Teranesia

1

The island was too small for human habitation, and too far from the commonly travelled sea routes to serve as a navigation point, so the people of the Kai and Tanimbar Islands had never had reason to name it. The Javanese and Sumatran rulers who’d claimed tributes from the Spice Islands would have been oblivious to its existence, and Prabir had been unable to locate it on any Dutch or Portuguese chart that had been scanned and placed on the net. To the current Indonesian authorities it was a speck on the map of Maluku propinsi, included for the sake of completeness along with a thousand other uninhabited rocks. Prabir had realised the opportunity he was facing even before they’d left Calcutta, and he’d begun compiling a list of possibilities immediately, but it wasn’t a decision he could make lightly. He’d been on the island for more than a year before he finally settled on a name for it.

He tried out the word on his classmates and friends before slipping it into a conversation with his parents. His father had smiled approvingly, but then had second thoughts.

‘Why Greek? If you’re not going to use a local language… why not Bengali?’

Prabir had gazed back at him, puzzled. Names sounded dull if you understood them too easily. Why make do with a lame Big River, when you could have a majestic Rio Grande? But surely his father knew that. It was his example Prabir was following.

‘The same reason you named the butterfly in Latin.’

His mother had laughed. ‘He’s got you there!’ And his father had relented, hoisting Prabir up into the air to be spun and tickled. ‘All right, all right! Teranesia!’

But that had been before Madhusree was born, when she hadn’t been named herself (except as the much-too-literal Accidental Bulge). So Prabir stood on the beach, holding his sister up to the sky, spinning around slowly as he chanted, ‘Teranesia! Teranesia!’ Madhusree stared down at him, more interested in watching him pronounce the strange word than in taking in the panorama he was trying to present to her. Was it normal to be near-sighted at fifteen months? Prabir resolved to look it up. He lowered her to his face and kissed her noisily, then staggered, almost losing his balance. She was growing heavier much faster than he was growing stronger. His parents claimed not to be growing stronger at all, and both now refused to lift him over their heads.

‘Come the revolution,’ Prabir told Madhusree, checking for shells and coral before putting her down on the dazzling white sand.

‘What?’

‘We’ll redesign our bodies. Then I’ll always be able to lift you up. Even when I’m ninety-one and you’re eighty-three.’

She laughed at this talk of the metaphysically distant future. Prabir was fairly sure that Madhusree understood eighty-three at least as well as he understood, say, ten to the hundredth power. Looming over her, he counted out eight hand flashes, then three fingers. She watched, uncertain but mesmerised. Prabir gazed into her jet-black eyes. His parents didn’t understand Madhusree: they couldn’t tell the difference between the way she made them feel and the way she was. Prabir only understood, himself, because he dimly remembered what it was like from the inside.

‘Oh, you pretty thing,’ he crooned.

Madhusree smiled conspiratorially.

Prabir glanced away from her, across the beach, out into the calm turquoise waters of the Banda Sea. The waves breaking on the reef looked tame from here, though he’d been on enough queasy ferry rides to Tual and Ambon to know what a steady monsoon wind, let alone a storm, could whip up. But if Teranesia was spared the force of the open ocean, the large islands that shielded it—Timor, Sulawesi, Ceram, New Guinea—were invisibly remote. Even the nearest equally obscure rock was too far away to be seen from the beach.

‘For small altitudes, the distance to the horizon is approximately the square root of twice the product of your height above sea level and the radius of the Earth.’ Prabir pictured a right-angled triangle, with vertices at the centre of the Earth, a point on the horizon, and his own eyes. He’d plotted the distance function on his notepad, and knew many points on the curve by heart. The beach sloped steeply, so his eyes were probably two full metres above sea level. That meant he could see for five kilometres. If he climbed Teranesia’s volcanic cone until the nearest of the outlying Tanimbar Islands came into sight, the altitude of that point—which his notepad’s satellite navigation system could tell him—would enable him to calculate exactly how far away they were.

But he knew the distance already, from maps: almost eighty kilometres. So he could reverse the whole calculation, and use it to verify his altitude: the lowest point from which he could see land would be five hundred metres. He’d drive a stake into the ground to mark the spot. He turned towards the centre of the island, the black peak just visible above the coconut palms that rimmed the beach. It sounded like a long climb, especially if he had to carry Madhusree most of the way.

‘Do you want to go see Ma?’

Madhusree pulled a face. ‘No!’ She could never have too much of Ma, but she knew when he was trying to dump her.

Prabir shrugged. He could do the experiment later; nothing was worth a tantrum. ‘Do you want to go swimming, then?’

Madhusree nodded enthusiastically and clambered to her feet, then ran unsteadily towards the water’s edge. Prabir gave her a head start, then pounded across the sand after her, bellowing. She glanced at him disdainfully over her shoulder, fell down, stood up, continued. Prabir ran rings around her as she waded into the shallows, the soles of his feet slapping up water, but he made sure he didn’t get too close; it wasn’t fair to splash her in the face. When she reached little more than waist height, she dropped into the water and started swimming, her chubby arms working methodically.

Prabir froze and watched her admiringly. There was no getting away from it: sometimes he felt the Madhusree-thing himself. The same sweet thrill, the same tenderness, the same unearned pride he saw on his father’s and mother’s faces.

He sighed heavily and swooned backwards into the water, touching bottom, opening his eyes to feel the sting of salt and watch the blurred sunlight for a moment before rising to his feet, satisfyingly wet all over. He shook his hair out of his eyes and then waded after Madhusree. The water reached his own ribs before he caught up with her; he eased himself down and started swimming beside her.

‘Are you all right?’

She didn’t deign to reply, merely frowning at the implied insult.

‘Don’t go too far.’ When they were alone, the rule was that Prabir had to be able to stand in the water. This was slightly galling, but the prospect of trying to tow a struggling, screaming Madhusree back to safety was something he could live without.

Prabir had left his face mask behind, but he could still see through the water quite clearly with his head above the surface. When he paused to let the froth and turbulence he was making subside, he could almost count grains of sand on the bottom. The reef was still a hundred metres ahead, but there were dark-purple starfish beneath him, sponges, lone anemones clinging to fragments of coral. He spotted a conical yellow-and-brown shell as big as his fist, and dived for a closer look. In the water everything blurred again, and he almost had to touch bottom with his face to see that the shell was inhabited. He blew bubbles at the pale mollusc inside; when it cowered away from him he retreated sheepishly, walking a few steps backwards on his hands before righting himself. His nostrils were full of sea water; he emptied them noisily, then pressed his tongue against his stinging palate. It felt as if he’d had a tube rammed down his nose.

Madhusree was twenty metres ahead of him. ‘Hey!’ He fought down his alarm; the last thing he wanted to do was panic her. He swam after her with long, slow strokes, reaching her quickly enough, and calming himself. ‘Want to turn back now, Maddy?’

She didn’t reply, but a grimace of uncertainty crossed her face, as if she’d lost confidence in her ability to do anything but keep swimming forward. Prabir measured the depth with one glance; there was no point even trying to stand. He couldn’t just snatch her and wade back to the shore, ignoring her screams, her pummelling and her hair-pulling.

He swam beside her, trying to shepherd her into an arc, but he was far more wary of colliding than she was. Maybe if he just grabbed her and spun her round, making a game of it, she wouldn’t be upset. He trod water and reached towards her, smiling. She made a whimpering noise, as if he’d threatened her.

‘Sssh. I’m sorry.’ Belatedly, Prabir understood; he felt exactly the same when he was walking on a log over a stream or a patch of swampy ground, and his father or mother grew impatient and reached back to grab him. Nothing could be more off-putting. But he only ever froze in the first place when someone was watching him, hurrying him along. Alone, he could do anything—casually, absent-mindedly—even reversing high above the ground. Madhusree knew she had to turn back, but the manoeuvre was too daunting to think about.

Prabir cried out excitedly, ‘Look! Out on the reef! It’s a water man!’

Madhusree followed his gaze uncertainly.

‘Straight ahead. Where the waves are breaking.’ Prabir pictured a figure rising from the surf, stealing water from each collapsing crest. ‘That’s just his head and shoulders, but the rest will come soon. Look, his arms are breaking free!’ Prabir imagined dripping, translucent limbs rising from the water, fists clenched tight. He whispered, ‘I’ve seen this one before, from the beach. I stole one of his shells. I thought I’d got away with it… but you know what they’re like. If you take something from them, they always find you.’

Madhusree looked puzzled. Prabir explained, ‘I can’t give it back. I don’t have it with me, it’s in my hut.’

For a moment Madhusree seemed about to protest that this was no real obstacle; Prabir could simply promise to return the shell later. But then it must have occurred to her that a creature like this wouldn’t be so patient and trusting.

Her face lit up. Prabir was in trouble. The water man lowered his arms and strained against the surface, forcing more of his body into existence. Bellowing from the pain of birth, baring glistening teeth.

Prabir turned a nervous circle. ‘I have to get away before his legs are free. Once you see a water man running, it’s too late. No one’s ever lived to describe it. Will you guide me back to shore? Show me how to get there? I can’t think. I can’t move. I’m too frightened.’

By now Prabir had psyched himself up so much that his teeth were chattering. He only hoped he hadn’t gone too far; Madhusree could gouge agonising furrows in his skin without the slightest qualm, ignoring his screams of protest, but she’d also been known to burst into inconsolable tears when anything else distressed him.

But she gazed at the water man calmly, assessing the danger. She’d been treading water since the creature appeared, and she’d already drifted around to face sideways. Now she simply leant towards the shore and started swimming, all difficulties forgotten.

It was hard work feigning panic without overtaking her, when her arms were about a quarter as long as his own. Prabir glanced over his shoulder and shouted, ‘Faster, Maddy! I can see his ribs now!’ The water man was leering angrily, already assuming a kind of eager parody of a sprinter’s crouch. Rocking back and forth on the tips of his splayed fingers, he dragged more of his torso out of the waves. Prabir watched as the creature inhaled deeply, driving water from his lungs through his glassy skin, preparing himself for the world of air.

