Read Online Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje - Free Book Online

him more authority, and a second name suggested perhaps an alternative side to his nature. Also there was his grandfather. Neither of the children had in fact known the grandfather whose name it had been. The parents threw their hands up and finally the siblings worked out a trade between them. She gave her brother one hundred saved rupees, a pen set he had been eyeing for some time, a tin of fifty Gold Leaf cigarettes she had found, and a sexual favour he had demanded in the last hours of the impasse.
    After that she allowed no other first names on her passports or school reports or application forms. Later when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that name and the joy of getting it that she remembered most. Everything about the name pleased her, its slim, stripped-down quality, its feminine air, even though it was considered a male name. Twenty years later she felt the same about it. She’d hunted down the desired name like a specific lover she had seen and wanted, tempted by nothing else along the way.
     
    Anil recalled the nineteenth-century air of the city she had left behind. The prawn sellers holding out their wares to passing traffic on Duplication Road, the houses in Colombo Seven painted that meticulous flat white. This was where the old money and the politically powerful lived. ‘Heaven . . . Colombo Seven . . .’ her father would sing, to the tune of ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ as he let Anil thread his cuff links into his shirtsleeves while he dressed for dinner. There was always this whispering pact between them. And she knew that no matter what time he returned home from dances or other engagements or emergency operations, he would drive her to her dawn swimming practice the next morning, through the empty streets towards the Otters Club. On the drive home they would pause at a stall for a bowl of milk and sugar hoppers, each wrapped in a shiny page from an English magazine.
    Even during the monsoon months, at six in the morning she would run from the car through heavy rain and dive into the pocked water and swim her heart out for an hour. Just ten girls and the coach, the noise of the rain clattering on the tin roofs of cars, on the hard water and the taut rubber bathing caps as the swimmers sloshed, turned and emerged again, while a handful of parents read the
Daily News.
All real effort and energy when she was a kid seemed to have happened by seven-thirty in the morning. She kept that habit in the West, studying for two or three hours before going off to classes at medical school. In some ways her later obsessive tunneling toward discovery was similar to that underwater world, where she swam within the rhythm of intense activity, as if peering through time.
    So in spite of Sarath’s suggestion the day before that she sleep in, Anil had breakfasted and was already on her way to Kynsey Road Hospital by six in the morning. The eternal prawn sellers were there on the side of the road, holding out last night’s catch. The smell of hemp idled in the air from ropes lit outside cigarette stalls. She had always veered towards this smell as a child, loitered beside it. Suddenly, and she didn’t know why, she recalled the schoolgirls of Ladies’ College on a balcony looking down at the boys from St. Thomas’s, cads all of them, singing as many verses as they could of ‘The Good Ship Venus’ before the matron chased them off the grounds.
     
    It was on the Good Ship Venus—
    By Christ, you should have seen us.
    The figurehead was a whore in bed
    Astride a rampant penis.
     
    The girls, normally as secure in their school as women within the bounds of courtly love, had thus been startled at the age of twelve and thirteen by this strange choreography, but had no desire to stop listening. It was not until Anil was twenty and in England that she heard the song again. And there—at a post–rugby match party—it seemed a more natural context, in tune with the male braying around her. But the