He walked away from the week’s pile of photographs. The doors opened and a thousand bodies slid in, as if caught in the nets of fishermen, as if they had been mauled. A thousand bodies of sharks and skates in the corridors, some of the dark-skinned fish thrashing…
They had begun covering the faces on the photographs. He worked better this way, and there was no danger of his recognizing the dead.
The joke was that he had entered the medical profession because he assumed it would have a nineteenth-century pace. He liked its manner of amateur authority. There was the anecdote about Dr. Spittel carrying a body out of a hospital when lights failed during a night operation in Kandy, placing it on a bench in the parking lot and aiming car headlights onto the patient. A quietly heroic life remembered in a few such stories. That was the satisfaction. He’d be remembered the way a cricketer was who played one classic innings on an afternoon in 1953, his name emerging in a street baila for a week or two. Famous in a song.
As a boy, in the months when he fought off the fate of diphtheria, Gamini would lie on a mat during his afternoon sleeps and wish only for the life that his parents had. Whatever career he chose, he wanted it to move with their style and pace. To rise early and work until a late lunch, then sleep and conversation, then drop in at the office once more, briefly. His father’s and grandfather’s law offices took up one wing of the family’s large house on Greenpath Road. He was never allowed into the mysterious warrens during the workday when he was younger, but at five p.m. he would carry a glass filled with amber fluid, push the swing door with his foot and enter. There were squat filing cabinets and small desk fans. He said hullo to his father’s dog and then placed the drink on his father’s table.
At this moment his body was yanked into the air and swivelled so that he now sat on his father’s lap, large dark arms around him. ‘Start at the beginning,’ he’d say, and Gamini proceeded to tell him about his day’s adventures, his day at school, what his mother had said when he came home. He was, in the early years, fully at ease with the family. When he looked back he never remembered anger or nervousness in the house. He recalled his parents gentle with each other. They were always conversing, sharing everything, and in bed he could hear the continuing hum of it like wool between the house and the world. He realized later that every dimension of his father’s world existed in the house. Clients came to him. There was a tennis court in the back where guests joined the family on weekends.
It was assumed that the two brothers would be part of the family firm. But Sarath left home, deciding not to be a lawyer. And a few years later, Gamini also betrayed those voices in the house and entered medical school.
Two months after his wife left him, Gamini collapsed from exhaustion, and the administration ordered a leave. He had nowhere to go, his home abandoned. He realized Emergency Services had become for him, even in its mad state, a cocoon, as his parents’ house had been. Everything that was of value to him took place there. He slept in the wards, he bought his meals from the street vendor just outside the hospital. Now he was being asked to step away from the world he had burrowed into, created around himself, this peculiar replica of childhood order.
He walked to Nugegoda, the neighbourhood where his house was, and banged on the locked door. He could smell cooking. A stranger appeared but would not open it. ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m Gamini.’ ‘So?’ ‘I live here.’ The man walked away and there were voices in the kitchen.
It was a while before Gamini realized they were going to ignore him. He crossed the small garden. The odour of the food was wonderful to him. He had never felt so hungry. He didn’t want the house, he wanted a home-cooked meal. He entered through the back door. Glancing around, he was conscious they were looking after the place much better than he had. The man who had ignored him was with two women. He knew none of them. He had thought at first his wife had sent relatives over. ‘Can I have some water?’
The man brought him a glass. Gamini heard children farther back in the bungalow and was pleased about that, that all the space was being used. He remembered something and asked if there was any mail. They brought him a stack of it. A letter from his wife, which he put in his pocket. Several cheques from the hospital. He opened them, signed a couple on the back and gave them to one of the women. Two others he kept for himself. The women gestured and he sat down to eat with them. String hoppers, pol sambol, chicken curry. Afterwards he strolled with a comfortably full stomach to the bank. He was flush. He phoned Quickshaw’s and hired a car and waited in the air-conditioned lobby of Grindlays until it rolled up. Gamini got in next to the driver.
‘To Trincomalee. Then to the Nilaveli Beach Hotel.’
‘No, no.’
He was expecting this. It was supposedly dangerous with guerrilla forces in the vicinity. ‘It will be quite safe, I’m a doctor. They don’t touch doctors, we’re like prostitutes. Here’s a Red Cross sign for the windshield. I’m hiring you for a week. You don’t have to like me or be polite. I’m not one of those who needs to be loved. Stop here.’
He got out of the car and climbed into the back seat, he needed to sprawl out. He was asleep by the time the car weaved itself out of Colombo. ‘Take the coast road,’ he murmured just before sleep. ‘Wake me up in Negombo.’
Gamini and the driver walked into the dark, sunless lobby of the old Negombo rest house. A small lamp by the front desk lit up the manager, who sat in front of a poorly painted mural of the sea, and Gamini, remembering something, turned around, looked through the door and saw the same scene in reality. They had a beer and went on. Near Kurunegala he asked the driver to take a side road. A few miles past Kurunegala, Gamini climbed out and asked the driver to meet him at the same place the next morning. It took a while for the driver to understand. Still, he wanted to be here for the night.
His father had brought him to the forest monastery nearby, in Arankale. He had brought him as a child, and every few years Gamini managed to revisit the place. As a war doctor he had come to have little faith, but he always felt a great peace here. With nothing much, just a light shirt and pants, no umbrella for the sunlight, no food, he made his way into the forest. Sometimes when he came here he saw that the place had been kept up; sometimes it had closed down like an eye in the forest.
There was the well. There was the corrugated sheet that made a roof over the porch where old monks slept. He could stay there. He could bathe at the well in the morning. He buttoned the breast pocket of his shirt so his glasses would not fall out and be lost.
…
A week later, Gamini stepped from the Nilaveli Beach Hotel compound and walked to the sea. He was very drunk. He had been shambling around in the deserted resort with a cook and a night manager and two women who cleaned the empty bedrooms and screamed whenever the cook attempted to push them into the swimming pool. They were always wrestling in the halls. On the beach he fell asleep, and when he woke there were gunmen around him laughing.
His sarong had half fallen off. He said, as clearly as he could in the two official languages, ‘I-am-a-doctor-’ and passed out again. The next time he woke up he was in a hut full of wounded boys. Seventeen years old. Sixteen years old. Some even younger. This was supposed to be his holiday and he said so to one of the gunmen. ‘I’m expected at dinner at seven. If I’m not there by seven-thirty they don’t serve-’