Anil's Ghost

The Life Wheel

Sarath and Anil had identified Sailor at the third plumbago village. He was Ruwan Kumara and he had been a toddy tapper. After breaking his leg in a fall he had worked in the local mine, and the village remembered when the outsiders had picked him up. They had entered the tunnel where twelve men were working. They brought a billa-someone from the community with a gunnysack over his head, slits cut out for his eyes-to anonymously identify the rebel sympathizer. A billa was a monster, a ghost, to scare children in games, and it had picked out Ruwan Kumara and he had been taken away.

They now had a specific date for the abduction. Back at the walawwa they planned the next step. Sarath felt they should still be careful, have more evidence, or all their work would be rejected. He proposed that he go to Colombo and search for Ruwan Kumara’s name in a list of government undesirables; he claimed he could get hold of such a thing. It would take two days and then he would be back. He would leave her his cell phone, though she would probably not be able to contact him. So he would call her.

But after five days Sarath had not returned.

All her fears about him rose again-the relative who was a minister, his views on the danger of truth. She moved around the walawwa furiously alone. Then it was six days. She got Sarath’s cell phone working and called Ratnapura Hospital but it seemed that Ananda had left, had gone home. There was no one to talk to. She was alone with Sailor.

She took the phone and went out to the edge of the paddy field.

‘Who is this?’

‘Anil Tissera, sir.’

‘Ah, the missing one.’

‘Yes sir, the swimmer.’

‘You never came to see me.’

‘I need to talk to you, sir.’

‘What about.’

‘I have to make a report and I need help.’

‘Why me?’

‘You knew my father. You worked with him. I need someone I can trust. There is maybe a political murder.’

‘You are speaking on a cell phone. Don’t say my name.’

‘I’m stranded here. I need to get to Colombo. Can you help?’

‘I can try to arrange something. Where are you?’

It was the same question he had asked once before. She paused a moment.

‘In Ekneligoda, sir. The walawwa.’

‘I know it.’

He was off the phone.

A day later Anil was in Colombo, in the Armoury Auditorium that was a part of the anti-terrorist unit building in Gregory’s Road. She no longer had possession of Sailor’s skeleton. A car had picked her up at the walawwa but Dr. Perera had not been in it. When she arrived at the hospital in Colombo he had met her, put his arm around her. Then they’d eaten a meal in the cafeteria and he had listened to what she had done. He advised her to take it no further. He thought her work good, but it was unsafe. ‘You made a speech about political responsibility,’ she said. ‘I heard a different opinion then.’ ‘That was a speech,’ he replied. When they returned to the lab, there was confusion as to where the skeleton was.

Now, standing in the small auditorium that was half filled with various officials, among them military and police personnel trained in counter-insurgency methods, she felt stranded. She was supposed to give her report with no real evidence. It had been a way to discredit her whole investigation. Anil stood by an old skeleton laid out on a table, probably Tinker, and began delineating the various methods of bone analysis and skeletal identification relating to occupation and region of origin, although this was not the skeleton she needed.

Sarath in the back row, unseen by her, listened to her quiet explanations, her surefootedness, her absolute calm and refusal to be emotional or angry. It was a lawyer’s argument and, more important, a citizen’s evidence; she was no longer just a foreign authority. Then he heard her say, ‘I think you murdered hundreds of us.’ Hundreds of us. Sarath thought to himself. Fifteen years away and she is finally us.

But now they were in danger. He sensed the hostility in the room. Only he was not against her. Now he had to somehow protect himself.

Between Anil and the skeleton, discreetly out of sight, was her tape recorder, imprinting every word and opinion and question from officials, which she, till now, responded to courteously and unforgivingly. But he could see what Anil couldn’t-the half-glances around the hot room (they must have turned off the air-conditioning thirty minutes into the evidence, an old device to distract thought); there were conversations beginning around him. He shrugged himself off the wall and moved forward.

‘Excuse me, please.’

Everyone turned to him. She looked up, her face amazed at his presence and this interruption.

‘This skeleton was also located at the Bandarawela site?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And how much earth was found over it?’

‘Three feet approximately.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

‘We cannot. I really don’t see its relevance.’

