About twenty years ago a friend from my childhood, Skanda, gave me a photograph of a boarding school in Colombo that I had gone to at a very young age for two or three years. Skanda was a relative but only in the Sri Lankan sense, where everyone you knew was considered a relative, just as any person who visited members of your family would be referred as an “uncle” or an “auntie.” What Skanda gave me was a photograph of Winchester House. Five years older than me, he had gone to the same boarding school and created an almost heroic reputation as a trouble-maker. Even as an adult, I recalled notorious incidents he had been involved in, and later, when I became a writer, I was tempted to write about his double-edged reputation that mocked any discipline. Then I lost touch with him. He seemed to roam in some far anonymous territory with his troublesome nature, yet somehow I felt he would always be a part of my life.
When Skanda and I met for the first time as adults, it was at a crowded dinner in Colombo. We barely spoke to each other. I assumed he was bored with the reputation he still carried of being that notorious trouble-maker in his youth. We had come from much the same background and neither of us, I suspect, really wished to go back to that other country of our childhood. When we said a brief goodnight on leaving, I did not enquire what he did, and he did not ask what I was doing, though by now I was writing novels.
So far, I had not written about Skanda, though at times I might have borrowed an aspect of him that clashed with the safe social world of Colombo. But when I began my novel Anil’s Ghost, Skanda entered my world. What I needed was a doctor working in one of the peripheral hospitals in the north of Sri Lanka, behind enemy lines during the war. It was distant and dangerous work. Sometimes they worked throughout the night, then slept half the next day, unaware of daylight. I had met such doctors in the north while researching the book. Many had tempers but were also benign, even compassionate; yet none of them felt they were worthy of trust. I needed a figure with all those aspects. And I needed an outsider, a stranger to the north, who was shocked at what he was now somehow becoming. “He felt happiest when he slipped from disorganized youth into the exhilaration of work,” I wrote, having to imagine how that might have happened to Skanda. In any case, he entered my book in a major role, disguised and unexpected, the stranger I needed to build the portrait I was making.
Kurosawa, in his autobiography, claimed he would always leave the detailed coloring of the central characters in his films up to the actors. It was they who would provide aspects of their nature he did not fully know; they were the ones who would make those fictional characters vivid, believable. Like him, I drew on Skanda as well as others I had met—for instance, one surgeon who tested his blood pressure at least twice a day when he had any spare moment at a besieged hospital. Or the eye surgeon who did not have the right high-level medical degree for hospitals in the south, so was working in the peripheral hospitals at Arangawila and Welikanda. The surgical team kept altering her name on medical reports to stop her being dismissed by higher authorities. At any rate, my fictional Skanda, who was a senior surgeon and head of triage, insisted on this: “She has got an unreliable diploma, but she works harder than us and I am not letting her go.” Just as he supported a Cuban, there for just one year, by providing him with a translator. Like the actual doctors I had met, these doctors traveled everywhere, worked anywhere—in abandoned train stations, in clinics housed in partially built schools, in a shaded forest. Skanda became my frame, by his habit of never feeling wise enough or trustworthy enough, changeable and inconsistent, but gradually emerging within what Penelope Fitzgerald called “a once-born and then twice-born plot that makes a reader—even if he is reading it for the first time—want to interfere at every stage.”
This group of doctors realized it was a time that would alter their lives. “They would eventually learn everything of value there. Not one of them would return to the economically sensible careers of private practice.” They woke and walked barefoot, still in sarongs, at dawn, onto a narrow country road, half-awake, half-smiling for no reason in this new yet still ancient universe, as if lords of another time, unsafe, honorable somehow. Now and then Skanda would persuade the eye doctor to recite something, perhaps a story or lines they had heard her say before, her voice always at peace, safe, in the way women are able to hold cats.
Where they had found themselves was an apt fit for those with a constantly suspect nature, caught now against both sides of a war. Each felt safer within their own rules, as Skanda always was, truthful only to himself, even if he felt irrelevant in the world.
