Anil’s homes
Another important aspect of Anil’s identity is Anil’s home. Right at the very beginning of the main plot, the reader is confronted with a first ambivalence: “In the West she’d read, The dawn comes up like thunder, and she knew she was the only one in the classroom to recognize the phrase physically” (9). From that sentence we get the direct information that she has lived in the West. But we can also conclude that she had lived in a Southeast Asian country before, since she is familiar with dawn coming up like thunder – an image from Rudyard Kipling’s poem On The Road To Mandalay, which takes place in Burma.
The following section begins with the question “‘How long has it been? You were born here, no?’” (9), which substantiates the previous conclusion. As the novel progresses, the reader is gradually further introduced to the exact circumstances that Anil has been in during the course of her life. Anil left Sri Lanka when she was eighteen and began studying medicine in London. After that, she lived in the USA, but visited several other countries around the globe to work there as a forensic anthropologist. The social connections she makes outside of Sri Lanka take place in Great Britain, where she marries another medical student from Sri Lanka, and in the United States, where she forms a close friendship with a colleague called Leaf and has an affair with a married man named Cullis.
If we embrace the fact that a big part of Anil’s home and therefore a big part of her identity is constituted by her social surroundings, we can determine certain changes of her identity against the background of her changing acquaintances. Her first home after she has left Sri Lanka is London, but she still has a strong connection to Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan culture. Although she claims that “[a]fter she had left Sri Lanka at eighteen, her only real connection was the new sarong her parents sent her every Christmas” (10), there is a connection to her native country that manifests itself in her marriage to a Sri Lankan, which she later deliberately conceals: “It was while studying at Guy’s that Anil found herself in the smoke of one bad marriage. She was in her early twenties and was to hide this episode from everyone she met later in life” (140f).
The reason for this marriage is Anil’s intense longing for something that represents her home country and its culture, a longing that can certainly best be described as homesickness:
He too was from Sri Lanka, and in retrospect she could see that she had begun loving him because of her loneliness. She could cook a curry with him. She could refer to a specific barber in Bambalapitiya, could whisper her desire for jaggery or jakfruit and be understood. That made a difference in the new, too brittle country. Perhaps she herself was too tense with uncertainty and shyness. She had expected to feel alien in England only for a few weeks. (141)
Anil’s first step into the western world is at the beginning not a complete one. She still holds on to her Sri Lankan background and together with her husband reminisces about Sri Lanka. Ironically, it is her father-in-law’s wish that his son and Anil return to Sri Lanka and live a traditional life which eventually puts an end to the marriage. This divorce and her ex-husband’s return to Sri Lanka cause her to finally cut the cord, which even results in her abandonment of her native language. “She no longer spoke Sinhala to anyone. She turned fully to the place she found herself in, [...] She was now alongside the language of science” (145).
Anil at last turns her back on Sri Lanka, she immerses herself in work and wins a scholarship to study in the United States, where she becomes more and more a Westerner. She says about herself that she is “now light-years beyond the character she had been in London” (147). At the beginning of her time in England “[s]he seemed timid even to herself. She felt lost and emotional” (142). Now in the United States she goes bowling, drinks beer and eats tacos (cf. 147), and it is not mentioned that she even thinks about Sri Lanka. When Cullis asks her if she will go back to Colombo, she answers with a plain and simple “No.” (36). I would say that it is only at this stage that Anil has found a new place that can rightly be called ‘home’.
Things change again after her return to Sri Lanka. During her investigations there, she begins to identify with the Sri Lankan people again. At the hearing at the Arnoury Auditorium she says: “‘I think you murdered hundreds of us.’”. With this statement she includes herself in the group of victims, the innocent Sri Lankans. “Fifteen years away and she is finally us.” (272) thinks Sarath, and the word ‘finally’ demonstrates the journey that Anil had to go through to find a way to identify with the Sri Lankan people.