‘Because sections of the hill outside the cave, where this one was found, had been worn down by cattle, trade, rains… isn’t that correct? Can someone turn on the damn air-conditioning in here, it’s difficult for us all to think clearly in this heat. Isn’t it true that in the old nineteenth-century burial grounds, murder sites as well as graves were often-in fact in nearly every case-found with less than two feet of earth over them?’

She was becoming agitated and decided to be silent. Sarath could sense them focusing on him, turning in their seats.

He walked down to the front of the auditorium and they let him approach her. He faced Anil now across the table, leaned forward and with a set of tongs pulled out the piece of stone imprisoned within the rib cage.

‘This stone was found in the ribs of the skeleton.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell us what happens in ancient customs… Think carefully, Miss Tissera, don’t just theorize.’

There was a pause.

‘Please don’t speak like that. Patronizing me.’

‘Tell us what happens.’

‘They bury bodies and they place a stone on the earth above it, usually. It acts like a marker and then it drops when the flesh gives way.’

‘Gives way? How?’

‘One minute!’

‘How many years does that take?’

Silence.

‘Yes?’

Silence.

He spoke very slowly now.

‘A minimum of nine years usually, isn’t it? Before the stone falls through, into the rib cage. Right?’

‘Yes, but-’

‘Right?’

‘Yes. Except for fire corpses. Burned ones.’

‘But we’re not even sure of this, because most of them were burned in the last century, these ones in the historical gravesites. As you know, there was a plague there in 1856. Another in 1890. Many were burned. The skeleton you have here is likely to be a hundred years old-in spite of your fine social work about its career and habits and diet…’

‘The skeleton I could have proved something with has been confiscated.’

‘We seem to have too many bodies around. Is this one less important than the confiscated one?’

‘Of course not. But the confiscated one died less than five years ago.’

‘Confiscated. Confiscated… Who confiscated it?’ Sarath said.

‘It was taken while I met with Dr. Perera in Kynsey Road Hospital. It was lost there.’

‘So you lost it, then. It was not confiscated.’

‘I did not lose it. It was taken from the lab when I was speaking with him in the cafeteria.’

‘So you misplaced it. Do you think it’s possible Dr. Perera had something to do with that?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. I have not seen him since.’

‘And you wished to prove that skeleton was a recent death. Even if we now do not have the evidence.’

‘Mr. Diyasena, I’d like to remind you that I came here as part of a human rights group. As a forensic specialist. I do not work for you, I’m not hired by you. I work for an international authority.’

He turned and directed his words to the audience.

‘This “international authority” has been invited here by the government, has it not? Is that not right?’

‘We are an independent organization. We make independent reports.’

‘To us. To the government here. That means you do work for the government here.’

‘What I wish to report is that some government forces have possibly murdered innocent people. This is what you are hearing from me. You as an archaeologist should believe in the truth of history.’

‘I believe in a society that has peace, Miss Tissera. What you are proposing could result in chaos. Why do you not investi-gate the killing of government officers? Can we get the air-conditioning on, please?’

There was a scattering of applause.

‘The skeleton I had was evidence of a certain kind of crime. That is what is important here. “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims.” Remember? I thought you represented more than you do.’

‘Miss Tissera-’

‘Doctor.’

‘All right, “Doctor.” I have brought here another skeleton from another burial site, an earlier century. To establish the difference, I would like you to do a forensic study of it for me.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘This is not ridiculous. I would like to have evidence of the difference between two corpses. Somasena!’

He gestured to someone in the back of the hall. The skeleton, wrapped in plastic, was wheeled in.

‘A two-hundred-year-old corpse,’ he said out loud. ‘That’s what we assume, anyway, the boys in archaeology. Perhaps you can manage to prove us wrong.’

He was tapping his pencil against her table, like a taunt.

‘I need time.’

‘We give you forty-eight hours. Leave the skeleton you were talking about and go with Mr. Somasena to the lobby, he will escort you. You will have to sign back all your research before you leave. I must warn you of that. This skeleton will be waiting for you in the front entrance in twenty minutes.’

She turned from him and collected her papers.

‘Leave the papers and the tape recorder, please.’

She was still for a moment, then removed the tape recorder from the pocket where she had just put it, and left it on the table.

‘It belongs to me,’ she whispered. ‘Remember?’

‘We’ll get it back to you.’

She started walking up the steps to the exit. The officials hardly looked at her.

