The Disappeared: Fiction and Ethnography in Sri Lanka's Postwar Reconciliation
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Disappeared: Fiction and Ethnography in Sri Lanka's Postwar Reconciliation The Disappeared I. Saint Anthony's Ajith Dissanayake, part-time friend and part-time drummer for much of the previous winter, disappeared the following spring outside the St. Anthony's Church on Inner Flower Road, half-way into the street. In the midday heat, St. Anthony's smelled like salt and spicy sambol in abrading teeth. A thick cross extended cumbersomely off its roof. The cross, hanging exhausted in the sky, obscured the sun during the day, the moon and stars at night. The past half-century had not been kind to the building, only recently recovered from its long state of disuse and disrepair. I often walked at night with friends—the hidden poets of work, or school, from the first floor apartments of faces I can't remember—in search of St. Anthony's. We drifted, always vibrating forward, too drunk to all stay still and quiet. For days, we wandered across Colombo, through postal codes and endless bowls of curd and honey, through cameras, pens and ink on spiral note pads. When we came upon the church we showed our pens and cameras to a pair of old uniforms at the corner. They laughed at us through all the holes where teeth once were. "Aren't you children Buddhist?" Did we say yes? But they always let us through and we recorded our youth against the leaning cross, and the way the stars moved in and out of focus on the building's stained glass, its rotting wooden door, cockroaches twisting, hissing about the pews. Thick roots slipped through cracked windows, around delicate ornaments, into bibles, slender from missing pages and worn print, almost illegible. A veneer of dried mud carpeted the building's concrete floor. Outside, orange 1 clay roof tiles tumbled toward the ground, worn and cracked, covered with thick moss as if they had been perched there, on the roof, for centuries, anticipating their own plummet to earth. We thought St. Anthony's would stay like this forever. For so long it was our broken beauty, and then suddenly it wasn't. In only days, the inhabitants of Colombo—restaurant owners, artists, gas station attendants, professors and master builders, politicians and beggars— came from all over the city in a giant procession to restore the church. They ground off the mud from the concrete floor and painted it a dull black. They rebuilt the door, rebound the bibles, wrote in the missing words with shaky hands. They painted murals of the Buddha and of Jesus. Stories from the Bible and the Mahavamsa fell from the beige walls into the adjacent street. They painted the cross upon the roof a shining gold and hammered in nails, fixing it at its crooked angle outward into Inner Flower Road. Its tilt the only remaining evidence the building had ever been abandoned. Migara de Silva, the filmmaker—camera around his neck, a cigarette permanently in his left hand, wax matches that kept breaking in his right—said he saw the reconstruction happen. He said he filmed it, had the faces memorized. "They came like ants," he said. To us they were just empty faces we didn't know, lions and almost secrets. On the day Ajith disappeared, we came upon St. Anthony's only by accident. We'd planned to attend a matinee adaptation of King Lear—the whole thing being put on at the Wendt by a favorite professor from the University of Colombo. Instead, we found ourselves among a small assortment of students and artists drifting rootless in the city, eventually arriving at the church. For a moment we all gazed upon the building. On my right, Ajith stood, his adolescent 2 shoulders pulled back onto a straight spine. Migara de Silva squatted to my left, close to the ground, a carton of cigarettes and matches in his hands. Unhurriedly, he brought a cigarette from its container to his face. With his lips, he worked it to the corner of his mouth and lit it with a slow-burning match. I turned my attention to him, away from the church. The smoke billowed and swirled as he exhaled. It hung nervous in the humid air. "Gihan, do you want to share?" I said, "I guess," and knelt with him to the ground. The rough concrete cut into my bare knees with uneven patterns. Migara removed the burning cigarette from his mouth and brought it to my lips, his fingers still holding onto the filter. "Breathe," he said. As I inhaled, he spoke about the church. "They say St. Anthony restores the missing." He exhaled a cough of smoke and gestured to the church. "If you listen on quiet days, you can sometimes hear the prayers to him, all in unison, all wanting to find the forgotten, a peace of mind, a faith in God." Ajith turned to interject. Scars of adolescent acne adorned his arms, a tattoo of a dragon peaked through his collarbone. "Machang, these people don't know what they have lost." On the day Ajith disappeared, the sun's heat broke through the leaning cross and the new stained glass windows of St. Anthony's, casting pockets of shadows and colorful light onto the street below. My skin was sweaty from the heat and clammy air. I wiped at my face with the hem of my shirt to reveal a new fuss of acne spreading down my forehead. I listened for the prayers to St. Anthony coming from inside the church and I thought about the performance at the Wendt we were sure to miss, the favorite professor I might disappoint. I hadn't been to his class in weeks. I 3 thought about the spring exams I already missed, and then about the way my mother would cry, and the way my father would yell when I called them on the phone and told them all my plans. I thought about how I would break their hearts. How I would say that I was dropped from the university's program, that I didn't have a real job or house, but that I wasn't coming home either. I looked up to Ajith with all my worries. He looked down to me, and as if he knew what I was thinking, said that we were better Buddhists than our mothers. "Why?" I asked. "They don't tolerate our lifestyle. My mother doesn't tolerate me. Do you know why I'm a better Buddhist than her?" I waggled my head. "Because I tolerate people. The Buddhists here can't tolerate shit." I thought about tolerance and I imagined my two parents pacing the floors of the home in which I grew until the soles of their feet turned black from dust and dirt. On the day Ajith disappeared, it was too humid and too bright. Ajith looked pale in the sun and wobbled tall on the ground above me. I reached out to steady him, grasping onto his lower leg as support. My hands inadvertently pulled him unsteady to the ground. As he fell, he let go a short holler that brought silence to the group. He stayed for some time sprawled out upon the ground. Blood dripped from behind rips in blue jeans. White scrapes hung from his sun- darkened knuckles. His eyes were closed. His hands slid about the pavement as he lifted up his face to look at us. Maybe he was crying. I was on my feet, Migara's cigarette still between my teeth, tobacco on my tongue. I reached for his hand. "I can help you up." "Don't touch me." He spoke at me loudly as he pulled himself upwards. 4 "I really want to help," I said. The group, no longer focused on the church, circled around him, asking questions, making suggestions. "What's wrong, Ajith?" His skin was still a sickly grey beneath the sunlight. "He needs a joint." They chuckled. He pulled away from us, breaking out onto the street. I called out, "Where are you going?" From behind his shoulder, he said he was disappearing for a while. He said he wasn't afraid and that he might come back, eventually. He walked into the bright pockets of sunlight cast down from the church onto the pavement and vanished in this light. First his feet, then his tattooed arms. His torso, wrapped in loose fabric, softened and then dissolved. When he disappeared, Ajith left behind his drumsticks in the middle of the street. They lay there for a while until a bus for Galle drove over them, cracking the smooth wood sticks into splintered pieces on the pavement, just barely visible under the harsh light. Migara was still smoking his cigarette. All of us stayed still, waiting for Ajith to return, maybe laughing, from the same place that he had left. Two days later Migara disappeared too. Then the Devasiri brothers, Sudarashana and Widarshana. I saw their mother at the market in a sari. She waved me over with a subtle nod and greeted me, "Ayubowan, Gihan. Are you well? It's too hot to be out shopping today." At the time, Colombo was experiencing a heat wave like no other. I went to bed with fan waves warping around my form, my body swaddled in humidity. A film of brackish sweat was plastered permanently to my forehead and to the back of my neck. 5 The ceaselessly blistering sun, the still, clammy air, was accompanied by a feeling of drowsiness and a yearning for respite that consumed the entire city.