Anil's Ghost

Anil remembers her friendship with Leaf, whom she met in Arizona. They bond over bowling and movies. As forensic pathologists, they share a similar fixation over details, even in the movies. After Anil leaves the States, she loses contact with Leaf but they reconnect before Anil goes to Sri Lanka. When Leaf confides that she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease, Anil feels even more alone in her life. Later, an italicized vignette details a letter Anil wrote to the director John Boorman, asking about Lee Marvin’s escape from Alcatraz in the movie Point Blank.

Gamini remembers working at his last base hospital. He was operating on a boy with a heart condition when news arrived about an attack on a nearby village. He refused to leave his young patient until he went to the recovery ward. By then, the few attack survivors arrive, and Gamini tends to their wounds. He learns later, from the nurse who assisted him during the surgery, that the boy’s family had renamed him Gamini. He tracks the nurse down at a party; noticing the scars on her wrist, he remarks that she resembles his brother’s wife. She is married, Gamini returns to Colombo, where he meets the woman who briefly becomes his wife.