Anil and her lovers
Her Husband
To elaborate further on Anil’s social connections, I now want to go through the persons she has a love relationship with. The first character of importance in this context is the man she marries during her time in England, who I have already mentioned in chapter 2. 2. There, I have claimed that Anil’s husband represents her will to keep contact with Sri Lankan culture and that her divorce is a sign of her liberation from that need. But there is another striking aspect involved in that marriage. What is surprising is that Anil’s husband is introduced as “her future, and soon-to-be, and eventually ex-, husband” (142). After this introduction he is always only referred to as “he” (142ff) and the reader never gets to know his name, but is told that “[a]fter she escaped him she would never say his name out loud” (144). In a context in which names and namings play such an important role there is certainly more meaning behind that circumstance.
Victoria Cook explains that “[b]y refusing to name her husband, Anil erases him from the cartography of her life in an action reminiscent of the imperial map-makers that Ondaatje refers to in his mimetic reproduction of the National Atlas of Sri Lanka” (2004, 7). In this excerpt, in which the design of the Atlas is described, we read the sentences “There are no city names. [...] There are no river names” (40). It is the act of “leaving unnamed” (Spurr 1993, 4) by which a superior authority – and that is what Anil wants to be here – exercises its power over the subordinated. Anil treated “the whole marriage and divorce, the hello and good-bye, [...] as something illicit that deeply embarrassed her” (144). By doing that, she subjugates “her Eastern cultural identity in favor of the West” (Cook 2004, 7), but establishes the proportions of power between her ex-husband and herself in the way she needs them in order to liberate herself.
Cullis
The next relationship that Anil enters is an affair with an American writer named Cullis. If we start again by looking at how Cullis is introduced to the reader, we spot some differences. First of all, his first appearance in the novel is not the first meeting between him and Anil. Instead, Ondaatje puts the reader in medias res regarding their relationship. “While Anil was working with the forensic team in Guatemala, she’d flown into Miami to meet Cullis.” (33) is the sentence in which the reader first encounters him. At this meeting, which is described in the following two pages of the novel, Anil talks a lot about her work in Guatemala, which makes Cullis realize that “she had fallen even more in love with her work” (33), certainly not a nice experience for him as her lover. But worse for him is yet to come when she says:
‘You’ve got a mixed bag of characters working on those sites. Big-shot pathologists from the States who can’t reach for salt without grabbing a woman’s breast. And Manuel. He is part of that community, so he has less protection than the others like us. He told me once, When I’ve been digging and I’m tired and don’t want to do any more, I think how it could be me in the grave I’m working on. I wouldn’t want someone to stop digging for me. . . . I always think of that when I want to quit. I’m sleepy, Cullis. Can hardly talk. Read me something.’ (34)
She complains about the attitude of the Americans and forgets that Cullis is American, then she tells him enthusiastically about a colleague called Manuel who she adores for his wise advice. And without awaiting an answer from Cullis and after her long monologues she suddenly claims that she “[c]an hardly talk” and is tired. Before Cullis can start reading she falls asleep. The image of the relationship that we can see here is very different to the one which Anil showed in England. There, Anil was in some respects dependent on her husband, because she needed him to keep the connection with Sri Lankan culture alive and to establish a copy of her original home in the western world. By marrying him she complied with the traditional eastern lifestyle and submitted herself to him, at least in the beginning of the marriage.
Now, however, Anil is emancipated and superior to her lover. She has left behind the Sri Lankan part of her identity, she does not speak about her marriage and refuses to even recall the name of her former husband. Instead, when Cullis gets to know her better and asks her about her roots, she has decided on a new home. We are told about this in a short dialogue that is worth a closer examination:
They drove through the suburbs.
‘Do you speak French?’ he asked.
‘No. Just English. I can write some Sinhala.’
‘Is that your background?’
A no-name plaza appeared on the side of the highway, and she parked beneath the blinking lights of a Bowlerama. ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘In the West.’ (36)
In this excerpt we can see an interesting accumulation of American things in the background scenery – driving by car, suburbs, a highway, and most notably “the blinking lights of a Bowlerama”. But a revealing conversation takes place within this stereotypical western setting. With her statement “I live here, [...] In the West” she builds up the antithesis ‘East versus West’ – after all, she does not say ‘I live in America’, but she expands her home to the whole of the western world, as opposed to the ‘eastern world’ and Sri Lanka. Furthermore, Anil conceals her Sri Lankan origin from Cullis completely and does not respond to his question “Is that your background?”, although he has obviously noticed that she comes from abroad, be it by her looks, by her accent, or simply by her telling statement “I can write some Sinhala”.