They would lie there at night, trying to remember the shape of their room in the dark. Or they woke too soon, and it was still only three hours past midnight and they feared they would not sleep again but did so within the sweep of a quick minute. They lowered themselves into the bed or cot or rattan mat—on their backs or face-down—usually on their backs because it gave them a few seconds of rest with all their senses alive. Someone coughing during the night. The eye nurse in the next bed whispering to herself the way she always whispered to her patients, to make them safe in their darkness. She always rose before the others to read the minimal light as to where they all were. Ampara? Manampitiya?
It was during the composing of these pages in the book, whenever I imagined Skanda among the other doctors, that I could always somehow relax, just remain curious about what was happening, at ease about the discoveries of their character. It was strange, for the book was full of biographical and autobiographical intimacies. And yet I was at ease. It was that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know. You will not even remember writing it.
So there would be a character named Skanda in Anil’s Ghost. But the real Skanda would also appear more fully as another doctor—Gamini, the brother of the book’s central character. And it was Gamini who would claim during his first meeting with Anil that he was the black sheep of the family. Gamini still hanging on to an old anarchy of spirit, just as it was Skanda’s habit of never seeing himself as part of a clan or a family but as a man formed by his own fury during his early years at that boarding school in Colombo.
In any case it now felt a coincidence, especially as we did not see much of each other, that when I returned to Sri Lanka as an adult for a family wedding, it would be Skanda—whom I had already imagined into my fiction as a doctor—who, discovering I had also been a student at Winchester House when young, took the trouble to hunt down an old photograph and then drove over to Battaramulla, where I was staying with a friend, and, not pausing more than a few minutes, handed it to me as if it were not as innocent as it seemed.
The boys boarded at Winchester House Junior School ranged in age from seven to nine. Looking now at the old black-and-white photograph, intended to capture a moment of childhood innocence, I am conscious that they were not much older than infants. Sixteen students in black shorts and white shirts are playing cricket, while in the background is a one-level building with a tiled roof looking as anonymous as an old cafeteria, or a prison. On the far-left side of that building—it was what my eye sought out first—was the housemaster’s bedroom, where you were sent to be caned. The rest of the long narrow building was a dormitory where two rows of twenty beds were separated by a narrow aisle that led ominously to the door of the housemaster, Father Barnabas.
Out of sight, on the far side of the building, was the kitchen as well as the domicile of the nurse. Also the showers, with a minimal and almost medieval toilet. But in the photo we see only the children playing cricket, the bowler having just flung the ball. It’s a distant and anonymous scene that attempts to summarize an average day of childhood. No one is recognizable, but this is the place where Skanda and several others lived and then escaped from after learning a few crucial lessons.
It was the era when there were few official photographs of children. No children holding up medals after a swimming event or behaving badly in the background at a wedding. We slipped through youth almost unrecorded, not even able to identify a faint image of ourselves a few years later. As if we had not been present at all. Although we recalled those line-ups for a vaccination, or the more feared line, waiting to be thrashed by the housemaster after causing a small riot in the dormitory or perhaps just laughing too much when the lights went out. So we would barely recognize the streets we walked on, or the beds we slept in for years. It was a silenced past and, with a memory of fear and trauma, difficult to step into. Until I was handed a black-and-white photograph in my thirties by a distant hero from that time.
Some years ago, I read a strange and remarkable poem where the speaker in the first line suddenly wakes from sleeping with a woman, rises, leaves the house, and ends up in a dark forest, fighting his way through the low branches. It felt storm-like, claustrophobic. Eventually, after two or three pages, he returns, comes back to bed, lies down, and the woman asks, “What was wrong?” And he says, after a pause, “An eyelash.”
In one of my later books, a woman in her twenties confesses to the man she works with, a close friend, about some stage in her past as a teenager that she feels has scarred her for life. She then describes what happened. The man she is speaking to—he himself was in the Vietnam War—in a benign way tries to calm her, and to put all that into perspective he says, “That was just an eyelash.” For the listening girl, the phrase releases her from some demon that overwhelmed her. It felt shocking in its simplicity and, without the context of that original poem by Frank Stanford, even more so.