‘Dr. Tissera!’

She turned at the top of the stairs and faced him, certain it would be for the last time.

‘Don’t attempt to return for these things. Just leave the building. We’ll call you if we want you.’

She stepped through the door. It closed behind her with a pneumatic click.

Sarath remained there and spoke quietly, out into their midst.

With Gunesena he wheeled the two skeletons on the trolley through the side door. It opened onto a dark passageway that would take them towards the parking lot. They stood still a moment. Gunesena said nothing. Whatever happened, Sarath did not want to return to the auditorium. He felt for a switch. There was the crackle of neon trying to catch, that stuttering of light he was used to in buildings like this.

A row of red arrows lit the passageway, which inclined upwards. They pushed the trolley with the two skeletons in the semi-darkness, arms turning crimson every time they passed an arrow. He imagined Anil two floors above him, walking angrily, slamming each door she walked through. Sarath knew they would halt her at each corridor level, check her papers again and again to irritate and humiliate her. He knew she would be searched, vials and slides removed from her briefcase or pockets, made to undress and dress again. It would take her more than forty minutes to pass the gauntlets and escape the building and she would, he knew, be carrying nothing by the end of the journey, no scraps of information, not a single personal photograph she might foolishly have carried with her into the Armoury building that morning. But she would get out, which was all he wished for.

Since the death of his wife, Sarath had never found the old road back into the world. He broke with his in-laws. The unopened letters of condolence were left in her study. They were, in reality, for her anyway. He returned to archaeology and hid his life in his work. He organized excavations in Chilaw. The young men and women he trained knew little about what had occurred in his life and he was therefore most comfortable among them. He showed them how to place strips of wet plaster on bone, how to gather and file mica, when to transport objects, when to leave them in situ. He ate with them and was open to any question in regard to work. Nothing was held back that he knew or could guess at in their field. Everyone who worked with him accepted the moats of privacy he had established around himself. He returned to his tent tired after their day of coastal excavations. He was in his mid-forties, though he seemed older to the apprentices. He waited until the early evening, until the others had finished swimming in the sea, before he walked into the water, disappearing within its darkness. At this dark hour, out deep, there were sometimes rogue tides that would not let you return, that insisted you away. Alone in the waves he would let go of himself, his body flung around as if in a dance, only his head in the air rational to what surrounded him, the imperceptible glint of large waves that he would slip beneath as they rose above him.

He had grown up loving the sea. When he was a boy at school at St. Thomas ’s, the sea was just across the railway lines. And whatever coast he was on-at Hambantota, in Chilaw, in Trincomalee-he would watch fishermen in catamarans travel out at dusk till they faded into the night just beyond a boy’s vision. As if parting or death or disappearance were simply the elimination of sight in the onlooker.

Patterns of death always surrounded him. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hand against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.

This rock hand could have been his wife’s hand. It had a similar darkness and age to it, a familiar softness. And with ease he could have re-created her life, their years together, with the remaining fragments of her room. Two pencils and a shawl would have been enough to mark and recall her world. But their life remained buried. Whatever motives she had for leaving him, whatever vices and faults and lack he had within him that drove her away had remained unsought by Sarath. He was a man who could walk past a stretch of field and imagine a meeting hall that had been burned to the ground there six hundred years before; he could turn to that absence and with a smoke smudge, a fingerprint, re-create the light and the postures of those sitting there during an evening’s ceremony. But he would unearth nothing of Ravina. This was not caused by any anger towards her, he was just unable to step back to the trauma of that place when he had talked in darkness, pretending there was light. But now, this afternoon, he had returned to the intricacies of the public world, with its various truths. He had acted in such a light. He knew he would not be forgiven that.

He and Gunesena pushed the trolley against the incline. There was hardly any air in the tunnel. Sarath put on the brake.

‘Get some water, Gunesena.’

Gunesena nodded. There was irritation in the formal gesture. He went off, leaving Sarath in the half-dark, and returned five minutes later with a beaker of water.

‘Was it boiled?’

Again Gunesena nodded. Sarath drank it and then got off the floor where he had been sitting. ‘I’m sorry, I was feeling faint.’

‘Yes, sir. I had a tumbler too.’

‘Good.’

He remembered Gunesena drinking the remnant of cordial, Anil holding the bottle, the night they had picked him up on the Kandy road.