Anils assertion “In the West” gets even more emphasis through the stylistic arrangement of the dialogue. The description of the symbols of western culture is interposed between Cullis’ question and Anil’s answer and this hyperbaton builds up the reader’s suspense. With the ensuing word “here”, then, Anil directly refers to these symbols, confirms her affinity for them and thus positions herself within the western culture. Finally, the critical word “West” marks the end of the conversation and gets the most emphasis.
Leaf
The last of Anil’s relationships that I want to take a look at in this chapter is the one with a woman named Leaf. While we know quite much about her relationships with her husband and with Cullis, her relationship with Leaf remains rather intransparent. We never get a explicit hint that she and Anil were anything more than just ‘best friends’. When Anil refers to her, she calls her “her girlfriend” (28 and 64), a word which leaves some ambiguity whether Leaf is her best female friend or her lover. Leaf is described as “Anil’s closest friend and constant companion” (235). However, as Margaret Scanlan notices, “the language used about their relationship [...] suggests something more” (2004, 316), which Antoinette Burton cautiously calls a “hint of homo-eroticism” (2003, 41).
The language Scanlan mentions is to be found in Anil’s reflective thoughts after Leaf has left her:
Anil assumed she’d abandoned her, for a new life, for new friends. [...] Still, Anil left a snapshot on her fridge of the two of them dancing at some party, this woman who had been her echo, who watched movies with her in her backyard. They’d sway in the hammock, [...] they’d wake up at three in the morning entangled in each other’s arms [...]. (254)
Some time later, when Leaf gets in touch with Anil again and tells her that she has Alzheimer’s, we read: “They talked and listened to each other. She loved Anil. And she knew Anil loved her. Sister and sister” (256). Although the word ‘love’ appears in the description of their relationship, I would not argue that they are in love in the way two lovers are – after all, Leaf is not explicitly addressed as Anil’s ‘lover’, unlike Cullis (cf. Scanlan 2004, 316). Instead, I think their relationship is indeed like one between sisters. They are physically attracted to each other, but not in a sexual, but in an emotional sense.
Leaf’s disease can be seen as an inversion of Anil’s intentions in Sri Lanka. Anil tries to unbury the dead in order to identify them, give them a name and solve murder cases. Leaf, on the other hand, forgets names, identities, and even murders, too, albeit murders that happen in films:
‘Leaf, listen. Remember? Who killed Cherry Valance?’
‘What?’
Anil repeated the question slowly.
‘Cherry Valance,’ Lead said, ‘I . . .’
John Wayne shot him. Remember.’
‘Did I know that?’
‘You know John Wayne?’
‘No, my darling.’ (256)
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré sees in the progress of Leaf’s disease a call for “a conscious effort not only on the part of people who suffer from amnesia but also on the part of the people who tend to them”, an effort to fight “against the collective amnesia provoked by greed and maintained by gun and drug runners”. Ganapathy-Doré considers Anil’s questions such as “Who killed Cherry Valance?” as a stimulation for Leaf’s memory and compares that stimulus to the fact that some pages of the novel are not numbered. According to Ganapathy-Doré, this could be an imitation of “the human weakness to forget. The meticulous reader is obliged to go back and find out the page number” (2002).
The connection of the omission of certain page numbers to the motif of oblivion in the novel is an audacious approach, but I am afraid that Ganapathy-Doré over-interprets the aspect here. I would follow her argument if the page numbers had been left out randomly, but there is a quite transparent system behind the omissions: All the numbers on left-hand side pages are left out, that is all the even page numbers. In addition to that, a page number on the right-hand side is left out if a new chapter begins on that page, because then there is some blank space on the top of the page anyway. So, I think it is more probable that the omissions have practical reasons caused by the printing process rather than any figurative meanings.
Summary
After that short excursus I want to draw a conclusion of the topic of Anil’s lovers. During her time in England, Anil is at first still very attached to the Sri Lankan culture that she has left behind. Her Sri Lankan husband is a sign for that attachment. When she gets divorced, she frees herself not only from him, but also from the bond with her home country and turns towards the western world and its lifestyle. In America, she has a lover, but her real purpose in life – and her real love – at that time is not the relationship with Cullis, but her work, as I have shown by analysing their meeting in Miami. With Leaf, who has the same job, she can finally live out the love for her work, for example by watching films from an anthropological view.