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

trick of the boys of St. Thomas’s had been to hold up sheet music, and at first the song had sounded like a carol, with trills and descants and preverbal humming, and in this way they had fooled the matron, who was not really listening to anything but the tone. It was only the girls of the fourth and fifth forms who heard every word.
     
    The captain’s name was Mugger,
    A dirty-minded bugger.
    He wasn’t fit to shovel shit
    From one deck to another.
     
    Anil was fond of that verse, and its neatly packed rhyme slid back into her mind at odd moments. She loved songs of anger and judgement. So at six a.m., walking towards the hospital, she tried to recall the other verses to ‘The Good Ship Venus,’ singing the first out loud. The rest she was less certain about, and played them on her lips, a faux tuba. ‘One of the greats,’ she muttered to herself. ‘One of the crucial ones.’
     
    The trainee in Colombo who had written about pupae research turned out to be working in one of the offices off the postmortem lab. It had taken Anil some time to remember the name, but she now found Chitra Abeysekera typing an application form, the paper limp from the humidity of the room. She was standing as she typed, wearing a sari, with what seemed a portable office beside her—two large cardboard boxes and one metal case. They contained research notes, lab specimens, petri dishes and test tubes. The metal case held growing bugs.
    The woman looked up at her.
    ‘Am I disturbing . . . ?’ Anil looked down at the four lines the woman had just typed. ‘Why don’t you take a break and let me type it for you?’
    ‘You’re the woman from Geneva, right?’ The face was disbelieving.
    ‘Yes.’
    Chitra looked at her hands and they both laughed. Her skin was covered with cuts and bites. They could probably slip easily into a beehive and come out with plunder.
    ‘Just tell me what to say.’
    Anil sidled up and, as Chitra spoke, did a quick edit, adding adjectives, improving her request for funds. Chitra’s blunt description of her project would not have gone far. Anil gave it the necessary drama and turned Chitra’s list of abilities into a more suggestive curriculum vitae. When they finished she asked if Chitra would like to get something to eat.
    ‘Not the hospital cafeteria,’ Chitra said helpfully. ‘The cook moonlights in the postmortem labs. You know what I’d like? Chinese air-conditioned. Let’s go to Flower Drum.’
     
    There were three businessmen eating at the restaurant, but otherwise it was empty.
    ‘Thank you for the application help,’ Chitra said.
    ‘It’s a good project. It’ll be important. Can you do all that here? Do you have facilities?’
    ‘I have to do it here . . . the pupae . . . the larvae. The tests have to be done in this temperature. And I don’t like England. I’ll go to India sometime.’
    ‘If you need help, contact me. God, I’d forgotten what cool air feels like. I might just move in here. I want to talk to you about your research.’
    ‘Later, later. Tell me what you like about the West.’
    ‘Oh—what do I like? Most of all I think I like that I can do things on my own terms. Nothing is anonymous here, is it. I miss my privacy.’
    Chitra looked totally uninterested in this Western virtue.
    ‘I have to be back by one-thirty,’ she said, and ordered chow mein and a Coke.
     
    The cardboard box with test tubes was open and Chitra was prodding a larva under the microscope. ‘This is two weeks old.’ She tweezered it out and placed it in a tray holding a piece of human liver, which Anil assumed must have been obtained illegally.
    ‘It’s necessary,’ Chitra said, aware of Anil’s gaze, trying to be casual about it. ‘A little got removed before someone was buried, a small favour. There is an important difference in the speed of growth when insects feed on this as opposed to organs from an animal.’ She dropped the rest of the liver into a picnic cooler, pulled out her