1In her book review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Janet Maslin expresses her admiration of Ondaatje’s writing for being able to “commingle anguish and seductiveness in fierce, unexpected ways” (11), but she also vents her frustration with the way the novel fuses so many elements that seem foreign to its primary focus on the civil war in Sri Lanka:

The book drifts in flashback, for instance, from Guatemala to the Miami bedroom where Anil has a tryst with her married lover, Cullis, who is as much on her mind as Sailor the skeleton. She speaks about the Spanish names for bones; he says he has written something about Norwegian snakes. While Cullis sleeps, in the kind of effortlessly bewitching gesture Mr. Ondaatje creates so gracefully, she photographs him, then buries the film inside his suitcase as a souvenir. But as to how such moments—or those in which Anil writes a letter to John Boorman about his film “Point Blank” […]—connect with the book’s essential business in Sri Lanka, that remains indistinct. Frustratingly so since the scattered aspects of this voyage of discovery are separately so powerful. (11, my emphasis)

2Maslin’s frustration with a novel that is multi-layered, scattered, time-jumping, and whose purpose appears at times indistinct, may well have been shared by some readers, even though similar digressing narrative techniques have featured in many earlier works by Ondaatje, namely The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Running in the Family (1983), or The English Patient (1993), and readers have learned to appreciate them. Yet, Anil’s Ghost is somewhat different, even from Running in the Family that is also set in Sri Lanka and also digs up bones, albeit figuratively and from a personal perspective. Anil’s Ghost deals with the exhumation and identification of bones during the Civil War in Sri Lanka that tore the country to shreds between 1983 and 2009, in what can be defined as a genocide by the Sri Lankan Tamils. In the opening pages, Sri Lankan-born, Sinhala-speaking and North American-educated Anil Tissera comes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist, responding to a call from the Centre of Human Rights in Geneva to go and investigate the political killings of the Civil War. In Anil’s search for identification in the context of mass killings and mass graves, the bones of the dead are literally unearthed and forensics are used, scientifically and / or metaphorically, to investigate the crime, reveal the truth about their deaths, but also “settle the dead in the world of the dead” (Herrick 40), thus providing the hope of consolation for the bereaved families. Through the literary text, the forensic search makes it possible for the survivors to get back to the world of the living and allows both the quick and the dead to return to the realm of a visible and tangible humanity. But this can only happen once the bodies of their relatives have been found, identified and given a proper ritual.

3Fifteen years after she left her native island, Anil’s journey is not an easy task as over time she had gradually disengaged herself from Sri Lanka, so much so that she may appear in denial of any trauma she may have suffered, of any tears that may yet have to be shed, of any consolation that she may still be in need of. Anil has been described as “[h]aunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural dislocation” (Härting 43). This dislocation may be due to what she calls her “long-distance gaze” (Ondaatje 11), as her life has been made and unmade by her travels on various fact-finding missions for human rights international bodies. From the beginning of the novel, she entertains an ambiguous relationship with her native island and with her past, marked by disavowal and distance, and the unacknowledged desire to remain in control of her trajectory even if solitary. Thus, she does not want to be reminded of her adolescent swimming success (10-11; 17), or of the scholarship she won to go to America (25), and, contrary to the narrator of Running in the Family, insists she is “not a prodigal” (10). She says that “[t]he island no longer held her by the past” (11), a sentence that can almost echo for the reader as “held her by the throat.” This ambivalence between what can be said and what should be hushed, or between what can be heard and given to understand is a structural element in the plot development. Through the plight of others Anil gradually unravels her own formerly suppressed need for consolation. Through the implicit mention of the island that would be holding her by the throat, the reader is given to understand very early in the novel that recognizing the erasure has become a matter of life or death for Anil, even if she is not yet aware of it.