They continued a while longer with the trolley. Pushed the double swing doors and broke out into daylight.

The noise and sun almost made him step back. They had come out into the officers’ parking lot. A few drivers stood in the shade of the one tree. Others remained within their cars, the air-conditioning purring. Sarath looked towards the main entrance but couldn’t see her. He was no longer sure she would make it out. The van that was to carry the skeleton they were going to give Anil pulled up beside them and Sarath supervised the loading. The young soldiers wanted to know everything that was going on. It had nothing to do with suspicion, they were just curious. Sarath desired some pause or quiet but he knew he would not get it. The questions were personal not official. Where was he from? How long had he been…? The only way he could escape them was to answer. When they began asking about the figure on the trolley, he waved his hands in front of his face and left Gunesena with them.

She hadn’t come out of the building. He knew, whatever had happened, he couldn’t go in looking for her. She would have to go through the hurdles of insult and humiliation and embarrassments on her own. It was almost an hour since he had last seen her.

He needed to keep busy. Beyond the fence a man was selling sliced pineapple so Sarath bought some through the barbed wire and sprinkled the salt-and-pepper mixture on it. A rupee for two slices. He could go into the lobby, out of the sunlight, but he didn’t know whether he could trust her not to lose her temper and endanger herself more.

An hour and a half now. When he turned and looked back for the fourth time he saw her at the doors. Just standing there, not moving, not knowing where she was or what she was supposed to do.

He came towards her, his fist clenched, his mind swirling.

‘Are you all right?’

She looked down, away from him.

‘Anil.’

She pulled her arm from him. He noticed she was carrying no briefcase. No papers. No forensic equipment. He put his hand on her chest to feel for the small test tubes in the inner pocket of her coat but they were not there. She didn’t react to that. Even in her state she did at least understand what he was doing.

‘I told you I would return to the walawwa.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Everyone pays attention. My brother told you that. People knew you were in Colombo the moment you got here.’

‘Damn you.’

‘You have to leave now.’

‘No, thanks. No more help from you.’

‘Take the skeleton I’ve given you and get in the van. Go back to the ship with Gunesena.’

‘All my papers are in that building. I have to get them back.’

‘You’ll never get them back. Do you understand? Forget them. You will have to re-create them. You can buy new equipment in Europe. You can replace nearly everything. It’s just you who has to be safe.’

‘Thanks for your help. Keep your fucking skeleton.’

‘Gunesena, get the van.’

‘Listen…’ She swung her look towards him. ‘Tell him to take me home. I don’t think I can walk there. I really don’t want your fucking help. But I can’t walk. I was… in there…’

‘Go to the lab.’

‘Jesus, keep your-’

He slapped her hard. He was aware of people on the periphery, her gasp, her face as if it contained fever.

‘Go with the skeleton and work on it. You don’t have long. Don’t call me. Get it done overnight. They want a report in two days. But get it done tonight.’

She was so stunned by his behaviour she climbed slowly into the van, which had drawn up beside her. Sarath watched her. He handed Gunesena the pass through the window. He saw her lowered burning face as the van curled out of his sight.

There was no vehicle for him. He went past the guards at the gate, out onto the street, waved down a bajaj and gave the driver the address of his office. You could never settle back and relax in a bajaj; if you lost concentration you were in danger of falling out. But sitting forward, his head in his hands, he tried to lose touch with the world around him as the three-wheeler struggled through the traffic.

Anil climbed the gangplank, then walked along the upper deck. A harbour in the afternoon. She could hear whistles and horns in the far reaches of the port. She wanted openness and air, didn’t want to face the darkness in the hold. Farther down the quay she saw a man with a camera. Anil stepped back so he would be out of sight.

She knew she wouldn’t be staying here much longer, there was no wish in her to be here anymore. There was blood everywhere. A casual sense of massacre. She remembered what a woman at the Nadesan Centre had said to her. ‘I got out of the Civil Rights Movement partly because I couldn’t remember which massacre took place when and where…’

It was about five now. Anil found the arrack bottle and poured herself a glass, and walked the narrow steps down into the hold.

‘Everything all right, miss?’

‘Thank you, Gunesena. You can go.’

‘Yes, miss.’ Yet she knew he would stay with her, somewhere on the ship.

