Anil's Ghost

Ananda’s Buddha reconstruction symbolizes both the restoration of the sacred and the repossession of the past, emphasizing the theme of The Presence of the Past. That is, Ananda’s task is to pay respect to the gods of his country and to its ghosts, particularly Sarath. He thinks of the Bodhisattva statues, which line a wall some ways from the Buddha he is restoring, as anchors to memory, as testaments to the experience and suffering of the citizens that bring “a permanence to brief lives” (299). Their sacred presence both evokes the eternal and pays homage to the beliefs and struggles of the living.

Ananda’s initial plan for the Buddha statue is to “homogenize the stone, blend the face into a unit” (302), recalling his inaccurate restoration of Sailor’s face. He ultimately decides against this strategy, however, opting instead to preserve “the composure and the qualities of the face” (302). After his experience with Sailor, he realizes that the act of reconstructing such a face is a sacred undertaking. In this way, the past itself becomes sacred ground, as represented here by the Buddha. This is also how Ananda sees his purpose as an artist. It is not, for him, to create original works; rather, he connects the current remnants with the vastness of history. In a world beset by The Perversion of Politics, there are more important projects than invention, such as preserving memory and honoring the dead. This is why he wears Sarath’s shirt as he works, in tribute.

Ananda’s preparation to restore the Buddha’s eyes recalls Anil and Sarath’s visit to the forest monastery, when Palipana told them that the eyes give the Buddha its power, emphasizing the importance of the eye-painter. In the final scene, Ondaatje ties Ananda explicitly to the Buddha when he climbs the ladder to reach the eyes and surveys the land below him just like the statue: “And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him” (307). This illustrates the theme of Rootlessness and Return, with Ananda’s new strength of vision representing his return to the world in all its vastness and complexity. The Buddha witnesses the long view of history, dominated by the weather and the changing of the seasons. Ananda gets lost in this vision—peaceful and separate from humanity’s cruelty and endless wars—his assistant reaches up to touch him, literally bringing him back to earth. No matter how much Ananda suffers, however, no matter how much tragedy has occurred on this land, he feels this gentle pat as a “sweet touch from the world” (307). He can still savor sweetness in the connection to others.