Anil's Ghost

At this point in the novel, the past begins to bleed more directly into the present, emphasizing The Presence of the Past theme. For the most part, the author no longer cordons off past events in italicized asides. This section recounts the various characters’ memories, rather than following events in the narrative present: Anil thinks about her friendship with Leaf, and Gamini remembers his thwarted encounters with love. There is no mention of Sailor, or the search for the truth about his identity and end. In looking backward so close to the end of the novel, Ondaatje highlights the ways in which the characters’ past experiences inform their present behavior, particularly as the climax approaches.

Ondaatje’s emphasis on human connection highlights the theme of Rootlessness and Return, suggesting that human connection is necessary to put down roots. For example, Anil and Leaf’s friendship reveals Anil’s ability to connect with others. It parallels her relationship with Sarath, which grows closer over time. Anil and Leaf bond over their love of movies, their desire to decipher each scene and its intended meaning. Anil tells Leaf that, in Sri Lanka, the crowd would demand the projectionist replay the best scenes: “[T]he crowd would yell out ‘Replay! Replay!’ or ‘Rewind! Rewind!” (237). The two women’s friendship is non-linear, looping back around on itself. Leaf’s name is also symbolic, representing the natural outgrowth of something more rooted, while simultaneously evoking the flightiness of a leaf blowing in the wind. Anil claims that she spoke with Leaf during her fever, while hallucinating. This distance and implied longing for friendship suggests that Anil feels rootless. The letter to the director of Point Blank is the only concrete evidence provided of their friendship here.

Gamini’s recollections of his own past are similarly ambiguous and link him, too, to the rootlessness theme. His attachment to the beautiful boy with the congenital heart defect is never fully explained, other than that the boy looked at him with eyes “full of trust”—a commodity difficult to come by in a time of civil conflict. His remembered encounters with women are also nebulous: He pursues the nurse who assisted him in the boy’s operation, though she is married and never directly named. Gamini conflates her with Sarath’s wife, with whom he is also in love. The “scar on her wrist” indicates that she has attempted suicide previously (249). Gamini also reveals to Anil his attempt to care for the woman who swallowed lye, presumably Sarath’s wife, though Gamini does not substantiate her identity. “What would you do with her name?” he asks Anil. “Would you tell my brother?” (253). As with Sailor’s identification, the specifics are slippery. Throughout the novel, identity falters, wavers, and blurs, but never becomes certain or clearly defined, reinforcing the characters’ rootlessness.

Just as with Anil and Gamini, Sarath remains alienated from himself and allows his work to define him. Anil says, “‘You like to remain cloudy, don’t you, Sarath, even to yourself” (259). Sarath’s description of the Chinese civilization that warred over music illuminates his way of thinking about rootedness and implies another result of The Perversion of Politics. He notes that music in this society became a symbol of the eternal, with entire orchestras preserved and buried during this era. He compares this to the current state of Sri Lanka, “[t]he way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler” (261). The tragedy, he suggests, is that when political entities imbue such cultural touchstones with moral certainty, with eternity on the line, they leave no room for common ground. Ideas are ultimately more powerful than actions.