4Abundant critical literature has been produced on Anil’s Ghost, analyzing the novel from different perspectives: as detective fiction; as a political novel whose gesturing at not taking sides can be seen as highly problematic; as a novel of mourning; as a descent into the underworld or katabasis (Herrick 2016); as a terrorist narrative (Kubiak 2004; Scanlan 2004); as a text that uses the angle of the epistemological (Ganguly 2016), the historical (Burton 2003), the diasporic (Härting 2003) or the transnational (Cook 2004). The novel has also been analyzed through the Buddhist and Tantric lens (Hewitson 2019), among others. I have argued elsewhere that it contributes to addressing historical horrors as well as redressing social injustices (Misrahi-Barak 2023). I suggested that, as bones are literally being unearthed, the text grapples with ‘thanatic ethics’, performing a mourning ritual that could not be accomplished directly for those lost or unidentified bodies; I hypothesized that literary forensics enables a certain justice to be delivered to the living, in a symbolic court of law (forensis), allowing for a return to the world of the living, and investigated the possibility that the narrative of the identification of the dead could create a public space to be shared by all (forum).

5As I engage here with the theme of consolation and ponder whether consolation is possible or even desirable in such a context as a civil war, I would like to follow up on and move beyond such previous forensic approaches, re-reading Ondaatje’s novel and re-interpreting the rite that is performed in the text through the lens of consolation. I will argue here that the seemingly drifting style Maslin was unhappy with is at the heart of Ondaatje’s narrative and ethical project. It is my contention that, by crossing boundaries, be they national, cultural, political, literary or personal, the sophisticated dynamics of the drifting style in Anil’s Ghost serve the purpose of countering the dehumanization, the killing, and the polarization at work in the story. It enables a reading whose ultimate raison d’être is to create a space of identification and recognition, of textual togetherness and kinship. I intend to show that, far from leaving Anil disengaged, the drifting text is precisely the modality that enables her to re-engage with the island and with the world, what the psychiatrist Christophe André calls “reconnecting” when he writes about the consolation that social bonds can provide (“remettre en lien,” 131). I will offer the hypothesis that drifting gestures towards consolation in the way it takes us—character, author, narrator and reader—to a place we had not anticipated we would go, in a movement that is not dissimilar to what Kamau Brathwaite called tidalectics as will be shown further in the demonstration, thus taking us to a place other than pain and suffering. In that respect, I will keep in mind what Michaël Fœssel says about consolation in Le Temps de la consolation (2015): “To console is to allow the other person to see and perceive differently, not according to their pain, which is not the same as healing, i.e. seeing or perceiving without pain” (loc 74 of 276, my translation).

6Opting for an inductive organization that may appear to mimic the very topic of the article as I move from one stage to the next, I will first select three forms of drifting in the novel to examine eventually how a space for consolation is generated in the text, as the living move out of the limbo zone of trauma and mourning back into the community of the living, making use of the mode of a revisited elegy. As David Kennedy reminds us, “[e]legies cannot just describe loss: they have to refigure it as a species of transformation and provide an early glimpse of an afterlife for their subject” (loc 19 of 156) Ondaatje is interested in this “transformation” and this “afterlife,” morphing what Jean-Michel Ganteau has called the “saturation with the past” into a praxis of responsibility towards the other and of accountability for oneself that is oriented towards the future (33). This is precisely what I locate at the heart of the drifting in the novel—the relational dimension of consolation (Julliand 2020). I will then point to the different ways textual drifting contributes to having Anil, as well as the reader, move from desolation to consolation.