Madhusree was beginning to slap the water open-handed, the way she did when she was tired. Prabir suspected that he’d be able to stand soon, but it didn’t seem right to intervene before he had to. ‘I’m going to make it, aren’t I? I just have to breathe slowly, and keep my fingers together.’ Madhusree shot him an irritable don’t-patronise-me look, and clawed the water in an exaggerated fashion before accepting his advice and powering ahead.

Prabir stopped dead and turned to examine their would-be pursuer. The last stage was always difficult; it was awkward trying to brace yourself as you dragged your legs up beneath you. Prabir closed his eyes and imagined that he was the water man. Crouching lower, forearms to the waves, he strained with his whole body until his muscles expelled a visible surge of brine. Finally, he was rewarded: he felt the warm air on the back of his knees, on his calves. His right foot broke free; the sole rested lightly on the surface, tickled by the choppy water as if each tiny crest was a blade of grass.

He opened his eyes. The water man was rising up, ready to spring forward, with just one foot trapped below the waves to hold him back.

Prabir cried out and started swimming after Madhusree. Within seconds, he knew the chase had begun. But he didn’t dare look back: once you saw a water man running, you were lost.

The violence of his strokes made Madhusree turn; she lost her rhythm and began to flounder. Prabir caught up with her as her head dropped beneath the surface; he scooped her into his arms and reached for the bottom with his feet. His toes hit the sand with Madhusree cradled safely against his chest.

Running through the water was nightmare-slow, but he pushed his leaden body forward. He tramped right over a bed of brown sea-grass, shuddering with each step; it wasn’t that the blades were sharp, or slimy, but it always felt as if something was hiding among them. Madhusree clung to him, uncomplaining, staring back, transfixed. Skin crawled on Prabir’s scalp. He could always declare that the game was over, there was nothing following them, it was all made up. In his arms Madhusree was a passenger, immune to the rules, but if he turned and looked for himself now, the simple fact of his survival would prove beyond doubt that the water man had never been real.

But he didn’t want to spoil the game for Madhusree.

His legs almost folded as he hit the beach, but he caught himself and took a dozen more steps; just walking on dry land made him feel stronger. Then he crouched down and stood Madhusree on her feet before turning to sit facing the sea, his head lowered to help him catch his breath.

He was dizzy from the sudden end to his exertion, and his vision was marred with dark after-images. But Prabir was almost certain that he could make out a damp patch glistening on the sun-baked sand, one step beyond the water’s edge, evaporating before his eyes.

Madhusree declared calmly, ‘Want Ma.’

Prabir wasn’t allowed inside the butterfly hut. Because the malaria vaccine didn’t work for him, he’d had a pellet inserted beneath the skin of one arm that made him sweat mosquito repellent. The mere smell of the stuff probably wouldn’t harm the butterflies, but it could affect their behaviour, and any risk of serious contamination would be enough to invalidate all of his parents’ observations.

He put Madhusree down a few metres from the doorway, and she waddled towards the sound of her mother’s voice. Prabir listened as the voice rose in pitch. ‘Where have you been, my darling? Where have you been?’ Madhusree began to deliver an incoherent monologue about the water man. Prabir strained his ears long enough to check that he wasn’t being libelled, then went and sat on the bench outside his own hut. It was mid-morning, and the beach had grown uncomfortably hot, but most of the kampung would remain in shade until noon. Prabir could still remember the day they’d arrived, almost three years before, with half a dozen labourers from Kai Besar to help them clear away vegetation and assemble the pre-fabricated huts. He still wasn’t sure whether the men had been joking when they’d referred to the ring of six buildings with a word that meant ‘village’, but the term had stuck.

A familiar crashing sound came from the edge of the kampung; a couple of fruit pigeons had landed on the branch of a nutmeg tree. The blue-white birds were larger than chickens, and though they were slightly more streamlined in their own plump way it still seemed extraordinary to Prabir that they could fly at all. One of them stretched its comically extensible mouth around a nutmeg fruit the size of a small apricot; the other looked on stupidly, cooing and clacking, before sidling away to search for food of its own.

Prabir had been planning to try out his idea for altitude measurement as soon as he was free of Madhusree, but on the way back from the beach he’d thought of some complications. For a start, he wasn’t confident that he could distinguish between the shore of a distant island and part of a cliff or an inland mountain, visible over the horizon because of its height. Maybe if he could persuade his father to let him borrow the binoculars he’d be able to tell the difference, but there was another, more serious problem. Refraction due to atmospheric temperature gradients—the same effect that made the sun appear swollen as it approached the horizon—would bend the light he was trying to use as one side of a Pythagorean triangle. Of course, someone had probably worked out a way to take this into account, and it wouldn’t be hard to track down the appropriate equations and program them into his notepad, but even if he could find all the temperature data he needed—from some regional meteorological model or weather satellite thermal image—he wouldn’t really understand what he was doing; he’d just be following instructions blindly.

Prabir suddenly recognised his name amongst the murmuring coming from the butterfly hut—spoken not by Madhusree, who could barely pronounce it, but by his father. He tried to make out the words that followed, but the fruit pigeons wouldn’t shut up. He scanned the ground for something to throw at them, then decided that any attempt to drive them away would probably be a long, noisy process. He rose to his feet and tiptoed around to the back of the hut, to press one ear against the fibreglass.

‘How’s he going to cope when he has to go to a normal school back in India, in a real solid classroom six hours a day, when he’s barely learnt to sit still for five minutes? The sooner he gets used to it, the less of a shock it will be. If we wait until we’re finished here, he could be… what? Eleven, twelve years old? He’ll be uncontrollable!’ Prabir could tell that his father had been speaking for a while. He always began arguments dispassionately, as if he was indifferent to the subject under discussion. It took several minutes for this level of exasperation to creep into his voice.

His mother laughed her who’s-talking laugh. ‘You were eleven the first time you sat in a classroom!’

‘Yes, and that was hard enough. And at least I’d been exposed to other human beings. You think he’s being socialised properly through a satellite link?’

There was such a long silence that Prabir began to wonder if his mother was replying too softly for him to hear. Then she said plaintively, ‘Where, though? Calcutta’s too far away, Rajendra. We’d never see him.’

‘It’s a three-hour flight.’

‘From Jakarta!’

His father responded, quite reasonably, ‘How else should I measure it? If you add in the time it takes to travel from here, anywhere on Earth will sound too far away!’

Prabir felt a disorientating mixture of homesickness and fear. Calcutta. Fifty Ambons’ worth of people and traffic, squeezed into five times as much land. Even if he could grow used to the crowds again, the prospect of being ‘home’ without his parents and Madhusree seemed worse than being abandoned almost anywhere else—as surreal and disturbing as waking up one morning to find that they’d all simply vanished.

‘Well, Jakarta’s out of the question.’ There was no reply; maybe his father was nodding agreement. They’d discussed this before: throughout Indonesia, violence kept flaring up against the ethnic Chinese ‘merchant class’—and though the Indian minority was tiny and invisible in comparison, his parents seemed to think he’d be at risk of being beaten up every time there was a price rise. Prabir had trouble believing in such bizarre behaviour, but the sight of uniformed, regimented children singing patriotic songs on excursions around Ambon had made him grateful for anything that kept him out of Indonesian schools.

His father adopted a conciliatory tone. ‘What about Darwin?’ Prabir remembered Darwin clearly; they’d spent two months there when Madhusree was born. It was a clean, calm, prosperous city—and since his English was much better than his Indonesian, he’d found it easier to talk to people there than in Ambon. But he still didn’t want to be exiled there.

‘Perhaps.’ There was silence, then suddenly his mother said enthusiastically, ‘What about Toronto? We could send him to live with my cousin!’

‘Now you’re being absurd. That woman is deranged.’

‘Oh, she’s harmless! And I’m not suggesting that we put his education in her hands; we’ll just come to some arrangement for food and board. Then at least he wouldn’t be living in a dormitory full of strangers.’

His father spluttered. ‘He’s never met her!’

‘Amita’s still family. And since she’s the only one of my relatives who’ll speak to me—’

The conversation shifted abruptly to the topic of his mother’s parents. Prabir had heard this all before; after a few minutes he walked away into the forest.

He’d have to find a way to raise the subject and make his feelings plain, without betraying the fact that he’d been eavesdropping. And he’d have to do it quickly; his parents had an almost limitless capacity to convince themselves that they were acting in his best interest, and once they made up their minds he’d be powerless to stop them. It was like an ad hoc religion: The Church of We’re Only Doing It For Your Own Good. They got to write all the sacred commandments themselves, and then protested that they had no choice but to follow them.

‘Traitors,’ he muttered. This was his island; they were only here on his sufferance. If he left, they’d be dead within a week: the creatures would take them. Madhusree might try to protect them, but you could never be sure what side she was on. Prabir pictured the crew of a ferry or supply ship, marching warily into the kampung after a missed rendezvous and days of radio silence, to find no one but Madhusree. Waddling around with a greasy smile on her face, surrounded by unwashed bowls bearing the remnants of meals of fried butterflies, seasoned with a mysterious sweet-smelling meat.

Prabir trudged along, mouthing silent curses, gradually becoming aware of the increasing gradient and the dark rocks poking through the soil. Without even thinking about it, he’d ended up on the trail that led to the centre of the island. Unlike the path from the beach to the kampung—cut by the Kai labourers, and Prabir’s job now to maintain—this was the product of nothing but chance, of rocky outcrops and the natural spacing of the trees and ferns.

It was hard work moving up the sloping ground, but he was shaded by the forest, and the sweat that dripped from his elbows or ran down his legs was almost chilly. Blue-tailed lizards darted rapidly out of his way, barely registering on his vision, but there were purple tiger beetles as big as his thumb weaving over one fallen trunk, and large black ants everywhere; if he hadn’t smelt as vile to the ants as the tiger beetles did to him he might have been covered in bites within minutes. He stuck to bare soil where he could find it, but when he couldn’t he chose the undergrowth rather than volcanic rock—it was more forgiving on the soles of his feet. The ground was covered with small blue flowers, olive-green creepers, low ferns with drooping leaves; some of the plants were extremely tough, but they were rarely thorny. That made sense: there was nothing trying to graze on them.

