Books: Anil's Ghost: A teardrop in the ocean

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje



The story was told from the perspective of Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan who spent the majority of her adult life abroad, a forensic anthropologist sent by the UN to investigate the possible role of the Sri Lankan government in the 20-year civil war. She was assisted by a local archeologist, Sarath. Together they tried to reconstruct the face and decode the formal life and death of a skeleton they nicknamed "Sailor".

In the course of their investigation, Anil and Sarath encountered an assortment of unforgetable characters that had come to define the multifaceted shards of the broken life in a massive politically motivated genocide. It's been a week, yet this book has left such a enduring mark on my mind that I often found myself visualizing fragments from the book. I become intensely interested in Sri Lanka, a country previously I know very little about. I found a map of South Asia and saw that Sri Lanka is really in the middle of no where, just south of India, alone, shaped like a teardrop in the ocean, an emerald in the azure Bay of Bengal. In my naïve mind, I had always pictured the people of Sri Lanka, embodying the virtues of devoted Buddhists, live a quiet and peaceful life, tuned with the splendid nature around them. I did get a few glimpses of this serenity in Anil and Sarath's encounter with Sarath's teacher, the blind Paripana and his 12-year-old niece in an abandoned forest monastery, ironically though, as a way to recover the traumatizing shock of the niece after witnessing her own parents' murder. The tranquility was oddly similar to that of Spring Summer Fall Winter, and Spring by Ki-duk Kim, especially when the girl started preparing for Paripana's death by carving out his teachings alongside the river banks, so when the sun shines through the trees, the quiet river glistens with Paripani's words reflected on the surface of the water, for eternity to come.

In most parts though, I saw just the opposite, blood, limps, heads, disappearance, mutilation, suffocation, and I could literally hear the scream in the make-shift hospitals when anesthesia runs out, which is almost all the time. Michael Ondaatje paints the unfathomable pain and fear people endure everyday in a sweeping motion, like a skillful artist with delicate and alluring touch to the detail, thus creating an impression of the chaos and fear that's powerfully blinding and astonishingly clear at the same time. I still get the chills recalling an incident when Anil and Sarath ran into a truck driver being crucifix-ed onto the road, his 18-wheeler parked in the middle of the road approaching a sharp turn. The truck' torch-like piercing headlights burning above him, he was pinned down and waiting hopelessly for death to consume him whole.

Throughout the 20-year civil war, Sri Lanka was best symbolized as the giant Buddha that was blown to pieces as two thieves search fruitlessly for hidden treasure in its belly, as the story goes towards the end of the book. In the story, the artificer Ananda, reconstructs the broken Buddha piece by piece, and finally at 5AM (the hour of the enlightenment) paints the eyes, using a mirror for reflection so as not to look straight into Buddha＊s eyes. A grand gesture, unfortunately too grand for any real life imitations. The tragedy in Sri Lanka, like that in Rwanda, Sudan, Argentina, and many others, did not receive the attention it so rightly deserved from all around the globe, including the UN. Like a single teardrop falling silently into the ocean, it's lost without a trace. Only in great literary works does it re-live all its formal glory and culminating tragedy. Shame.