Generating a space for consolation

7The first kind of drifting that occurs in the novel takes the shape of detours in space and time. Indeed, Anil’s Ghost opens with an indirect “vigil for the dead” (5), one that will keep us awake throughout the whole novel (from the Latin “vigilantia,” “vigilare,” watch, watchfulness, wakefulness, keeping awake). Before we are even aware of the origin of the pain, this vigil, this search for consolation, is the first passageway the reader goes along:

When the team reached the site at five-thirty in the morning, one or two family members would be waiting for them. And they would be present all day while Anil and the others worked, never leaving: they spelled each other so someone always stayed, as if to ensure that the evidence would not be lost again. This vigil for the dead, for these half-revealed forms. (5)

8Instead of taking us to Sri Lanka directly, as one might expect, the incipit guides us backwards to an earlier excavation site Anil went to in Guatemala, searching for the remains of the killed and the ‘disappeared’ while the unconsoled family members, huddled together, wait by the side of the graves, or sometimes step into the graves, hoping to identify one of their lost ones and to reach the consolation such a revelation may provide them with.

9A whole page in italics thus opens the book with what the reader only later understands to be an analepsis. Some eight or nine such passages in italics punctuate the novel, complexifying the time scheme, and providing the narrative with a “textual kinetics” of its own, a concept coined by Anna Reckin to refer to a dynamic movement that pushes us towards reimagining modalities of inhabiting the world in the present.

10The italicized passages provide references to Anil’s investigations in Guatemala or China, a terrorist attack in a tunnel, the National Atlas of Sri Lanka, the Buddhist eye-painter Ananda Udugama, Ananda’s wife, Sirissa, and Ravina, the wife of Sarath Diyasena, the government-appointed archeologist with whom Anil will work to identify one particular skeleton whom they ironically nickname Sailor, as in the nursery rhyme Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Most of the time, the reader is not able to understand immediately why they are taken through those moments, or who these characters are, which could encourage us to read those moments as structured to work as trauma does: it is most often impossible to understand what is happening at the time of the event; understanding is possible only much later, when you go back to it, or when it comes back to you. As trauma scholars have amply and clearly demonstrated, the traumatic event is one that “resist(s) understanding and integration” at the moment when it takes place (Hirsch 12). A constant element that pertains to those pages in italics is that the characters who appear in them will be introduced formally only later in the diegesis, making those passages proleptic as well as analeptic, creating connections across the narrative, unbeknownst to the reader at first but to be ultimately reconstructed, knowingly this time, as one reconstructs and revisits a traumatic event, potentially to move away from it by purging what Judith Butler calls its “traumatic residue.” (38)

11For instance, Palipana, the archeologist Anil and Sarath turn to for assistance, is mentioned in passing in the second passage in italics (12)—even though that page is about China, and more precisely about a series of Buddhist cave temples in Shanxi province where the victims are the Bodhisattvas that were discovered by Japanese archeologists in 1918, with no apparent relation to 20^th century Sri Lanka. However, we are only introduced to Palipana diegetically in the section “The Grove of Aesthetics” some seventy pages later (79), and we meet him at the same time as Anil (85), after a few more drifting passages that situate him in his professional and personal history as well as in the forest grove he has retired to. Ananda Urugama, the eye-painter, is the object of the fifth passage in italics (91-93) but is only introduced when Palipana recommends him to Anil and Sarath as someone who can “rebuild the head” of Sailor (108). The reader meets Ananda diegetically and briefly in the section “A Brother,” (120) which is mostly about another character, Sarath’s brother Gamini, the young surgeon who operates in the North Central Province on the victims of stabbings and those missing limbs due to land mines, once the triage of victims has been done: “Orthopaedic trauma, punctured lungs, spinal cord injuries” (120). Finally, a whole section is named after him, “Ananda” (161-205), but it is symptomatic that this latter section is placed after the former, as if the restorative reconstruction that Ananda embarks on could only happen after the reader has been acquainted with Gamini and with the selfless work he performs as if he was past consolation. And yet it is the excruciating work he has chosen to do that enables others to keep their loved ones alive, or reach some form of solace when everything has been tried to save their lives.