The ground became increasingly steep and rocky, and the forest began to thin out around him. More and more sunlight penetrated between the trees, and the undergrowth became dry and coarse. Prabir wished he’d brought a hat to shield his face, and maybe even shoes; the dark rocks were mostly weathered smooth, but some had dangerous edges.

The trees vanished. He scrambled up the bare obsidian slope of the volcano. After a few minutes in the open, his skin had baked dry; he could feel tiny pulses of sweat, too small to form visible droplets, appear on his forearms and instantly evaporate. In the forest his shorts had been soaked through with perspiration; now the material stiffened like cardboard, and issued a curious laundered smell. He’d sprayed himself with sunscreen before leaving for the beach with Madhusree; he hoped he hadn’t lost too much of it in the water. They should have added some UV-absorbing chemical to his mosquito pellet, sparing him the trouble of applying the stuff externally.

Come the revolution.

The sky was bleached white; when he raised his face to the sun it was like staring into a furnace—closing his eyes was useless, he had to shield himself with his arms. But once he was high enough above the forest to see past the tallest trees, Prabir emitted a parched whoop of elation. The sea stretched out beneath him, like the view from an aeroplane. The beach was still hidden, but he could see the shallows, the reefs, the deeper water beyond.

He’d never climbed this high before. And though his family certainly hadn’t been the first people to set foot on the island, surely no stranded fisherman would have struggled up here to admire the view, when he could have been carving himself a new boat down in the forest?

Prabir scanned the horizon. Shielding his eyes from the glare allowed enough perspiration to form to run down his brow and half blind him. He mopped his eyes with his handkerchief, which had already been marinated in sea water and an hour’s worth of sweat in the forest; the effect was like having his eyelids rubbed with salt. Exasperated, he blinked away tears and squinted, ignoring the pain, until he was convinced that there was no land in sight.

He continued up the side of the volcano.

Visiting the crater itself was beyond him; even if he’d brought water and shoes, the approach was simply too steep. On the basis of vegetation patterns in satellite images, his mother had estimated that the volcano had been dormant for at least a few thousand years, but Prabir had decided that lava was circulating just beneath the surface of the crater, waiting to break free. There were probably fire eagles up there, pecking through the thin crust to get at the molten rock. They could be swooping over him even as he climbed; because they glowed as brightly as the sun, they cast no shadows.

He stopped to check for land every five minutes, wishing he’d paid more attention to the appearance of various islands from the ferry; the horizon was such a blur that he was afraid he might be fooled by a bank of clouds, a distant thunderstorm approaching. He’d cut his right foot, but it wasn’t very painful, so he avoided examining it in case the sight of the wound put him off. The soles of his feet were thick enough to make the heat of the rock bearable, but he couldn’t sit to rest, or even steady himself with his palms.

When an ambiguous grey smudge finally appeared between the sky and the sea, Prabir just smiled and closed his eyes. He didn’t have the energy to feel properly triumphant, let alone indulge in any kind of victory display. He swayed for a moment in the surreal heat, acknowledging his stupidity at coming here unprepared, but still defiantly glad that he’d done it. Then he found a sharp-edged rock and scraped a line at the place, as best as he could judge, where the distant island first appeared.

He couldn’t write the altitude; it probably wasn’t all that different from the five hundred metres he’d naively calculated, but he’d have to return with his notepad to read the true figure off the GPS display. Then he could work backwards to determine the effects of refraction.

The bare line wasn’t enough, though. No natural markings on the rock looked similar, but it wasn’t exactly eye-catching; he’d be pushing his luck to find it again. Carving his initials seemed childish, so he scratched the date: 10 December 2012.

He headed back towards the forest in a happy daze, slipping and cutting his hands on the rocks twice, not really caring. He hadn’t merely named the island, he’d begun to measure it. He had as much claim to stay as his parents, now.

The afternoon thunderstorm came from the north, behind him as he descended. Prabir looked up as the first swollen droplets splashed on to the rocks around him, and saw dazzling beads of white light against the clouds. Then the fire eagles rose up out of the storm, leaving the sky a uniform grey.

He tipped his head back and drank the rain, whispering, ‘Teranesia. Teranesia.’

Prabir arrived back in the kampung around three. No one had missed him; when there was no school he went where he pleased, with his watch to call for help if he needed it. He was exhausted, and slightly nauseous; he went straight to his hut and collapsed into his hammock.

His father woke him, standing by the hammock in the grey light of dusk, speaking his name softly. Prabir was startled; he was meant to help prepare the evening meal, but he could already smell it cooking. Why had they let him sleep so late?

His father put a hand on Prabir’s forehead. ‘You’re a bit hot. How are you feeling?’

‘I’m all right, Baba.’ Prabir balled his fists to hide the cuts on his palms; they weren’t serious, but he didn’t want to explain them—or lie about them, if he could help it. His father looked unusually solemn; was he going to announce the decision to pack him off to boarding school, here and now?

His father said, ‘There’s been a coup in Jakarta. Ambon’s been placed under martial law.’ His tone was deliberately neutral, as if he was reporting something of no consequence. ‘I haven’t been able to get through to Tual, so I’m not sure what’s happening there. But we might not be able to bring in supplies for a while, so we’re going to plant a small garden. And we’ll need you to help look after it. Will you do that?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir examined his father’s half-lit face, wondering if he seriously expected Prabir to be satisfied with this minimal account. ‘But what happened in Jakarta?’

His father made a weary, disgusted noise. ‘The Minister for Internal Security has declared himself “Emergency Interim Leader”, with the backing of the army. The President’s under house arrest. Sittings of the MPR have been suspended; there are about a thousand people holding a vigil outside. The security forces have left them alone so far, which is something.’ He stroked his moustache, discomforted, then added reluctantly, ‘But there was a big protest march in Ambon when the news came through. The police tried to stop it. Someone was shot, then the crowd started trashing government buildings. Forty-six people died, according to the World Service.’

Prabir was numb. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘It is. And it will be the last straw for many people. Support for ABRMS can only increase now.’

Prabir struggled to read between the lines. ‘You think they’ll start sinking ferries?’

His father winced. ‘No, no! It’s not that bad. Don’t start thinking like that!’ He put a hand on Prabir’s shoulder and rubbed it soothingly. ‘But people will be nervous.’ He sighed. ‘You know how whenever we want to go out and meet the ferry, we have to pay the captain to make the detour? We’re quite a way off the normal route between Saumlaki and Tual; the money makes up for the extra fuel, and the inconvenience, with a little left over for every member of the crew.’

Prabir nodded, though he’d never actually realised before that they were paying bribes for a favour, rather than purchasing a legitimate service.

‘That could be difficult now. No one’s going to want to make unscheduled stops in the middle of nowhere. But that’s all right; we can get by on our own for as long as we have to. And it’s probably better that we make ourselves inconspicuous. No one’s going to bother us if we stay out of their way.’

Prabir absorbed this in silence.

His father tipped his head towards the door. ‘Come on, you’d better wash up. And don’t tell your mother I upset you.’

‘You didn’t.’ Prabir climbed out of the hammock. ‘But where’s it all headed?’

‘What do you mean?’

Prabir hesitated. ‘Aceh. Kalimantan. Irian Jaya. Here.’ Over the years, as they’d listened to the news together, his father had explained some of the history of the region, and Prabir had begun to pursue the subject for himself on the net. Irian Jaya and the Moluccas had been annexed by Indonesia when the Dutch withdrew in the middle of the last century; both were Christian to some degree, and both had separatist movements determined to follow East Timor into independence. Aceh, at the north-west tip of Sumatra, was a different case altogether—the Muslim separatists there considered the government to be too secular by far—and Kalimantan was different again, with a long, complicated history of migrations and conquests. The government in Jakarta had been talking reassuringly about ‘limited autonomy’ for these outlying provinces, but the Minister for Internal Security had made headlines a few weeks before with a comment about the need to ‘eliminate separatists’. The President had told him to moderate his language, but apparently the army had decided that this was exactly the kind of language they liked.

His father squatted down beside him, and lowered his voice. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’

‘Yes.’ Prabir almost asked, Why are we whispering? But he knew why. They were stuck on the island for the foreseeable future, and he’d had to be told something of the reasons why, but his father had been instructed, above all else, not to risk frightening him.

‘I think the Javanese empire is coming to an end. And like the Dutch, and the Portuguese, and the British, they’re finally going to have to learn to live within their own borders. But it won’t come easily. There’s too much at stake: oil, fisheries, timber. Even if the government was willing to walk away from the more troublesome provinces, there are people making vast amounts of money from concessions that date back to the Suharto era. And that includes a lot of generals.’

‘Do you think there’ll be a war?’ Even as he spoke the word, Prabir felt his stomach turn icy, the way it did when he saw a python on a branch in front of him. Not out of any real fear for his own safety, but out of a horror at all the unseen deaths the creature’s mere existence implied.

His father said cautiously, ‘I think there’ll be changes. And they won’t come easily.’

Suddenly he scooped Prabir into his arms, then lifted him up, right over his head. ‘Oh, you’re too heavy!’ he groaned. ‘You’re going to crush me!’ He wasn’t entirely joking; Prabir could feel his arms trembling from the strain. But he backed out of the hut smoothly, crouching down to fit the two of them through the doorway, then spun around slowly as he carried Prabir laughing across the kampung, under the palm leaves and the wakening stars.

2

Prabir had stolen his father’s life, but it was his father’s fault, at least in part. And since no one had been deprived of the original, it wasn’t really an act of theft. More a matter of cloning.

When Prabir had begged permission to start using their satellite link to the net for more than schoolwork, his father had made him promise never to reveal his true age to even the most innocuous stranger. ‘There are people whose first thought upon meeting a child is to wish for things that should only happen between adults,’ he’d explained ominously. Prabir had decoded this euphemism immediately, though he still had trouble imagining what harm anyone could do to him from a distance of several thousand kilometres. He’d been tempted to retort that if he pretended to be an adult there’d be even more people who’d want to treat him like one, but he’d had a sudden intuition that this was not a subject on which his father would tolerate smart-arsed replies. In any case, he was perfectly happy to conceal his age; he didn’t want to be talked down to.

