Anil surveying
After the analysis of Anil’s relationships, I now want to examine Anil’s behaviour during acts of surveillance. In this chapter I will look at Anil as the person who surveys, and in the next chapter as the person who is under surveillance. An exploration of these situations will help us position Anil’s character within the framework of power relationships and therefore bring us closer to Anil’s identity.
The most important task of Anil’s profession itself involves already a great deal of surveying. When she examines a body as a forensic doctor, she has to look at it very closely in order to find out the causes of it’s death, its age and how long the person has been dead. Very often, and in particular during her work in Sri Lanka, she also has to identify the dead body by giving it a name and by assigning it to the life and the history of a missing person. Anil’s job is the first and a vital step in the course of serving justice – based on her results the police and a judge can accuse the culprit and solve a murder case. Being the first link in this chain of justice puts Anil in a position of great responsibility, her examinations are very important and her surveying actions are a sign of the power that she has in the whole process.
A concrete example of Anil surveying her surroundings can be found in the scene where she films Cullis. While he is still asleep in the morning of their meeting in Miami, she takes her video camera and films him and various things in their hotel room: “She stood on the bed and shot down at Cullis’s sleeping head, his left arm out to where she had been all night beside him. Her pillow. Back to Cullis, his mouth, his lovely rips, [...] down to his ankles” (35). That procedure is an act of power similar to her forensic work. She documents what she sees, preserves memory and, most importantly, she looks at someone who can not look back, which causes the power relationships to be one-sided. That interpretation supports my analysis of Anil’s relationship with Cullis in chapter 2. 4., where I have claimed that Anil is in a position superior to Cullis.
When Anil returns to Sri Lanka, she tries to exercise this power over her new environment, too. She claims that “[t]he island no longer held her by the past”, and that “she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze” (11), which she metaphorically does a few days later when she sees a bird:
She put herself into the position of the bird as it took off, and was suddenly vertiginous, realizing how high they were above the valley, the landscape like a green fjord beneath them. In the distance the open plain was bleached white, resembling the sea. (45)
These examples show that Anil is used to having an overview over the events that take place around her. She thinks that she is in control of the situation. This soon changes during her stay in Sri Lanka, which will be the topic of the next chapter.