12The characterization of Ananda’s wife Sirissa and of Ravina follows a similar pattern, but not quite. The former appears for the first time in one of those passages in italics (172-75). One early morning, as she comes close to the bridge she crosses every day to reach the school where she has a cleaning job, she sees heads on stakes. She has to walk past them, and the reader is reminded of the previous lines: “So many things happened during the feathers of night. The frantic running, the terrified, the scared, the pea-brain furious and tired professional men of death punishing another village of dissent” (174). What Sirissa has witnessed is so traumatic that she is not even given a second chance in the narrative. Instead of being properly introduced in one of the following scenes in the diegesis, she can only be alluded to in absentia as she disappeared shortly after the scene on the bridge: “Ananda’s wife, Sirissa, disappeared at that time… […]. It’s been three years. He still hasn’t found her” (185). She is thus turned into a ghost twice, since she is absent from the diegesis itself and she is not even referred to later on in the text. Ravina is another one of the ghosts who haunt the text. She is the one the young surgeon Gamini “should have loved” (251), but instead she married his brother Sarath. She was brought to the hospital after committing suicide, and Gamini was unable to save her, letting her slide into “the darkness of another tunnel” (252). Just like Sirissa, she never surfaces in the diegesis. When she is mentioned again a few pages later, it is to say that Sarath would “unearth nothing of Ravina” (279).

13A second form of drifting occurs through more straightforward analepses that haunt the narrative and morph it into a nimble object—“textual kinetics” again. Many of these analepses concern Anil’s personal life and memories: her love affair with the married man, Cullis, with whom she entertains an ambivalent relationship; her memories of her marriage with a medical student, whose name she does not even mention for fear it would leave a trace in her life (140-45); her youth memories of the monsoon (15), of the time when she was a swimmer (11; 69), or of the shallow graves she would walk on by accident and fall into (20); her reminiscing of her American girlfriend, Leaf, whose memory is being erased by Alzheimer’s disease; and her studies in North America and the Fuck Yorick School of Forensics (146-51).

14The third and last form of drifting materializes through the abundance of literary and cultural references that far exceed the boundaries of the tear-shaped island, even though they do include the National Atlas of Sri Lanka. It comprehends—and we should note the Latin etymology cum- ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp’—scientific annals and medical publications; a wide range of literary references, from the Greek poet Archilocus to Kipling to Goethe, writers like Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Enid Blyton, John Masters, among many others, or specific novels like Le Grand Meaulnes, L’Homme au masque de fer, Les Misérables, or The Queen’s Gambit. One could also mention films and actors like In Search of Gandhi or Ava Gardner; singers like Frank Sinatra, and specific songs like “The Good Ship Venus,” “Coming in from the Cold,” “Don’t Know Much about Entomology,” or Tom Waits’ “Heigh Ho” which is, significantly enough in a novel about excavation, a mining song.

15All those literary and cultural references that emerge through allusion, partial ellipsis, prolepsis, or analepsis, brush shoulders with the characters that exist in the story, as if on the same level, composing an aggregative approach. On the level of the diegesis, the role of many characters is to connect Anil and Sarath to other characters. If we borrow from Vladimir Propp’s character types, many could be seen as helpers, and as in a fairy-tale that one would unexpectedly stumble upon amidst a nightmare, they reflect and speculate, they contribute suggestions, offer protection, join the dots. Scientists help in that the two archeologists Palipana and his brother Nārada connect Anil and Sarath to artists (the eye-painter Ananda Udugama). In the same way, other sciences are called upon in this collaborative approach. Medicine leads to forensics, one medical doctor leads to another one, on either side of the political divide: Dr Perera, the Senior Medical Officer, working for the government; Linus Corea, the doctor kidnapped by the guerilla in 1987 to operate on the wounded insurgents; most importantly, Gamini, Sarath’s brother, who “saved the lives first, then the limbs” (118), categorizing the incoming victims and assessing the trauma. Palynology and forensic geology also help identify the traces of soil, pollen grains and spores that “fused to the bones” (52). Chitra Abeysekera, the entomologist, plays a part in identifying the first burial site of Sailor thanks to what she says about the insects and pupae (i.e. an insect in its inactive immature form between larva and adult) that were found in the bones (70-73; 152).