On his ninth birthday, when access was granted, Prabir joined discussion groups on mathematics, Indonesian history, and Madagascan music. He read or listened to other people’s contributions carefully before making his own, and no one seemed to find his remarks particularly childish. Some people signed their posts with photographs of themselves, some didn’t; his failure to do so gave nothing away. The groups were tightly focused on their chosen topics, and no one would have dreamt of straying into personal territory. The subject of his age, or what he did for a living, simply never came up.

It was only when he began exchanging messages directly with Eleanor, an academic historian living in New York City, that Prabir found himself painted into a corner. After two brief notes on the Majapahit Empire, Eleanor began telling him about her family, her graduate students, her tropical fish. She soon switched from plain text to video, and began sending Prabir miniature home movies and guided tours of Manhattan. This could all have been faked, but not easily, and it probably would have been enough to convince his father that Eleanor was an honest and entirely benign correspondent to whom Prabir could safely confess his true age. But it was already too late. Prabir had responded to Eleanor’s first, written description of her family with an account of his journey from Calcutta to an unnamed island in the Banda Sea—accompanied by his wife and young son—for the purpose of studying butterflies. This exotic story had delighted her, and triggered a barrage of questions. Prabir had felt unable to refuse her answers, and he hadn’t trusted himself to fabricate an entire adult biography, consistent with the things he’d already told her, out of thin air. So he’d kept on cannibalising his father’s life, until it became unthinkable to confess what he’d done either to Eleanor, or to his father.

Rajendra Suresh had been abandoned on the streets of Calcutta when he was six years old. He’d refused to tell Prabir what he remembered of his earlier life, so Prabir declared to Eleanor that his past was veiled by amnesia. ‘I could be the son of a prostitute, or the lost scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families.’

‘Wouldn’t wealthy parents have gone looking for you?’ Eleanor had wondered. Prabir had hinted at revelatory dreams of scheming evil uncles and fake kidnappings gone wrong.

Rajendra had survived as a beggar for almost five years when he first encountered the Indian Rationalists Association. (Outside the family—Prabir had had this drummed into him from an early age—the organisation was never to be referred to by its initials, unless they were swiftly followed by some suitable clarifying remark.) They couldn’t grant him the protection of an orphanage—their resources were stretched too thin—but they’d offered him two free meals a day, and a seat in one of their classrooms. This had been enough to keep him from starvation, and to save him from the clutches of the Mad Albanian, whose servants prowled the city hunting down children and lepers. Prabir had had nightmares about the Mad Albanian—far too disturbing to share with Eleanor—in which a stooped, wrinkled creature pursued him down alleys and into open sewers, trying to wash his feet with a cloth drenched in lamb’s blood.

The IRA’s avowed purpose was to rid the country of its mind-addling legacy of superstition, along with the barriers of caste and gender that the same gibberish helped prop up. Even before they’d begun their social programmes—feeding and educating street children, teaching women business skills and self-defence—the Calcutta Rationalists had taken on the gurus and the God-men, the mystical healers and miracle workers who plagued the city, and exposed them as frauds. At the age of twelve, Rajendra had witnessed one of the movement’s founders, Prabir Ghosh, challenge a local holy man who made his living curing snake bites to save the life of a dog who’d been thrust into a cage with a cobra. In front of an audience of a thousand enthusiastic believers, the holy man had waved his hands over the poor convulsing animal for fifteen minutes, muttering ever more desperate prayers and incantations, before finally confessing that he had no magical powers at all, and that anyone bitten by a snake should seek help from the nearest hospital without delay.

Rajendra was impressed by the man’s honesty, however belated; some charlatans kept bluffing and blustering long after they’d lost all credibility. But the power of the demonstration impressed him even more. It was common knowledge that many snakes were not poisonous, and that a shallow enough bite or a strong enough constitution could enable some people to survive an encounter with a truly venomous species. The holy man’s reputation must have flourished on the basis that he’d ‘cured’ people who would have survived anyway—each success a joyous miracle worth trumpeting loudly, to be retold with embellishments a hundred times, as opposed to each sad and unsurprising death. But this simple trial had cleared away all the confounding issues: the snake was poisonous, the bites were deep and numerous… and the victim had died in front of a thousand witnesses.

In the minute’s silence for the dog that followed, Rajendra had chosen his vocation. Life and death were mysteries to him, but no mystery was impenetrable. The earliest attempts to understand these things, he reasoned, must have foundered against obstacles that seemed insurmountable, leaving behind failed systems of knowledge to ossify or degenerate. That was the source of religion. But someone, somewhere had always carried on the search in good faith; someone had always found the strength to keep on asking: Are the things I believe true? That was the legacy he’d claim. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees and Christians, from the most sincere self-deluding mystics to the most cynical frauds, could never do more than parody the search for truth. He would put the truth above every faith, and hunt down the secrets of life and death.

He would become a biologist.

Four years later, Rajendra was working as a book-keeper in a warehouse, studying in the evenings and helping out at the IRA school on Sundays, when Radha Desai took over the women’s self-defence class. Each week he’d see her arriving, dressed in a plain white karate uniform, chauffeured by a man in his early thirties who was clearly not a servant. It took Rajendra a month to discover that she was neither married nor engaged; the chauffeur was her elder brother, and the only reason she wasn’t driving herself was fear of the car being vandalised.

Prabir had trouble keeping a straight face when he described his parents’ courtship, but he knew it was the kind of thing Eleanor would want to hear about, even if he was short of authentic details and had to improvise. In Prabir’s version, Rajendra would synchronise the chants of his class of beggars reciting their multiplication tables with the shouts of Radha from the courtyard as she counted out push-ups and sit-ups, allowing him to hang on her every word without neglecting his students. And then just before lunch time she’d walk right past his classroom window, and he’d stare at the floor, or feign a migraine and cover his eyes, lest their gazes meet accidentally and his face betray everything to the worldly children.

Prabir’s mother described her parents as ‘upper-middle-class pseudo-socialist hypocrites’. For their daughter to teach karate to Scheduled Caste women and brush shoulders with infamous atheists could be considered progressive and daring. To say that she’d married a book-keeper three years younger than herself who’d fought his way up to live in the slums wouldn’t have had quite the same value as a throw-away line at parties. His father was milder, merely saying that ‘Given their background, what could you expect?’

Radha was studying genetics at the University of Calcutta. They’d meet secretly in parks and cafés early in the morning, before Rajendra started work—long before Radha’s first lecture, but she always had the excuse of karate training. Rajendra was still struggling with high-school biology, but Radha tutored him, and they set their sights on a distant goal: they’d work together as researchers. Somewhere, somehow. Prabir was confident that it had been love at first sight—though neither of them had ever said as much—but it was biology that kept them together, in more than the usual way. Prabir snorted with laughter as he described clandestine meetings on park benches, hands fumbling with the pages of textbooks, recitations of the phases in the life cycle of a cell. But for all that it amused and embarrassed him, and nagged at his conscience now and then, he never really felt like a thief and a traitor as he gave away secrets that weren’t his to give. Though all of this was supposedly for Eleanor’s benefit, imagining his parents’ lives became, for Prabir, something akin to staring into Madhusree’s eyes and trying to make sense of what he saw. In this case, though, he had no memories to guide him, just books and films, instinct and guesswork, and his parents’ own guarded confessions.

Rajendra won a scholarship to attend the university. With so many more opportunities to be together, they became less discreet. Their affair was discovered, and Radha left home, severing all ties with her family. She was still not qualified for an academic job, but she was able to support herself as a lab assistant. Four men ambushed Rajendra on the campus one night and put him in hospital; there was never any proof of who sent them. When he’d recovered, Radha tried to teach him to defend himself, but Rajendra turned out to be her worst student ever, strong but intractably clumsy, possibly as a result of early malnutrition.

Lest Eleanor think less of his father for this—the whole question of exactly whose honour was at stake was somewhat blurred in Prabir’s mind by now—he sent her a picture of Rajendra in an IRA parade, dragging a truck through the centre of Calcutta with a rope attached to his body by two metal hooks through the skin of his back. Not quite single-handed; a friend marched beside him, sharing the load. The visible tension in the ropes and the pyramids of skin raised by the hooks made it look as if both men were on the verge of being flayed alive, but they were smiling. (Smiling over gritted teeth, but anyone pushing a truck through the heat of Calcutta would have clenched their jaws as much from sheer exertion.)

A similar feat was performed as part of certain religious festivals, in which devotees would whip themselves into a frenzy of body piercing, hot-coal walking, and other supposedly miraculous acts of potential self-harm—protected by purification rituals, the blessing of a holy man, and the intensity of their faith. But Rajendra and his fellow human bullock had received no blessing from anyone, and loudly professed their complete lack of faith in everything but the toughness and elasticity of ordinary human skin. Positioned correctly, the hooks drew little blood, and a thick fold of skin could take the load easily, even if the tugging sensation was disturbing to the uninitiated. There was no need for ‘trance states’ or ‘self-hypnosis’—let alone supernatural intervention—to block out the pain or stop the bleeding, and the greatest risk of actual harm could be eliminated by carefully sterilising the hooks. It still required considerable courage to participate in such a gruesome-looking act, but knowing the relevant anatomical facts was as good an antidote to fear as any amount of religious hysteria.

Prabir spared Eleanor the picture of his mother with cheeks and tongue skewered, though like the hooks it was safe and painless enough if you knew how to avoid the larger nerves and blood vessels. The sight of his mother performing this exacting feat made Prabir intensely proud, but it also induced more complicated feelings. You couldn’t tell from the picture, and she hadn’t known it at the time, but on the day of the parade she was already carrying him. It added a certain something to his cosy images of amniotic bliss to see steel spikes embedded in the same sheltering flesh.

