Anil's Ghost

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of trauma and death by suicide.

The narrator describes Anil’s previous work as a forensic pathologist in Guatemala. She and her team are always aware of the families who stand vigil over their work, hoping for answers about what might have happened to their loved ones during conflict. The families are as afraid that the team will not unearth their loved ones as they are that the team will confirm their deaths. Anil watches a woman who crawled into one of the mass graves and thinks how the woman cannot render her grief into words.

Anil arrives in Sri Lanka, where she was born but hasn’t lived for 15 years. While she still has relatives in Colombo, she is not particularly interested in reaching out to them. She reflects upon her teenage years as a gifted swimmer and how much she has changed since leaving. The island, too, has changed, plunged into a bloody civil war with atrocities committed on all sides.

Anil agrees to examine and determine the cause of death for a recently dead body for the students at the local hospital. The corpse’s “freshness” bothers her, along with the fact that the deceased most likely died by a politically motivated assassination.