16The text highlights how victims often become helpers, as in the case of Gunesena, the young man who was pulled out of his truck and nailed on the tarmac, as in a modern crucifixion. Given proper medical care first by Anil on the road, then by Gamini at the hospital, he is eventually the one who pushes the trolley with the skeletons in the semi-darkness of the corridors of the Armoury Auditorium at the end of the novel, when Anil is heard, in the judicial meaning of the term, by the anti-terrorist unit and is not aware yet that Sarath has not betrayed her. Gunesena smuggles out Sailor, ensuring Anil can bring to Geneva the ultimate evidence of the government-ordered murder. In short, the network of helpers grows organically from within, one connection leading to another, just as one literary or cultural reference leads to another, in an amplifying momentum. Now that the three examples of drifting in Anil’s Ghost have been reviewed, one can ask the corresponding questions that pertain to the ways consolation is performed in the text.

Performing consolation

17What, then, is the link between the passages in italics and the diegesis? Between the text-time of the analepses and the story-time of the late-1990s Sri Lanka? Between all the diegetic characters and the fictional characters present in the literary and cultural references? Why such sweeping gestures across continents and cultural references in a novel about the Civil War in Sri Lanka and the unidentified bones of the murdered? What is the impact of a time scheme that is bound to confuse the reader? How can the survivors’ impossible mourning and the female protagonist’s unacknowledged inconsolation be linked, and to what effect? Is there a possibility that those two forms of grieving, if connected, could endow the mourning and / or the grief with a restorative function geared towards a more future-oriented approach (Ganteau)?

18As readers, we never quite know what to expect, nor what to look for, at first, until we realize we must look back to see where we are going. Reading the novel through the lens of “terrorist fiction,” Margaret Scanlan convincingly argues that “the distinctive achievement in Anil’s Ghost is to create a narrative structure that replicates the experience of terror” (302). In particular, the novel uses what Ursula Heise calls “chronoschisms,” those “abrupt breaks in time [that shatter] the unifying time of the individual mind” (Heise 7, qtd. in Scanlan 303): “The chronoschisms create a sense of time experienced through terror, by people living in fear they can be blown away in an instant, to whom historical perspective is an alien luxury. What human beings of good will and intelligence […] might accomplish in such a time, becomes the novel’s central question” (303).

19Whether we speak about the structured-like-trauma narrative, or about text-time that shatters story-time, it is up to the reader to put the pieces back together, to reattach this episode with that one, connect this character to that one, etc. Pursuing what for Scanlan is the novel’s “central question,” I want to suggest that this drifting is a bringing together, a coming into one’s own albeit through a detour. Ultimately, the connections that take place in the text create a renewed form of agency for the reader and for the protagonist, an agency that does not stem from control but which enables the yet unconsoled individual to re-insert themselves in a community and look towards a possible future.

20While Anil has shed her younger swimmer self and is ready to don a new persona as drifter, the whole novel appears bent on helping its main protagonist transition from swimming to drifting. A useful prism may be Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics defined as a complex oceanic worldview which explores the entanglement between past and present, water and land, diaspora and home, roots and routes (Gilroy), and in which the world breathes with the rhythms of the sea, far from the Western terrestrial “obsession for fixity, assuredness, and appropriation” (Brathwaite 34). Brathwaite’s tidalectics provides a framework that enables a creative vision of the past as it surfaces again and again in the present, in a different shape from what it used to be. It is a constant back and forth movement that cannot be reduced to a cyclical movement since the tide never comes back to the same point of origin. The concept was shaped by Brathwaite from the image of an old woman sweeping sand in her yard, repeatedly, every morning. To this continual and coastal to and fro Brathwaite attributes the quality of tidalectics, instead of the more Western dialectics. The woman’s movement is similar to that of the ocean she appears to be walking on, instead of sand, as one could have thought. In the digressions she is involved in as a character—let us remember that the verb digress comes from the Latin di ‘aside’ + gredi ‘walk, step’, an etymology that we may also find interesting in the context of reaching consolation as a movement that encourages us to step aside one’s pain—, Anil could be another impersonation of that walking woman, “constantly coming from where she had come from” (33). She reaches out towards an image of the “perhaps creative chaos of the future” (34), even though she did not realise it at first. Anil may have believed she could swim away from her native island and never be back, but she does return even though not quite to the place she had left, following a narrative tempo that is crucial to the “therapeutic value of literary writings” (James 6).