Rajendra had learnt of the butterfly as he was completing his doctorate in entomology. A Swedish collector, in the country on a buying expedition, had come to the university seeking help in identifying a mounted specimen he’d bought in the markets; he’d been handed down the academic ranks until he’d reached Rajendra. The butterfly—a female, twenty centimetres across, with black and iridescent-green wings—clearly belonged to some species of swallowtail: the two hind wings were tipped with long, narrow ‘tails’ or ‘streamers’. But there were puzzling quirks in certain anatomical features, less obvious to the casual observer but of great taxonomic significance: the pattern of veins in the wings, and the position of the genital openings for insemination and oviposition. After a morning spent searching the handbooks, Rajendra had been unable to make a positive identification. He told the collector that the specimen was probably a mildly deformed individual, rather than a member of an unknown species. He could think of no better explanation, and he had no time to pursue the matter further.

A few weeks later—having successfully defended his doctoral thesis—Rajendra sought out the dealer who’d sold the specimen to the Swedish collector. After chatting for a while, the dealer produced another, identical butterfly. No fewer than six had arrived the month before, from a regular supplier in Indonesia. ‘Where, exactly, in Indonesia?’ Ambon, provincial capital of the Moluccas. Rajendra negotiated the price down to something affordable and took the second butterfly to the lab.

Dissection revealed more anomalies. Whole organs were displaced from their usual positions, and features conserved across the entire order Lepidoptera were missing, or subtly altered. If all of these changes were due to a barrage of random mutations, it was hard to imagine how the creature could have survived the larval stage, let alone ended up as such a beautifully formed, perfectly functioning adult. You could expose generations of insects to teratogens until half of them grew heads at both ends of their bodies, but nothing short of a few million years of separate evolution could have produced so many perfectly harmless—or, for all Rajendra knew, beneficial—alterations. But how could this one species of swallowtail have been isolated longer than any other butterfly in the world?

Radha carried out genetic tests. Attempts to determine the butterfly’s evolutionary genealogy with standard markers yielded nonsensical results—but old, degraded DNA couldn’t be trusted. Rajendra begged the dealer to try to obtain a living specimen, but nothing doing, that was too much trouble. However, he did reluctantly reveal the name of his supplier in Ambon. Rajendra wrote to the man, three times, to no avail.

By 2006, the couple had scraped together enough money for Rajendra to travel to Ambon in person, and he’d taught himself enough Bahasa Indonesian to speak to the supplier without an interpreter. No, the supplier couldn’t get him live specimens, or even more dead ones. The butterflies had been collected by shipwrecked fishermen, killing time waiting to be rescued. No one visited the island in question intentionally—there was no reason to—and the supplier couldn’t even point it out on a map.

‘Fishermen from where?’

‘Kai Besar.’

Rajendra phoned Radha. ‘Sell all my textbooks and wire me the money.’

With the help of the bemused fishermen, Rajendra collected dozens of pupae from the island; he had no idea what the chrysalis stage would look like, so he grabbed a few examples of every variation he could find. Back in Calcutta, fifteen of the pupae completed metamorphosis, and three yielded the mysterious swallowtail.

Fresh DNA only confirmed the old puzzles, and added new ones. Structural differences in the genes for neotenin and ecdysone, two crucial developmental hormones, suggested that the butterfly’s ancestors had parted company from other insects three hundred million years ago—roughly forty million years before the emergence of Lepidoptera. This conclusion was obvious nonsense, and other genes told a far more believable story, but the discrepancy itself was remarkable.

Radha and Rajendra co-authored a paper describing their discoveries, but every journal to which they submitted it declined publication. Their observations were absurd, and they could offer no explanation for them. Most of their peers reviewing the work for the journals must have decided that they were simply incompetent.

One referee who’d read the paper for Molecular Entomology thought differently, and contacted Radha directly. She worked for Silk Rainbow, a Japanese biotechnology firm whose speciality was using insect larvae to manufacture proteins that couldn’t be mass-produced successfully in bacteria or plant cells. Her employers were intrigued by the butterfly’s genetic quirks; no immediate commercial applications were apparent, but they were prepared to fund some blue-sky research. If Radha was willing to send her DNA samples, and her own tests confirmed the unpublished results, the company would pay for an expedition to study the butterflies in the wild.

Prabir had pieced together most of this story long after the events had taken place—even when he’d been old enough to understand the fuss over the butterfly, he hadn’t been paying much attention—but he could remember the day the message arrived from Tokyo, very clearly. His mother had grabbed his hands and danced around their tiny apartment, chanting, ‘We’re going to the island of butterflies.’

And Prabir had pictured the green-and-black insects by the millions, carpeting the ground in place of grass, nesting in the trees in place of leaves.

A month after the coup, Prabir received a message from Eleanor. He closed the door to his hut and lay on his hammock with his notepad beside him, turning down the volume until he was certain that no one outside could hear. The message was video, as usual, but this time Eleanor hadn’t roamed the city with the camera, or even prowled her own apartment cornering her irritated teenage children. She simply sat in her office and spoke. Prabir felt guilty that he’d never been able to repay her in kind for the tours of New York, but if he’d owned up to having a suitable camera at his disposal it would have been impossible to justify the pure text messages that concealed his true age.

Eleanor said, ‘Prabir, I’m worried about you. I understand that you don’t want to interrupt your work—and I know how difficult and expensive it would be to charter a boat now—but I still hope you’ll reconsider. Will you hear me out?

‘I’ve been looking at the latest State Department report on the crisis.’ A URL came through on the data track, and the software automatically attempted to open it, but the ground station in Sumatra through which Prabir was connected to the wider world was blocking the site. ‘Kopasus troops are being flown in to Ambon; I’m sure you know the kind of things they’ve been doing in Aceh and Irian Jaya. And you’re in a typical hiding place for an ABRMS base; I know you’re there with official permission, but if you’re relying on bureaucrats in Jakarta to dig up the relevant file and instruct the army to stay out of your way… I think that might be a bit too optimistic.’

Eleanor hunched towards the camera unhappily. ‘This isn’t going to blow over in a month or two; even if the President is restored to office, there’s almost nothing the government could do now to put things right. For the past sixty years, people in the provinces have tolerated rule from Jakarta so long as there was some token respect for the customary power structures, and some token spending on things like health and education in return for all the timber, fishing and mineral rights being handed over to the cartels. But after fifteen years of austerity programmes—with every spare rupiah going to subsidise the cost of living in the major cities, to stave off riots—the imbalance has become impossible to ignore. Forget religious and ethnic differences; the provinces have been bled dry, and they’re not going to put up with it any longer.’

There was more in the same vein. Prabir listened to it all with a mixture of unease and annoyance. His parents had decided that the safest thing to do was stay put, attract no attention, and ride out the storm. Teranesia had no strategic importance, so neither side had reason to come here. Who was Eleanor to think she knew better, from twenty thousand kilometres away?

Still, it was clear that she was genuinely worried about him, and Prabir didn’t like to see her upset. He’d send back a confident, up-beat reply that would put her mind at ease… without casting doubt on her conclusions, or questioning her expertise.

Prabir pressed one foot against the wall of the hut and rocked the hammock gently while he composed his reply. He began by mentioning the garden, and how well it was doing, though in truth it was full of starchy native tubers that would probably taste like cardboard. ‘Rajendra is weeding it diligently every day. He’s such a good boy!’ He dictated the words to the notepad and it converted them into text; he’d almost patched the software to add random typing errors, but then he’d decided that even the oldest, cheapest keyboard-driven notepad would have corrected them as they were made.

He added a few vaguely positive words about ‘my work’, but there was nothing new to report. His parents had gathered a wealth of data as they observed generation after generation of the butterfly in the setting that had, presumably, shaped its strange adaptations, but as far as Prabir could tell they were still no closer to an explanation. Nothing about Teranesia was wildly different from other islands in the region, and even eighty kilometres of water—and much less during ice ages—was no real barrier to migration on a time scale of tens of millions of years.

He left any mention of politics to the end, and ran through the words in his head a dozen times before committing a first draft to the notepad. He had to sound like his father, but firmer and clearer, so Eleanor wouldn’t keep questioning his decision to stay. Instead of dismissing her fears that the worst might happen, he’d welcome the possibility with open arms.

‘By the way, I checked out that State Department report you mentioned, and I agree completely with your analysis of the situation. The brutal, corrupt Javanese empire is finally coming to an end! Like the Portuguese, and the Dutch, and the British, they’re going to have to learn to live within their own borders. And if they can’t read the lessons of history, ABRMS is going to have to teach them the hard way.

‘But please don’t worry about me and my family. The army will never even think of coming here. We have all the equipment and supplies we need, so we can stay holed up here for as long as we have to. And it’s not as if Radha and I have nothing to do! We’ll continue with our work, until it’s safe to leave.’

Safe to leave? That wouldn’t inspire much confidence. He slid the cursor back across the screen with his finger. ‘… until victory is accomplished!’

Prabir hesitated. It still sounded a bit like whistling in the dark. He needed to sign off on a positive note, or Eleanor would think it was all bluster.

He closed his eyes and swung the hammock, sighing with frustration.

Then inspiration struck.

‘As ever, your friend Prabir. Long live the Republik Maluku Selatan!’

3

‘Be careful!’ Prabir’s mother shaded her eyes and looked up at him, shifting Madhusree to one side to free her arm. Prabir stepped off the ladder on to the gently sloping roof. There were no gutters, so there was nothing to stop him falling if he started to slide, but the surface of the photovoltaic composite felt reassuringly rough beneath his feet. The modified fibreglass gained efficiency from its lack of polish; the polymer strands could gather more light if they stuck out in random tufts.

Prabir crouched down slowly, legs spaced, balancing carefully. He’d managed to convince his parents that they were both too heavy to walk on the roofs of the huts, and though he’d been arguing entirely for the sake of doing the job himself, it seemed he’d been right: he could feel the panels flexing beneath his feet. They still felt springy, but it probably wouldn’t have taken much more force to buckle them.