She turned on a lamp. There was the other set of tools, which belonged to Sarath. She heard the door close behind her.

She drank more arrack and spoke out loud, just to hear the echo in the dim light so she would not feel alone with the ancient skeleton she had been given. She cut the plastic wrapping with an X-acto knife and rolled it down. She recognized it immediately. But to be certain moved her right hand down to the heel and felt the notch in the bone that she had cut weeks earlier.

He had found Sailor. Slowly she directed another lamp onto him. The ribs like struts on a boat. She slid her hand between the arched bones and touched the tape recorder that was there, not believing this now, not yet, until she pressed the button and voices began filling the room around her. She had the information on tape. Their questions. And she had Sailor. She put her hand between the ribs again to press the button to stop it, but as she was about to, his voice came on, very clear and focused. He must have held the recorder close to his mouth as he whispered.

‘I’m in the tunnel of the Armoury building. I have just a moment. As you can tell, this is not any skeleton but Sailor. It’s your twentieth-century evidence, five years old in death. Erase this tape. Erase my words here. Complete the report and be ready to leave at five tomorrow morning. There’s a seven-o’clock plane. Someone will drive you to the airport. I would like it to be me but it will probably be Gunesena. Do not leave the lab or call me.’

Anil made the tape roll back on the rewind. She walked away from the skeleton and paced up and down the hold listening to his voice again.

Listening to everything again.

On Galle Face Green the brothers had talked comfortably only because of her presence. So it had seemed to her. It was a long time later that she realized they were in fact speaking only to each other, and that they were pleased to be doing so. There was a want in each of them to align themselves, she was the beard, the excuse. It was their conversation about the war in their country and what each of them had done during it and what each would not do. They were, in retrospect, closer than they imagined.

If she were to step into another life now, back to the adopted country of her choice, how much would Gamini and the memory of Sarath be a part of her life? Would she talk to intimates about them, the two Colombo brothers? And she in some way like a sister between them, keeping them from mauling each other’s worlds? Wherever she might be, would she think of them? Consider the strange middle-class pair who were born into one world and in mid-life stepped waist-deep into another?

At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for the place. ‘But I could never leave here,’ Gamini had whispered.

‘American movies, English books-remember how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’

The worker from the civil rights organization came in with the Friday reports of victims-the fresh, almost-damp black-and-white photographs, seven of them this week. Faces covered. The reports were left for Gamini on the table by his window. By the time he got to them the shifts were changing. He turned on the tape recorder and began describing the wounds and how they were probably caused. When he got to the third picture he recognized the wounds, the innocent ones. He left the reports where they were, went down one flight of stairs and ran along the corridor to the ward. It was unlocked. He began pulling the sheets off the bodies until he saw what he knew he would see. Ever since he had picked up the third photograph, all he could hear was his heart, its banging.

Gamini didn’t know how long he stood there. There were seven bodies in the room. There were things he could do. He didn’t know. There were things he could do perhaps. He could see the acid burns, the twisted leg. He unlocked the cupboard that held bandages, splints, disinfectant. He began washing the body’s dark-brown markings with scrub lotion. He could heal his brother, set the left leg, deal with every wound as if he were alive, as if treating the hundred small traumas would eventually bring him back into his life.

The gash of scar on the side of your elbow you got crashing a bike on the Kandy Hill. This scar I gave you hitting you with a cricket stump. As brothers we ended up never turning our backs on each other. You were always too much of an older brother, Sarath. Still, if I had been a doctor then, I could have sewn the stitches up more carefully than Dr. Piachaud. It’s thirty years later, Sarath. It’s late afternoon-with everyone gone home except me, your least favourite relative. The one you can never relax with or feel secure with. Your unhappy shadow.

He was leaning over the body, beginning to dress its wounds, and the horizontal afternoon light held the two of them in a wide spoke.

There are pietàs of every kind. He recalls the sexual pietà he saw once. A man and a woman, the man having come and the woman stroking his back, her face with the acceptance of his transformed physical state. It was Sarath and Sarath’s wife he had witnessed, and then her eyes had looked up at him, in his madness, her hand not pausing in its stroke of the body within her arms.

There were other pietàs. The story of Savitra, who wrestled her husband away from Death so that in the startling paintings of the myth you saw her hold him-joy filling her face, while his face looked capsized, in the midst of his fearful metamorphosis, this reversal back into love and life.