21Within the frame of the complex time structure of Anil’s Ghost, drifting can be interpreted, then, in three different ways that do not necessarily contradict the experience of terror embedded in the reading. Drifting could highlight what can be “accomplished” to counter the experience of terror and provide some form of solace, just as the movement and sound of the ebb and flow of water—the pain is not erased but it is taken further away and mitigated. I now need to return to the three examples that were taken earlier to illustrate the different kinds of drifting in the novel. First, addressing the detours in space and time, the passages in italics that are simultaneously analeptic and proleptic, it is the tension between story and text that is made clear. The freedom and agency that the victims and survivors were deprived of in the story (the diegetic elements as they could have happened in real life) are proffered through the text (the diegetic elements as they have been reshaped and reordered by the author). Story stays within the borders of the island, within the contours of violence, conflict, destruction and “inconsolation,” unable to escape loss and desolation; whereas text roams freely beyond borders and boundaries, across emotions and timelines, making all possible connections outside the frame of violence. The malleability of the space and time schemes, the “textual kinetics,” gives the text the freedom the story does not have. Text, as a nimble object, cannot be constrained by the shackles of story. Text goes against story.

22Second, as regards the more straightforward analepses, the reader is implicated in creating invisible connections that are revealed only eventually—as has been shown earlier, we already know Palipana, Ananda, Sirissa, or Ravina when we meet them later in the chapters. We recognize them more than we discover them, as if we have always already known them. Recurring motifs (of the leaf, the bird, food and drink, the well, the mine, etc.) that echo across the narrative also create a web of connections, thus undermining the disconnection that seems to emerge from the story. As alluded to earlier, the “powerful remedies” that André associates with social bonds are at work there, too (blurb). The reader cannot but engage in an act of active reconstruction, potentially akin to post-traumatic surgery, reconstructive surgery or bone setting. The text relies on care and agency where there was none, as we can see with Sarath’s forensic treatment of the bones:

He […] began cleaning the bones of the […] skeleton, drilling free the fragments of dirt. Then he turned on a slim hose and let it hover over each bone, air nestling into the evidence of the trauma as if it were blowing cool breath from a pursed mouth onto a child’s burn. He dipped the camel-hair brush into the dish and began painting a layer of protective plastic over the bones, moving down the spine and ribs. (74)

23Through a “literary practice of care that is also the expression of an ethics of alterity” (Ganteau 34), the text brings together instead of hacking, it sutures instead of wrenching apart. It creates a subterranean bond of affinities between characters, countries, cultures even, a space of identification that is one of recognition and kinship—a forum for everyone to participate in while also providing a court of law (forensis) where social justice can be delivered symbolically.

24Third, as far as the literary and cultural references are concerned, some of them are bound to be missed by the reader; others will ring a few bells, albeit in a fuzzy way; others, still, like the characters whom we are made to recognize eventually, will breed familiarity, and place us, readers, in a tantalizing proximity to the characters—to Anil, particularly. In another context, Debjani Ganguly uses an interesting phrase to describe the emergence of a “humanitarian sensibility” in the eighteenth-century novel. She speaks of “an architectonics of proximity” (Ganguly 30). As I strive to analyse what is at stake in Anil’s Ghost, I would like to suggest that drifting provides such an architectonics of distance and proximity, a paradoxical chronotope where the possibility of consolation is opened up in the way space and time are represented in the discourse of the novel. This is the route that now needs to be taken in the last section of this article.