He shook the spraycan and began to paint an ‘I’. His parents had argued it through the night before: no elaborate messages proclaiming neutrality, no Indian flag, no sycophantic declarations of loyalty to either side, no praise-be to Allah or Jesus. Just one word on every wall and every roof of every hut: ILMUWAN. Scientist.

The hope remained that no sign was needed. No one had troubled them so far, and since it seemed unlikely that their presence had gone unnoticed, perhaps their purpose was already known. Jets had flown over the island a few times, tiny soundless metallic specks, so small that Prabir could almost believe that they were just flaws in his vision, like the swimming points of distortion he saw when he stared too long into a cloudless sky. Whether they were scanning the island for rebel bases, or merely passing over on their way elsewhere, it was hard to feel threatened when all you could see was a glint of sunlight.

The whole Emergency was becoming like that: distant, hallucinatory, impossible to resolve in any detail. Their access to the net had been cut off since the beginning of February; presumably Jakarta had pulled the plug on the entire province. They could still get BBC shortwave, but the reception was very patchy, and there was only so much you could cram into an hour-long bulletin that covered all of East Asia. It was clear that the regional independence movements were taking advantage of each other’s actions: the separatists in Aceh were now fighting government troops for control of the district capital, and in Irian Jaya the OPM had bombed an army base in Jayapura—an unexpected move from a group whose weapons were usually described as ‘neolithic’. But while dramatic events like that made it into the bulletins, the day-to-day situation in Tual or Ambon never rated a mention. A web site in the Netherlands had been offering individual reports for every inhabited island group in the Moluccas, and its operators had successfully evaded the Indonesian censors with some fancy rerouteing tricks, right up to the moment of the uniform black-out. Prabir’s father had warned him that the site was probably run by expatriate ABRMS members, but Prabir didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in the voice of neutrality. He wanted a flood of propaganda washing over the islands, proclaiming bloodless victory to the rebels. He wanted everyone in Indonesia to talk themselves into believing that they could walk unharmed out of the ashes of the burning empire.

Prabir completed the final ‘N’ and sidled back towards the ladder. The paint would reduce their power supply by about one-fifth, but with the satellite link switched off they’d still have enough to keep everything else running. As he approached the ground, Madhusree started wailing because she wasn’t allowed to climb up and see what he’d written. His mother began fussing over her as if she was in genuine distress, cooing and stroking her brow. Prabir said mischievously, ‘She can do the next one. I don’t mind. Would you like that, Maddy?’ He gave her an aren’t-you-adorable look, and she stared back at him in amazement, her bawling dying down to a half-hearted wheezing sound.

His mother said wearily, ‘Don’t be stupid. You know she can’t.’ Madhusree started screaming. Prabir moved the ladder over to the next hut.

‘I wish you’d grow up! You’re such a baby sometimes!’ Prabir was halfway up the ladder before he realised that these words were directed at him. He continued on, his face burning. He wanted to shout back: It was only a joke. And I look after her better than you do! But there were some buttons he’d learnt not to push. He concentrated on his sign writing, and kept his mouth shut.

When he came down, Madhusree was still whimpering. Prabir said, ‘She can help me do one of the walls.’

His mother nodded, and stooped to put Madhusree down. Madhusree gazed resentfully at Prabir and clung on, sensing a chance to milk the situation further. Prabir gave her a warning look, and after a moment she changed her mind and waddled over to him. He handed her the spraycan, then crouched behind her, guiding her arm while she squeezed the button.

‘You know we almost sent you off to boarding school this year. Would you have liked that?’ His mother spoke without a trace of sarcasm, as if the answer wasn’t obvious.

Prabir didn’t reply. It was no thanks to her that he’d been spared; only the war had saved him from exile.

She said, ‘At least you would have been out of all this.’

Prabir kept his eyes on the job, doing his best to compensate for Madhusree’s enthusiastic random cross-strokes, but he thought back over the conversation he’d heard between his parents in the butterfly hut. It was true that his mother had suggested sending him to her cousin in Toronto… but that had only served to put his father off the whole idea, a response that might not have come as a great surprise to her. So maybe he’d judged her too harshly. Maybe she’d actually been fighting to keep him here.

He said, ‘If I was away I’d be worried about everyone. This way I know you’re all safe.’

‘That’s true.’

Prabir glanced over his shoulder; his mother was smiling, pleased with his answer, but she still looked uncharacteristically fragile. It made him very uneasy to think that she might need reassurance from him. Ever since she’d gone soppy over Madhusree he’d longed for some kind of power over her, some means of extracting revenge. But this was too much. If an illchosen word could truly hurt her, it was like being handed the power to shut off the sun.

The sign on the wall resembled one of Prabir’s attempts to write with his foot, but the word was recognisable. He said, ‘Well done, Maddy. You wrote “Ilmuwan”.’

‘Mwan,’ Madhusree declared confidently.

‘Ilmuwan.’

‘Ilwan.’

‘No, Il-mu-wan.’

Madhusree screwed her face up, ready to cry.

Prabir said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll be back in Calcutta soon, and no one speaks Indonesian there. It’s a language you’ll never use again.’

Prabir woke in the middle of the night, his stomach churning. He staggered half awake to the lavatory hut. He’d suffered bouts of diarrhoea ever since they’d started eating home-grown yams, but it had never woken him before.

He sat in the dark, with the door open slightly. There was a faint electrical hum from the treatment tank beside him. It took him no time to empty his bowels, but then he still ached, almost as badly. He was breathing strangely, much faster than usual, but if he tried to slow down that made the pain worse.

He washed his hands, then walked out into the middle of the kampung. The view through the gaps in the trees was like deep space. In Calcutta the stars had seemed tame, almost artificial—drab enough to pass for a half-hearted attempt to supplement the street lighting. Here there was no mistaking them for anything human.

Back in his hammock the pain refused to fade. He didn’t need to vomit, or shit more, but his stomach was knotted with tension, as if he was about to be found out for some crime. But his conscience was no more troubled than usual. He hadn’t teased Madhusree badly, or upset his mother that much. And he’d made up for it to both of them, hadn’t he?

When they’d first arrived on the island, and the unfamiliar sounds had woken him nightly, Prabir had cried out until his father came and rocked him back to sleep. This had gone on for weeks, though for the last few nights he’d been doing it out of habit, not fear. His father had never shouted at him, never complained. In the end, just the knowledge that his father would come if he needed him was enough; Prabir didn’t have to keep testing him in order to feel safe.

But he was too old to cry out for Baba now. He’d have to find another way to calm himself.

Prabir slid off his hammock and walked over to the screen door. The butterfly hut was directly opposite, grey and indistinct in the shadows. He knew the door to the hut would be bolted, to make sure no animals got in, but it wouldn’t be locked. Nothing ever was.

Cool sweat was gathering behind his knees. He moistened his fingers and sniffed them; he was so used to the smell of the mosquito repellent that he could barely detect it any more. But he doubted that anyone in the family found it so pungent that a few drops could incriminate him.

He opened the screen door just enough to slip through, then headed across the kampung, bare feet silent on the well-trodden ground. He was determined to act before he changed his mind. When he reached the butterfly hut, he didn’t hesitate: he slid the bolt open in one smooth motion. But when he began gently pushing the door, the whole fibreglass panel squeaked alarmingly, picking up the vibrations as its bottom edge scraped across the floor. He knew at once how to remedy this—the door to the kitchen made the same kind of noise—but he remained frozen for several heartbeats, listening for a sound from his parents’ hut. Then he steeled himself and flung the door open; the panel flexed enough to gain the necessary clearance, and there was nothing but the sigh of moving air.

Prabir had seen most of the inside of the hut through the windows, by daylight, but he’d never had reason to commit the layout to memory. He stood in the doorway, waiting to see how well his eyes would adapt. Anywhere else it would have barely mattered; he could have marched in blindfolded. ‘This is my island,’ he whispered. ‘You had no right to keep me out.’ Even as he said the words, he knew they were dishonest—he’d never actually resented the fact that the butterfly hut was out of bounds—but having stumbled on the lame excuse, he clung to it.

A patch of floor a metre or so ahead of him was grey with starlight, preceded by what he guessed to be his own shadow, unrecognisably faint and diffuse. The darkness beyond remained impenetrable. Switching on the light would be madness; there were no blinds or shutters for the windows, the whole kampung would be lit up. He might as well wave a torch in his father’s face.

He stepped into the hut. Groping around with outstretched arms would have been a recipe for sending glassware flying; he advanced slowly with one hand in front of him, just above waist height, close to his body. He inched forward for what seemed like minutes without touching anything, then his fingers struck Formica-coated particle board. It was the stuff of all their furniture: his own desk, the table they ate from. Unless he’d veered wildly off course, this was the main bench that ran along the length of the hut, not quite bisecting it. He glanced over his shoulder; he appeared to have walked straight in. The grey afterimage of the doorway took forever to fade, and when it did he could still see nothing ahead of him. He turned to the left and walked beside the bench, his right hand brushing the side of the benchtop, the left on guard for obstacles.

After sidestepping a stool and a chair on castors, Prabir came to a patch of starlight falling on the bench from one of the windows. He moved his right hand tentatively into the faint illumination, complicating the already baffling shadows and hints of surfaces. He touched cool metal, slightly rough and curved. A microscope. He could smell the grease on the focusing rack-and-pinion; it was a distinctive odour, summoning memories. His father propping him up on a stool so he could peer into a microscope, back in Calcutta. Showing him the scales on the butterfly’s wings, glinting like tiny emerald prisms. Prabir’s stomach tightened until he could taste acid, but that only strengthened his resolve. The worse he felt about doing this, the more necessary it seemed.

He pictured the daylight view through the window. He’d seen his father hunched over the microscope; he knew where he was now, and where he needed to go. Opening a cage full of adults in the dark would be asking for trouble; he could hardly expect to find their bodies by touch without waking them, and even if none escaped, their wings were easily damaged. The larvae were covered with sharp bristles and spurted a malodorous brown irritant. He could probably have overcome his reluctance to touch them—they were only caterpillars, after all; it wouldn’t be like thrusting his hand into a cage full of scorpions—but he’d seen the kind of stains the irritant left on his father’s skin. He’d be hard pressed to explain an equally bad case as the product of a chance encounter.