But this was a pietà between brothers. And all Gamini knew in his slowed, scrambled state was that this would be the end or it could be the beginning of a permanent conversation with Sarath. If he did not talk to him in this moment, admit himself, his brother would disappear from his life. So he was too, at this moment, within the contract of a pietà.

He opened his brother’s shirt so the chest was revealed. A gentle chest. Not hard and feral like his own. It was the generous chest of a Ganesh. An Asian belly. The chest of someone who in his sarong would stroll into the garden or onto the verandah with his tea and newspaper. Sarath had always sidestepped violence because of his character, as if there had never been a war within him. He drove people around him mad. If Gamini had been the Mouse, his brother was the Bear.

Gamini placed the warmth of his hand against the still face. He had never worried about the fate of his one brother, had always thought he himself would be the fatal one. Perhaps they had each assumed they would crash alone in the darkness they had invented around themselves. Their marriages, their careers on this borderland of civil war among governments and terrorists and insurgents. There had never been a tunnel of light between them. Instead they had searched out and found their own dominions. Sarath in sun-drenched fields looking for astrological stones, Gamini in his medieval world of Emergency Services. Each of them most at ease, most free, when not conscious of the other. They were too similar in essence and therefore incapable of ever giving in to the other. Each refused to show hesitation and fear, it was only strength and anger they revealed when in the other’s company. The woman Anil had said, that night on Galle Face Green, ‘I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.’

Sarath’s chest said everything. It was what Gamini had fought against. But now this body lay on the bed undefended. It was what it was. No longer a counter of argument, no longer an opinion that Gamini refused to accept. Oh, there seemed to be a mark like that made with a spear. A small wound, not deep in his chest, and Gamini bathed it and taped it up.

He had seen cases where every tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with liquids, the ears entered. He had been, as he ran down that hospital hallway, most frightened of seeing his brother’s face. It was the face they went for in some cases. They could in their hideous skills sniff out vanity. But they had not touched Sarath’s face.

The shirt they had dressed Sarath in had giant sleeves. Gamini knew why. He ripped the sleeves down to the cuffs. Below the elbows the hands had been broken in several places.

It was dark now. It looked as if the room were full of grey water. He walked to the entrance and touched the switch, and seven central lights came on. He came back and sat with his brother.

He was still there an hour later when the bodies started coming in from a bombing somewhere in the city.

President Katugala was in a white cotton outfit, looking old, not at all like the giant posters of him throughout the city that had celebrated and idealized him for years. When you looked at the real image of the man, the lean face below the thinning white hair, there was a compassion for him, no matter what he had done. He looked weary and scared. He had been tense during the previous days, as if there was some kind of foreshadowing in his mind, as if some mechanism he had no control of had been put in motion. But it was now National Heroes Day. And the one thing the Silver President did every National Heroes Day was to go out and meet the people. He could never give up a political rally.

The week before, there had been warnings from the special forces of the police and army for him not to go among the crowds. He had in fact promised he would not do so. But around three-thirty in the afternoon, it was discovered the President was out meeting the people. The head of Katugala’s special unit, with a few other officials, leapt into a jeep and went looking for him. They located him reasonably quickly in the crowded Colombo streets and had just reached him and were standing behind him at the moment the bomb went off.

Katugala was wearing a loose white long-sleeved jacket and sarong. He was wearing sandals. He had a watch on his left wrist. He stopped by Lipton Circus and made a short speech from his bulletproof vehicle.

R- wore denim shorts and a loose shirt. Underneath these was a layer of explosives and two Duracell batteries and two blue switches. One for the left hand, one for the right, linked by wires to the explosives. The first switch armed the bomb. It would stay on as long as the bomber wished. When the other switch was turned on, the bomb detonated. Both needed to be activated for the explosion to occur. You could wait as long as you wanted before turning on the second switch. Or you could turn the first switch off. R- had more clothing on above the denim shorts. Four Velcro straps held the explosives pack to his body, and along with the dynamite there was the great weight of thousands of small ball bearings.

