However, without identifying Sailor, they had no victim yet.
Anil had worked with teachers who could take a seven-hundred-year-old skeleton and discover through evidence of physical stress or trauma in those bones what the person’s profession had been. Lawrence Angel, her mentor at the Smithsonian, could, from just the curvature of a spine to the right, recognize a stonemason from Pisa, and from thumb fractures among dead Texans tell that they had spent long evenings gripping the saddle on mechanical barroom bulls. Kenneth Kennedy at Cornell University remembered Angel identifying a trumpet player from the scattered remains in a bus crash. And Kennedy himself, studying a first-millennium mummy of Thebes, discovered marked lines on the flexor ligaments of the phalanges and theorized the man was a scribe, the marks attributed to his constantly holding a stylus.
Ramazzini in his treatise on the diseases of tradesmen had begun it all, talking of metal poisoning among painters. Later the Englishman Thackrah spoke of pelvic deformations among weavers who sat for hours at their looms. (‘Weaver’s bottom,’ Kennedy noted, may have led to Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Comparisons were made because of similar anatomical ailments between javelin throwers among Neolithic Saharans of the Niger and modern golf professionals.
These were the markers of occupation…
The night before, Anil had leafed through Kennedy’s charts in Reconstruction of Life from the Skeleton, one of her constant travelling companions. On Sailor’s bones she could find no precise marker of occupational stress. As she stood utterly still in the courtyard, she realized there were two possible versions of a life that she could deduce from the skeleton in front of her. And the two aspects of the skeleton did not logically fit together. The first, from her reading of the bones, suggested ‘activity’ above the height of the shoulder. He had worked with his arms stretched out, reaching up or forward. A man who painted walls perhaps, or chiselled. But it appeared to be a harder activity than painting. And the arm joints showed a symmetrical use, so both arms had been active. His pelvis, trunk and legs also gave the suggestion of agility, something like the swivel of a man on a trampoline. Acrobat? Circus performer? Trapeze, because of the arms? But how many circuses were around in the Southern Province during the emergency? She remembered there had been many roaming ones in her childhood. And she remembered once seeing a children’s book on extinct animals where one of the extinct creatures was an acrobat.
The other version of him was different. The left leg had been broken badly, in two places. (These wounds were not a part of his murder. She could tell the breaks had occurred about three years before his death.) And the heel bones-the heel bones suggested an alternate profile completely, a man static and sedentary.
Anil looked around the courtyard. Sarath was barely visible, sitting in the darkness of the house, while Ananda squatted comfortably in front of the head on the turntable, a lit beedi in his mouth. She could imagine the squint of his eyes behind his spectacles. She passed him as she walked to the granary cupboards. Then moved back.
‘Sarath,’ she said quietly, and he came out. He sensed the edge to her voice.
‘I- Can you tell Ananda not to move. To stay as he is. That I’m going to have to touch him, okay?’
Sarath’s glasses were on his nose. He looked at her.
‘Do you understand me?’
‘Not really. You want to touch him?’
‘Just tell him not to move, okay?’
As soon as Sarath entered his work space, Ananda threw a cloth over the head. There was a brief conversation, then hesitant monosyllabic agreement repeated after each of Sarath’s phrases. She walked in slowly and kneeled beside Ananda, but as soon as she touched him he jumped up.
She turned away in frustration.
‘Ne, ne!’ Sarath tried to explain once more. It took a while for them to arrange Ananda into exactly the same position he had been in.
‘Get him to keep it taut, as if he was working.’
Anil took hold of Ananda’s ankle in both hands. She pressed her thumbs into the muscle and cartilege, moved them up a few inches above his ankle bone. There was a dry laugh from Ananda. Then down to the heel again. ‘Ask him why he works like this.’ She was told by Sarath that he was comfortable.
‘It’s not comfortable,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the foot is relaxed. There’s stress. The ligament is being stretched against the bone. There will be a permanent bruise to it. Ask him.’
‘What?’
‘Ask him why he works this way.’
‘He’s a carver. That’s how he works.’
‘But does he usually squat like this?’
Sarath asked the question and the two men rattled back and forth.
‘He said he got used to squatting in the gem mines. The height down there is only about four feet. He was in them for a couple of years.’
‘Thank you. Please, will you thank him…’
She was excited.
‘Sailor worked in a mine too. Come here, look at the strictures on the ankle bones of the skeleton-this is what Ananda has under his flesh. I know this. This was my professor’s area of specialty. See this sediment on the bone, the buildup. I think Sailor worked in one of the mines. We need to get a chart of the mines in this area.’
‘Are you talking about gem mines?’
‘It could be anything. Also, this is just one aspect of his life, the rest is very different. He must have done something more active before he broke his leg. So we have a story about him, you see. A man who was active, an acrobat almost, then he was injured and had to work in a mine. What other mines do they have around here?’
There followed two days of storms when they had to stay indoors. As soon as the bad weather ended, Anil borrowed Sarath’s cell phone, found an umbrella and went into a light rain. She clambered down a slope away from the trees and stalked across to the far edge of the paddy field, to where Sarath had told her there was the clearest reception.
She needed communication with the outside world. There was too much solitude in her head. Too much Sarath. Too much Ananda.
Dr. Perera at Kynsey Road Hospital answered the phone. It took a while for him to remember who she was, and he was startled to be told that she was speaking to him from a paddy field. What did she want?
She had wanted to talk to him about her father, knew she had been skirting the memory of him since her arrival on the island. She apologized for not calling and meeting him before she left Colombo. But on the phone Perera seemed muted and wary.
‘You sound sick, sir. You should take a lot of liquids. A viral flu comes like that.’
She would not tell him where she was-Sarath had warned her of that-and when he asked for the second time she pretended she could not hear, said, ‘Hello… hello? Are you there, sir?’ and hung up.
Anil moves in silence, the energy held back. Her body taut as an arm, the music brutal and loud in her head, while she waits for the rhythm to angle off so she can open her arms and leap. Which she does now, throwing her head back, her hair a black plume, back almost to the level of her waist. Throws her arms too, to hold the ground in her back flip, her loose skirt having no time to discover gravity and drop before she is on her feet again.
It is wondrous music to dance alongside-she has danced to it with others on occasions of joy and gregariousness, carousing through a party with, it seemed, all her energy on her skin, but this now is not a dance, does not contain even a remnant of the courtesy or sharing that is part of a dance. She is waking every muscle in herself, blindfolding every rule she lives by, giving every mental skill she has to the movement of her body. Only this will lift her backward into the air and pivot her hip to send her feet over her.