A couple of metres further along the bench, he found what he hoped was the right cage. He flicked the taut mesh a few times, and listened for a response. No nervous fluttering, no angry hiss. He put his face to the mesh and inhaled; behind the metallic scent there was sap and leaves. Prabir had seen the pupae hanging by narrow threads from the branches in the cage, lumpy orange-black-and-green objects, each supported by a coarse silk net—what his father called a ‘girdle’—like small, misshapen, fungus-rotted melons in individual string bags. The larvae spun no proper cocoon to hide their metamorphosis; they did it naked, and it was not a pretty sight. But however ugly their jumble of dissolving parts, they wouldn’t be half as unpleasant to handle as they were before the process began.

Prabir opened the cage and reached in.

He pulled his hand back. Idiot. He couldn’t trust a vague memory of how the cage had once looked to guide him. He had to start near the bottom and work his way up, lest he sever one of the supporting threads. And he needed sweat on his fingers now, so the first touch would count.

His arms and sides were dripping from the night’s humidity; he soaked his right hand and placed it, palm up, on the bottom of the cage. Then he raised his arm slowly. The empty space above the floor of the cage seemed to go on forever; he could feel his palm drying while the rest of his skin shed nervous rivulets. He tried to remember what his father had told him about the breeding cycle. Maybe there were no pupae in the cage at all.

When his hand was shoulder-high, his wrist finally touched something.

It was cool and springy. One of the branches.

He withdrew his arm. It was trembling.

One more time, he decided. If he failed again, he’d walk away.

As he stood beside the cage, trying to remember exactly where he’d placed his hand the first time, Prabir became aware of a faint, unfamiliar drone coming from somewhere outside the hut. He was puzzled; he knew the sound of every machine in the kampung, whether they were working smoothly, labouring against an overload, or seizing up completely. If there were any mysteries left, they’d be in here with him: some automated piece of lab equipment or refrigeration pump, too quiet to hear from the outside. But the source of this sound was not in the hut, he was sure of that.

It was a jet. Flying lower than usual. Or maybe not; maybe the night air changed the acoustics. The sound was so faint it would never have woken him. He couldn’t be sure that this was anything new.

He stood in the dark, listening to the aircraft approaching. If it was flying lower, what did that mean? If he ran and woke his parents, no one would demand to know what he’d been doing. He’d been woken by stomach pains, that was all he’d need to say.

The drone grew louder, then suddenly dropped in pitch. Prabir remained paralysed, picturing bombs tumbling through the air, falling towards their target as the plane accelerated away. But as the retreating engines faded, nothing followed. Only frog calls from the jungle.

Prabir almost laughed with relief, but the sound stuck in his throat. Maybe the signs had protected them, the paint visible against the warmth of the roof panels, black-on-green in the false colours of an infrared display. But if the plane’s destination had been elsewhere all along—if Teranesia had meant nothing to the pilot but a fleeting piece of scenery beneath the flight path—then the bombs could still fall tonight. On some other island.

Prabir stared into the darkness, a hollow ache in his chest. He put his hand into the cage again, and continued the search. This time he was rewarded: his fingertips brushed against the side of a chrysalis. The impact set it swinging, but the silk thread holding it was resilient. He waited for the oscillations to die down, then cupped it gently in the palm of his hand. The surface was cool and smooth, like shellac.

He wasn’t sure now how much sweat he’d had on his palm, and he didn’t want to try to move his left hand into the cage as well—that would mean twisting his body, and worrying about new obstacles. He stood perfectly still for a while, fixing the position of the chrysalis in his mind. Then he withdrew his hand, coated it thoroughly, and wiped a second, surer dose of poison across the surface of the sleeping insect.

He closed the cage and walked out of the hut the way he’d come. Belatedly, he crouched to check for footprints, but there was enough grass along the route he’d taken to keep him from making any impression in the soil, and to keep his feet from being dusty enough to have left a visible trail indoors.

As he lay down in his hammock, he felt physically drained, more exhausted than when he’d half climbed the volcano. But everything he’d done in the butterfly hut already felt less real than a dream. Not having seen the crime would make it easier to keep the guilt from his face when he heard the news. By the time the poisoned butterfly failed to emerge—or unfurled its wings and died in the sunlight—no memory would remain of the faint mental image of his hand inside the cage.

Prabir was walking back from the beach, Madhusree in his arms, when he heard a loud, dull thud from the direction of the kampung. It could almost have been a tree toppling, but there’d been no screech of tearing wood, no rustle of branches.

Madhusree gave him a puzzled look, but didn’t press him for an explanation; she was perfectly capable of inventing one herself. They’d all get to hear it at dinner: a new creature on the island, probably, blundering around in search of children to eat.

Prabir heard his mother cry out, her voice rising in horror. ‘Rajendra!’ Madhusree looked startled, then her mouth curled. Prabir put her down on the path. ‘Stay here.’ He began running towards the kampung. Madhusree screamed wordlessly after him; he turned and saw her flapping her arms in distress. He stopped and gazed back at her, torn. What if there was danger here, too? If soldiers had parachuted from the plane, they could be anywhere.

He ran back to her and lifted her up. She clawed at his cheeks and pummelled his neck, tears and mucus streaming down her face. Prabir ignored the assault and started jogging down the path again, indifferent to her weight and her struggling. It was like running in a dream; the jungle flowed past him, but it took no will, no effort to move. The dream itself propelled him forward.

His mother was standing alone in the middle of the kampung, distraught, looking around as if searching for something. When she spotted Prabir she started banging her fist on her forehead. She screamed at him angrily, ‘Take her away! She mustn’t see!’

Prabir stopped at the edge of the kampung, confused, fighting back tears. Where was his father? ‘What happened? Ma?’

His mother stared at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Where’s the ladder?’ she wailed. ‘What did you do with the ladder?’

Prabir couldn’t remember. He’d meant to put it in the storage hut when they’d finished painting the roofs, but that would have been the first place she’d checked.

He stepped forward uncertainly. ‘I’ll help you look.’

His mother waved him away miserably, then started walking in circles around the middle of the kampung.

Madhusree was scarlet-faced, screaming and trying to slither out of his grip. Prabir ran over to his parents’ hut and placed her in her cot. She was tall enough now to climb over the sides if she wanted to, but smart enough to realise that the fall would do her serious harm. Prabir knelt down and pressed his face against the bars. ‘I’ll be back soon, I promise. With Ma. OK?’ He didn’t wait for an answer.

He found the ladder in the undergrowth behind the butterfly hut, the last place he’d used it. He picked it up one-handed and started running towards his mother; it wasn’t all that heavy, but it swayed sideways as he moved, throwing him off balance.

He called out nervously, ‘Where should I take it? Where’s Baba?’

She stared at him blankly for several seconds, then put her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes. Prabir stood watching her, his skin growing icy.

When she opened her eyes she seemed calmer.

She said softly, ‘Baba’s been hurt. I’m going to need your help. But you have to do exactly what I tell you.’

Prabir said, ‘I will.’

‘Wait there.’ She vanished into the storage hut, then emerged with two empty wooden packing crates. ‘Listen to me carefully. I want you to follow five metres behind me. Walk where I walk, nowhere else. Bring the ladder, but don’t let it touch the ground.’

As she spoke, Prabir heard doubt rising in her voice, as if she was beginning to think this was too much to ask of him. He said firmly, ‘Follow five metres behind you. Walk where you’ve walked. Don’t let the ladder touch the ground.’

She smiled reluctantly. ‘OK. I know you’re not stupid, I know you’ll be careful. Can you be brave for me, too?’ She searched his face, and Prabir felt his chest tightening.

‘Yes.’

His father was lying in a shallow crater in the middle of the garden behind the storage hut. His legs were mangled, almost shredded. Dark blood was spurting from his thighs, welling up through a layer of sand that must have rained down on top of him from the blast. His eyes were closed, his face set against the pain. Prabir was too shocked for tears, and when he felt a plaintive cry of ‘Baba!’ rising in his throat, he silenced it.

His mother spoke almost in a whisper. ‘I’m back, love. It won’t be much longer.’ His father showed no sign of having heard her.

She turned to Prabir. ‘There could be more mines buried in the garden. So we’ll put the ladder between the crates, like a bridge. Then I’ll walk across to Baba and bring him back. Do you understand?’

Prabir said, ‘I can do it. I’m lighter.’ The ladder was aluminium, and he was afraid that it might not take the weight of two adults.

His mother shook her head impatiently. ‘You couldn’t lift him, darling. You know that. Just help me get the ladder in position.’

She placed one of the crates squarely on the ground at the edge of the garden, at the point nearest his father. Then she walked a couple of metres away, and motioned to Prabir to approach the crate. When he was standing beside it, he swung the ladder towards her, and she took hold of the end. She was still carrying the second crate in her left hand, gripping it by one exposed side.

As his mother walked around the edge of the garden, Prabir fed her more of the ladder, until he was holding it by the opposite end. She smiled at him encouragingly, but he felt his heart pounding with fear for her. Staying out of the garden was no guarantee of safety. The rectangle of cleared soil must have looked like an ideal target from the air—and maybe it was easier for a self-laying mine to penetrate the ground and cover its tracks where there was no vegetation—but there could still be others, buried anywhere at all.

As his mother approached the far corner, they both had to stretch their arms to keep their hold on the ladder, and it was soon clear that even this wouldn’t be enough. She seemed to be about to cut across the garden, but Prabir shouted out to her, ‘No! I can move closer to you!’ He gestured towards the corner nearest to him, where she’d already proved the ground safe. ‘I’ll stand over there. Then once you’ve turned the corner I can walk back towards the crate, keeping step with you.’

His mother shook her head angrily, but she was cursing herself for not thinking clearly. ‘You’re right. We’ll do it that way.’