After Katugala finished speaking at Lipton Circus, he travelled in the bulletproof Range Rover towards the large rally on Galle Face Green. A year earlier a fortune-teller had said, ‘He will be destroyed like a plate falling to the ground.’ Now he made his way along the dual carriageway. But he kept climbing out from his vehicle and greeting the crowd. R- threaded his way on a bicycle through the chaos of people, or maybe he was walking, wheeling it. In any case, Katugala was now among the people; he had stopped again because he saw a procession of slogan-waving supporters coming onto the street from a side road. He tried to help supervise it. And R-, who would kill him, who had infiltrated the outer circle of Katugala’s residential staff so that he was well known by them, R- came slowly towards him, riding or walking his bicycle.

There are a few photographs of Katugala taken during the last half-hour of his life that exist only in a file belonging to the army. A couple of pictures were taken by the police from a high building, some by journalists, which were later confiscated and never returned, never published in the newspapers. They show him in his white outfit, looking frail, beginning to appear concerned. Mostly he looks old. Over the years no unflattering pictures of him were published in the newspapers. But in these photographs what you notice first is his age-emphasized by the fact that behind him is his platonic form on a giant cardboard cut-out, where he looks vibrant, with thick white hair. And behind him you can also see the armoured vehicle that he has left for the last time.

Katugala’s plan, in his last minutes, was to get the procession of supporters from his constituency to join the crowd on Galle Face Green. He had begun walking back to his vehicle, changed his mind and returned to choreograph the procession once more; this was how he came to be caught with his bodyguards between two very different processions-his supporters and the general populace celebrating National Heroes Day. If someone had said the President was in their midst, most of those in the crowd would have been surprised. Where is the President? At street level, in the crowd, the only presidential presence was a giant cardboard cut-out of him carried like a film prop, bobbing up and down.

No one knows really if R- came with this new procession, as seems most likely, or whether he was at the junction where the group met the larger crowd. Or he could have been waiting near the vehicle. In any case, he had been waiting for this day, when he was sure he would be able to get to Katugala on the street. There was no way R- could have entered the presidential grounds with explosives and ball bearings strapped to him. The bodyguards were unforgiving. There were never exceptions. Every pen in every pocket was examined. So R- had to approach him in a public place, with all the paraphernalia of devastation sewn onto himself. He was not just the weapon but the aimer of it. The bomb would destroy whomever he was facing. His own eyes and frame were the cross-hairs. He approached Katugala having already switched on one of the batteries. One blue bulb lighting up deep in his clothing. When he was within five yards of Katugala he turned on the other switch.

At four p.m. on National Heroes Day, more than fifty people were killed instantly, including the President. The cutting action of the explosion shredded Katugala into pieces. The central question after the bombing concerned whether the President had been spirited away, and if so whether by the police and army forces or by terrorists. Because the President could not be found.

Where was the President?

The head of the President’s unit, who half an hour earlier had been told that Katugala was out meeting the crowds, who had leapt into the jeep and made his way towards the Silver President, had just reached him and was insisting that he return to the armoured vehicle and be driven back to his residence. When the bomb went off he was left miraculously untouched. The direct spray of ball bearings entered and were held within the body of Katugala or went through him and fell in a clatter to the tarmac in the few feet behind him. But the sound of the blast drowned out the clatter. And it was the awfulness of the noise that most remember, those who survived.

So he was the only human left standing in the silence that contained the last echoes of the bomb. There was no one within twenty yards of him save the Gulliver-like replica of Katugala, rays of sun coming through the cardboard, which the ball bearings had reached and gone through.

Around him were the dead. Political supporters, an astrologer, three policemen. The armoured Range Rover just a few yards away was undamaged. There was blood on the unbroken windows. The driver sitting inside was unhurt except for damage to his ears from the sound.

Some flesh, probably from the bomber, was found on the wall of the building across the street. The right arm of Katugala rested by itself on the stomach of one of the dead policemen. There were shattered curd pots all over the pavement. Four p.m.

By four-thirty every doctor who could be located had reported for duty in the emergency hospitals in Colombo. There were more than a hundred injured on the periphery of the killing. And soon rumours rose in every ward that Katugala too had been in the crowd when the bomb went off. So each hospital waited for the possibility that his wounded body would be brought in. But it never arrived. The body, what remained of it, was not found for a long time.

The general public first became aware of the assassination when phone calls started coming in from England and Australia, people saying they had heard Katugala was dead. And then the truth slipped across the city within an hour.