“When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time,” writes Lucia Berlin. “This is also true if you are reading a novel,” she continues. And it is also true when you are gathering the distinct fragments you come upon from a remembrance (some of which could belong to another) during the hunt for your own story. As with photographs, the world is deliriously random, inarticulate. You smell sawdust or hay, and it reminds you of a summer when you were twelve, or five, even if you are at that moment in the midst of a Formula One race and in the fierce lead—as in the story told by Jackie Stewart, the English racing-car driver, of once becoming suddenly aware of the smell of hay in the midst of petrol fumes while he was going two hundred miles an hour and encased in noise: the Ferrari shaking against the wind, the crowd yelling. So that when the race was over, he left the victory celebrations and slowly drove the length of the track again, several times, in order to try and locate the source of that smell of hay, which had slipped by and evoked the distinct memory of childhood, of being on a farm as a youth, all the while cocooned in fumes…until he stopped the car, and saw a few bales of hay on the side of the track at a dangerous curve.
The source of what might become a large plot point or an influence on a character may be as small as a glance at a painting, or your fear of forgetting your multiplication tables. The influence might even remain that small but still be essential to the person in the story, continuing to alter him or her. A small hidden site of pleasure, an unfairness, even the possibility of anarchy remains in your pocket for life.
When the film If came out in 1968 in England, all those boys who had gone to English public schools found the release of revenge. Up to that moment there had been nothing to represent their fury at those marbled principles they felt they had tunneled into, and which had ruined or deformed them in some way. It was how we, too, had burrowed through the junior boarding school at Winchester House, with those same rules that Skanda must have witnessed earlier, that always gave him his grim grin of remembrance. He would be courteous, socially wise as an adult, even while remembering the boys playing cricket—all of them so small and forever anonymous in that picture, without seeming to have a care in the world. But he knew, as we did, that the dragon who governed the boarding school was Father Barnabas, and no one who survived that time would ever forget his name, or even forgive him a half-century later.
He had come disguised into our childhood world, wearing the dark cassock of a priest, his large body belted with a Christian cord of rope. He probably thrashed every boy numerous times in the two or three years they were under his academic and supposed spiritual care, until they escaped and moved eventually into mid-school, boarding later at Copplestone House, where the dormitories felt safer, even if Dickensian in their rules. Those were the years when we learned to protect ourselves by becoming liars, being devious, never confessing to a crime—in fact, confessing to nothing, good or bad. Such as pouring petrol and setting fire to the rhododendron bush in the small garden belonging to Father Barnabas, right beside his window, as if the light from it could witness his crimes. In any case, a group of us would continue to meet at the “fives-court,” cut open our palms with a razor blade in order to be on the side of the devil, swearing an eight-year-old blood oath against that black-cassocked body for the rest of our lives—so that, we hoped, he would die painfully, perhaps strangled by one of us with that Christian cord, or when another flowering bush in the small garden caught fire during the night.
Skanda had given me, it now appears, an ironic remembrance of boys playing cricket without a care in the world, where an hour of sport was all. As if violence could belong only to the climate, brief as a rain shower. But during those years we were really being taught to fear the future. If priests were like this, what would prefects be like? Or roughs in the real world, whom we might meet as survivors of an earlier time, clutching only that sweetness and safety of a black-and-white photograph?
There were to be other photographs that recorded other schools I went to, in another country, with their varying methods of law and judgment. Those future places were more innocent, less dangerous. None of them would have known of a man named Barnabas, or the way some of us still tracked his career to discover where he might be living in the last years of his life, with a small dog in a one-room apartment on South Bridge Road in Singapore, until, we hoped, he was eventually visited by a former student who, having located his address, partially strangled him with the rope and then cut his throat with a rusty knife so he fell back over a kitchen table and expired there.
But there was nothing like that in our future—no death as recompense for what had happened to us in our youth. Nothing about the truth of Father Barnabas would be revealed. There would only, now and then, for a few years afterwards, be letters written back and forth between a group of us, or his appearance in the fictional world of Cassius in The Cat’s Table, who had loathed his headmaster for the habitual beatings that still returned as a poisonous dream. And when If depicted its imaginary revolution in an English school, it meant little to those of us in a distant country. It was shown briefly at the Regal Cinema on the Galle Road, and by then Father Barnabas had left the scene of the crime.
Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, one of the best poets in Sri Lanka, claimed he always wrote in an “immoralist style.” One of his briefest poems was called “The British Council,” and in its totality goes:
When they kiss my arse, O Muse,
Save me from the clap.
He had gone to the same school as me, St. Thomas’ College in Mount Lavinia. Later he studied law, and wrote remarkable poems— argumentative, political—hating the school he had been sent to, speaking often of terrible events on that campus. Apart from his own poetry, he translated poems from eighteenth-century Sinhala, as well as poets from abroad that he loved and admired, like Lorca and Mandelstam. Before he got married, he said to his wife, “I will have to get rid of all of these feelings of fear and insecurity that have been second nature to me.” But in the end, Lakdhas would have a brief life. In 1978, at the age of thirty-six, he would drown in the sea at Mount Lavinia, close to our school, as if still caught in its tides and currents.
But the impetus for a magical If-like revolution, for those who went to that school in Colombo, could have been provided by Lakdhas in the poem he wrote called “1950–1959”:
Under the nightmare of Saint Thomas he wandered,
alone by the hederal walls, by the cold fishes sump
the trees were many, broken-willed
…in the quadrangle he mocked himself to sleep
how could he say “my brother” to the scum who ruled the day
beaten with their sticks what lament formed in his mind
ruined the heart…
in the haze of pain, under the hoarse breath of enemies
drunken masters beat him to the wall
Even now the poem evokes the landscape of that school faultlessly. The “hederal walls” covered with evergreen vines that felt like part of a prison, where everything described feels formal and yet damaged (“the broken-willed trees”), and where every phrase—the hoarse breath of enemies, the stigmatic spirit, the cold beds, the drunken masters—depicts danger. It is the poem one would wish to have cut into stone on the grounds of that school, written in that voice of “fear and insecurity” that had become second nature to him. All of that needing to be remembered. Otherwise there would be no warning of what had existed there. Today the junior boarding school of Winchester House no longer exists. And Lakdhas Wikkramasinha’s poem could be the memorial it deserves.
There is one more moment to complete that abandoned time. Stories, letters, films, memoirs of our youth are nothing without some real clue or glance towards the truth. Otherwise, somewhere back there, is only a bale of hay we pause at with no understanding and with no recognition of an evil. There was no midnight strangling with a rope, no rusty blade to cut Barnabas’ throat. Except as Lakdhas does in his poem: “How could he say ‘my brother’ to the scum who ruled the day.”
Many years later, returning to Sri Lanka, I got to know the archaeologist Senake Bandaranayake—about the same time as I began to discover the poems of Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, and as I met Skanda again. We had all been sent to that same school, and the place had become for us the eye of a needle through which each us had crawled. Senake and I became very close friends, and we talked often of the dragon in his black robe. Then he told me a story.
Being a well-known archaeologist, Senake had been invited to Singapore to give a series of lectures. A few days before returning to Colombo, he received a phone call at his Singapore hotel from Father Barnabas, who had read of his visit in the newspapers. Barnabas was now very old. His wife had died years before, and he was living in an apartment in a nearby area. He invited Senake to stay with him—perhaps on his last night? So they could catch up? After all, they were both from Sri Lanka…
Senake hesitated. He had disliked those years at St. Thomas, specifically being boarded at Winchester House. He had been beaten like the rest of us. He recalled those years as far more demonic, for instance, than the world of Tom Brown’s School Days. But for whatever reason, maybe wishing for some kind of understanding about Father Barnabas, he arrived late in the evening after his talk, met the old teacher who lived there alone with his small dog, and they talked quite late into the night. And then Senake slept on the sofa, until in the middle of the night he awakened to crying. The old man weeping. Senake got up, walked into Barnabas’ bedroom, and saw the old priest beating the dog.
Michael Ondaatje’s latest book of poetry was Handwriting. His most recent novel was Warlight. He lives in Toronto.
