor to life while implicitly reminding Anil of her own lost parents. After Anil learns that Ananda will survive, she admits for the first time that she “wanted to come back” (200). Her alienation slowly turns to identification, indicating her needs both to identify Sailor and reidentify with her roots.

Sailor’s identification is fraught with uncertainty and layers of meaning, further highlighting the theme of rootlessness and return. He becomes a sacred object in and of himself, in part because his identity is elusive: “it seemed unlikely that they would identify him; they still knew nothing of the world Sailor had come from” (176). Thus, he can be nothing more than symbol, a representation of state-sponsored violence. Complicating this is the fact that Sailor’s team conflate him with other people, evidenced by Ananda’s rendering of a face clearly not Sailor’s and Anil’s connection of Sailor’s bones to Ananda’s posture. As Sarath notes, the peaceful face Ananda paints is “what he wants of the dead” (182). Even when Anil identifies his occupation, putting his identification within reach, however, “it was not the head that would give the skeleton a name but his markers of occupation” (205). That is, Sailor will likely be identified as one of the miners who has gone missing. His elusive identity, like the truth he is meant to expose, defines him.