Drifting from desolation to consolation

25I delineated three possible responses to Janet Maslin’s interrogations about the novel’s drifting movement-in-stasis. It is the third point about proximity and distance that I want to use at this stage of my argument in order to show how textual drifting contributes to having Anil as well as the reader move farther away from desolation (from the Latin de-, thoroughly + solus, alone) and closer to consolation (consolari, con- + sōlārī, to solace, to soothe), from solitude and aloofness to togetherness and solidarity. The tidalectic drifting at work in the novel takes the character away from the place where pain and suffering were expected to keep her, to another place she had not anticipated she could reach. Bearing in mind the earlier reference to Fœssel’s Le Temps de la consolation, the reader is now better able to grasp the gradual change that the text has performed on Anil’s behalf. If consolation was not available at first because the need for it was not acknowledged, it is now available but not immediately (Fœssel 104). It becomes clear, then, that after the pain will come a time that will be different: “To convince us that the time after the loss will not dwell on the past and repeat it, we need to attribute to it in advance a density (of joy, of freedom) capable of responding to the distress of the present. Consolation is a step towards making time and meaning compatible” (loc 104 of 276, my translation).

26Consolation seems absent from the time and space as shaped in the present but it will come, almost as certainly as the ebb and flow removes the pain and brings it back, closer but different because reconfigured, tidalectically.

27As I have mentioned above, Anil has been described as “[h]aunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural dislocation,” while her character has also been said to “stage diaspora” as the condition of late modernity (Härting 43). Whether she is referred to as a “diasporan” or as an “expatriate” (Ganguly), a “nomad” or a “cosmopolitan” (Härting), Anil’s whole being seems to be dislocated, out of joint. In Härting’s words, “Anil’s experience of cultural and social displacement presents a cultural impediment that keeps her suspended in a state of perpetual foreignness and transition rather than allowing her to inhabit multiple cultural and historical spaces at once” (51).

28Her professional as well as personal and sexual life has been depicted through the lens of detachment and alienation, but it is difficult to define Anil in any fixed way. I see ambivalence, ambiguity, and fluidity at the heart of who she is, as she refuses to be constrained by anything or anyone. This is visible for instance in her volatile relationship with Cullis. Sexual intimacy is shared whenever they meet, here or there on the planet, but it can only be a “long-distance” relationship. Her friendship with Leaf is also identified as a “long-distance” relationship, yet it is intimate and close. Ganguly sees Anil’s training as a forensic pathologist as “an extension of her diasporic status—both are ultimately distancing” (201). In the absolute commitment she has toward her profession and the discovery of truth, however, she learns to negotiate how far or how close she should be, how much detachment or empathy she should adopt. In forensic science as in medicine, one needs distance to be able to reach a valid diagnostic and decide on the route to take, without letting oneself be engulfed by emotion. And yet, one cannot empty oneself of affect, one also needs empathy. The journey Anil performs in the novel takes her from an attempt at maintaining an abstract distance to embracing a more “embodied approach” (Herrick), in her scientific work as in the management of her own personal grief, which she will finally authorize herself to feel and come to terms with through her dedication to revealing the truth of the killing fields on behalf of others. Instead of swimming—and one generally swims in a beeline, from point A to point B, to reach a goal—she allows herself to drift. She accepts, and so does the reader, that the effective point of arrival can be different from the anticipated point of arrival.

29Through and beyond forensics, what the novel highlights is this complex relationship to the world, as if revealing that the mystery of the bones was also reconnecting Anil to herself and to the world. She gradually learns that there are many ways to reach truth, and a beeline is not always the shortest route. Her understanding of her own work—and of her own self—evolves until it reaches what Ganguly highlights as the necessary co-existence of different practices (multiplicity, alterity). Anil encounters those different practices in the course of the novel and must contrast them with her own. At the beginning of the novel, she is said to be able to “cut a cross-section of bone with a fine saw and determine the skeleton’s exact age at death that way” (95). She believes in the indubitable traction of forensic science. Sarath, on the other hand, needs the historical and archaeological approach, “truth is just opinion” (102); while Palipana’s approach to Sailor needs the haptic physicality of touch.

30As Anil investigates further to find truth, albeit not necessarily the truth, she comes to test her (in-)capacity for empathy, her desire to stay aloof, her ability to control or remove her emotions, and eventually her willingness to acknowledge trauma. She was not in Sri Lanka during the war, so she may have thought she had not been harmed. She thought she could insulate herself from the world, be an island entire to herself, as the poet John Donne would have said, remove herself from what and whom she used to be close to. But what is underlined in the progression of the text is the power of exchange, of encounter, of cross-fertilization. She changes through exchange and she is gradually transformed, shedding the belief she did not need to be consoled because she had not been affected in the first place. She finally becomes attuned to the idea that it is not because she was not a direct victim of the war that she has not been affected by the trauma.

31Anil gradually moves out of her “long-distance gaze” and her self-positioning as the objective, distant forensic scientist able to reveal an individual mystery through a cross-section of bone under a microscope. What she finally lets go of is her denial of any need for consolation, her “fantasy of invulnerability” (Herrick 36), her “fantasy of mastery” (Butler, qtd. in Herrick, 37). What she eventually acquires, and the reader with her, is the awareness that only through an “embodied sociality” (Herrick 46, referring to Merleau-Ponty) is one able to emerge out of extreme grief and extreme violence, reaching some form of truth and some form of consolation—never absolute ones but at a remove from desolation.

32The community of beings that is gradually woven around the identification of Sailor’s bones fulfills the purpose of one such “embodied sociality,” one in which we can accept to be exposed to “the reality of our shared human vulnerability, our shared corporeal precarity” (Herrick 46). This community of beings is made up of all the people Anil and Sarath encounter on their way to the revelation of truth about the murder of Sailor and the lie about his death since he was first murdered and then placed in a government-protected archeological zone so that the skeleton would be mistaken for a much older skeleton, along all the other ones dating back to the 6^th century.

33As they work towards identifying the unacknowledged bones, Anil and Sarath provide the families of the victims with solace and the possibility of mourning. More importantly, whether their investigations lead to identifying the anonymous dead or not, they contribute to weaving again a social and personal bond broken by the cycle of violence, loss and suffering (Fœssel loc 41 of 276). The group of women who appear in the slim, final chapter entitled ‘Distance’, eerily echoes the group of women who were sitting by the graves in Guatemala at the beginning of the novel. Once the stones have gone through the “triage” (301)—the same word that was used to describe what was happening at the hospital before Gamini could operate on the maimed bodies—the women distinguish the stones to reassemble the body of the smashed Buddha: “The distinguishing of the stones took several weeks, and by the time the dry season came most of the limbs had been assembled. There was now one arm, fifty feet long, an ear. The legs still safe in the fields of bees. They began to move the sections towards each other in the cicada grass.” (302)

34As they help Ananda rebuild the Buddha in the middle of a killing field, their work is to “distinguish” the stones from the bones, to “assemble” the limbs, two action verbs that are repeatedly used in the last few pages (300-307), as if the broken bodies of the victims and the broken body of the Buddha were reassembled in one social body. It is ironical but significant that neither Anil nor Sarath feature among those villagers—Anil has left Sri Lanka, Sarath is dead—, as if the consolation they have brought to others will suffice. The community of the living Anil finally allows herself to move back to is not only founded on the solidarity and ethics of alterity she has performed; it is also made up of, and supported by, the mental, emotional, literary and cultural drifting as I have endeavoured to demonstrate here. The transaction she has been involved in—acknowledging her need for consolation while accepting to go without it as she hands it over to others—authorizes her to requalify her experience and restore meaning.