Once they were holding the ladder across the full width of the garden, carrying it straight towards his father, Prabir began to feel hopeful. Just a few more steps and his mother would have no untried ground left to walk. He kept his eyes averted from his father’s legs, but a cool voice in his head was already daring to counsel optimism. People had survived these kinds of injuries, in remote villages in Cambodia and Afghanistan. His mother had studied human anatomy and performed surgery on experimental animals; that had to be of some use.

Prabir waited for her to put the second crate on the ground, then they lowered the ladder into place together. He didn’t doubt that the crates would take the load; there were a dozen of them scattered around the kampung, and he’d seen his father standing on them to reach things. If the ladder didn’t buckle, the one remaining problem was the far end sliding off the crate.

His mother followed his gaze.

She said, ‘You watch that, and tell me if it moves. If I shift it one way by accident, I can always shift it back.’

She took off her shoes and climbed on to the crate. The ladder’s steps were sloped so as to be horizontal when the ladder was a few degrees off vertical; the sides they presented now were curved metal, with none of the non-slip rubber that covered the tops. But as Prabir looked on, his mother found a way to balance with her feet resting on both the supporting rails and the sides of the steps. Still above the crate, she screwed her eyes shut and began swaying slightly, her arms partly raised at her sides—rehearsing the moves that would restore her equilibrium without compromising her footing, so she wouldn’t have to guess them when she was halfway across. Prabir’s throat tightened, his fear for her giving way to love and admiration. If there was anyone in the world who could do this, it was her.

She opened her eyes and started walking along the ladder.

Prabir kept his hands on his end of the ladder, pushing it down firmly against the top of the crate, and fixed his gaze on the other, unattended crate. He could feel a slight vibration with each step his mother took, but the ladder wasn’t trying to jerk sideways out of his grip. He risked a quick glance at his mother’s face; she was staring sightlessly over his head. He looked down at the opposite crate again. A wooden plank might have bowed enough to push the crates apart, its curvature redirecting the load, but the ladder was far too rigid for that. It would take the weight of both of them, easily; he was sure of that now.

His mother paused. Prabir watched her feet as she took one more step forward on her left, turning her body partly sideways so she could face his father. She dropped slowly to a crouch, then reached down towards him. The ladder was about half a metre from the ground; she could just touch his face with her fingertips.

‘Rajendra?’

He moved his head slightly in acknowledgement.

‘I’m too high to lift you from here. You’re going to have to sit up.’

There was no response. Prabir pictured his father rising from the sand into her arms, like a water man rising from the waves. But nothing happened.

‘Rajendra?’

Suddenly his father emitted a sobbing noise, and reached up with one hand and touched her forearm. She clasped his hand. ‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right.’

She turned to Prabir. ‘I’m going to try sitting down, so I can get Baba on to the ladder. But then I might not be able to stand up with him, to carry him. If I leave him on the ladder and walk back to my end, do you think the two of us could carry the ladder to the side of the garden with Baba on it—like a stretcher?’

Prabir replied instantly, ‘Yes. We can do it.’

His mother looked away, angry for a moment. She said, ‘I want you to think about it. Don’t just tell me what you’d like to be true.’

Chastened, Prabir obeyed her. Half his father’s weight. More than twice as much as Madhusree’s. He believed he was strong enough. But if he was fooling himself, and he dropped the ladder…

He said, ‘I’m not sure how far I could carry him without resting. But I could slide the crate along the ground with me—kick it along with one foot. Then if I had to stop, I could rest the ladder on it.’

His mother considered this. ‘All right. That’s what we’ll do.’ She shot him a half-smile, shorthand for all the reassuring words that would have taken too long to speak.

She gripped the ladder with her hands on either side, raised herself slightly with her arms, then brought her legs forward and lowered herself until she was sitting. She was still facing at an angle to the ladder; she curled her right leg up behind her and hooked her foot over one of the steps. Prabir pushed down nervously on the opposite rail. He had no way of sensing any change in the balance of forces as his mother shifted her weight, but he had a sickening feeling that the ladder might suddenly flip over sideways if he wasn’t ready to prevent it.

She reached down and took hold of his father by the chest, one hand beneath each armpit, her own arms fully extended. Prabir had imagined her wrapping his father in a bear-hug and hefting him up in one smooth motion—he’d seen her handle ninety-kilogram gas cylinders that way, in her lab in Calcutta—but it was clear now that she could stretch no closer. She took a few deep breaths, then attempted to lift him.

The geometry could not have been more awkward; that she could hold him at all was miracle enough, but everything she’d had to do with her body in order to reach him worked to undermine her strength. As Prabir watched, the top of the foot that she’d hooked over the ladder turned pale, then darkened with violet bruises. A resonant sound started up in her throat, an almost musical droning, as if she’d caught herself on the verge of an involuntary cry of pain and decided to make this sound instead, full of conscious anger and determination. Prabir had only heard her do this once before: in the hospital in Darwin, during labour.

His father lifted his head slightly, then managed to raise his shoulders a few centimetres off the ground by curving his spine. His mother took advantage of this immediately, bending her arms, moving her shoulders back, bracing herself more efficiently. With her arms stretched as far as they’d go, her whole upper body had been dead weight, but now the muscles in her back and arms could come into play. Prabir watched in joy and amazement as she pulled his father up, her arms closing around his back, until he was sitting.

She rested for a moment, catching her breath, repositioning her damaged foot. Prabir realised that his hands were shaking; he fought to steady them, to prepare himself for the task of stretcher-bearer.

Rajendra’s eyes were still closed, but he was smiling, his arms around Radha’s waist. She tightened her embrace, clasped her hands together behind him, and lifted him off the ground.

A wall of air knocked Prabir backwards on to the grass, then a soft rain of sand descended on him. He opened his mouth and tried to speak through the grit, but his ears were ringing and he couldn’t tell if any sound was emerging.

As he brushed his face clean with his arm, something beneath the sand scratched his forearm, then his face began to throb with pain. When he tried to open his eyes, it felt as if the point of a knife was being held against the lids.

He cried out, ‘Baba! Baba! Baba!’

He could feel the air resonating in his throat; he knew he was shouting at the top of his lungs. His father would hear him; that was all that mattered. His father would hear him, and come.

4

‘We’re going on a trip, Maddy! South, south, south! To the Tanimbar Islands!’ Prabir undressed her as he spoke, dropping her soiled clothes on the mattress of the cot. He didn’t think his mother would mind if he left them there unwashed; the whole point of the exercise was deciding what was important and what wasn’t. That was why he hadn’t wasted time burying the ‘bodies’ his parents had left in the garden; if something ever really did happen to them, they’d want him to think of Madhusree, rather than fussing over their meaningless remains.

He hoped his appearance wasn’t too alarming. He’d washed away all the dirt, but he’d given up trying to dig the metal from his skin, and simply drenched his face and chest with Betadine in the hope of warding off infection. Naturally, his parents had made sure that none of the shrapnel would penetrate too deeply; they would have calculated the size and placement of the charge so that no fragment would carry enough energy to harm him.

Madhusree had apparently cried herself dry in his absence. When she fingered a wound on Prabir’s face and he smacked her hand sharply, all she could manage was a whimpering sound, and even that soon faded. She remained sulky and irritable, but the idea of a trip seemed to intrigue her.

He carried her to the lavatory hut, wiped her backside, then cleaned her a bit more with moistened toilet paper.

‘Where’s Ma?’ she demanded.

‘I told you. South. On the Tanimbar Islands. She’s waiting for us there with Baba.’

Madhusree regarded him sceptically. ‘She didn’t.’

‘Didn’t what? Didn’t leave the island? Where is she then, smart-arse?’

Madhusree opened her mouth to reply, but she couldn’t hear her mother’s voice, so she had no ready answer.

Prabir said soothingly, ‘I know it was rough of them to sneak off without saying goodbye to you, but they had to do it that way. They wanted to see if I could look after you. If I do a good job, they’ll let me stay. If I don’t, I’ll have to go to boarding school. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?’

Madhusree shook her head unhappily, but Prabir suspected that this had more to do with the absence of Ma than the threat of him being sent away. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be for long. I worked out what they wanted, straight away. They want us to leave Teranesia.’

He took her back to his parents’ hut, put clean pants on her, then started packing the bag they used to carry her things when they went on the ferry. It was hard to decide what was essential. Warm clothes, obviously, in case they were still at sea when night fell, but what about nappies, lotions and powder? She’d been using the toilet for months now, climbing up on the steps his father had made for her, but how would she cope on the boat? He decided to bring her old potty along; nappies were too bulky, but he couldn’t expect her to piss over the side.

In the kitchen, he filled all six of her old baby bottles with fruit juice. She normally drank from a cup now, but when she was tired or moody his mother sometimes offered her a bottle, and it would make things easier on the boat. He grabbed three packs of the biscuits she ate, and a tin of powdered milk, then hesitated over her canned food. If they didn’t find their parents on the first night, they’d be camping out on land, so it wasn’t absurd to think about heating things in saucepans. He’d take the tiny methylated spirits cooker that they kept in case of power failure.

Madhusree followed him from hut to hut as he gathered everything they’d need into a pile at the edge of the kampung. It made him nervous to see her running about freely, but it would have slowed him down too much to carry her everywhere, and after visiting the kitchen and peering through the doorway of the butterfly hut, she could see for herself that Ma and Baba were no longer in the kampung. He resisted the urge to warn her sternly to keep away from the garden; if he didn’t mention it, she wouldn’t even think of going there.

When he dragged the motorboat out of the storage hut, Madhusree seemed finally to accept that they were leaving.

‘Ambon!’ she shouted.

‘No, not Ambon. The ferry’s not running. We’re going south, all by ourselves.’

The boat and its outboard motor were both made of ultralight carbon-fibre composites. Normally his father carried the motor in his arms, to and from the beach, while his mother carried the hull over her head. Prabir had planned to push the hull all the way to the beach, fully loaded, but his first exploratory shove was enough to convince him that he’d never succeed. He’d have to make at least four trips: the hull, the motor, fuel and water, then food, clothing and everything else.

‘Shit!’ He’d almost forgotten. He went back into the storage hut and pulled down the two smaller life jackets from their hooks on the wall. He stared uncomprehendingly at the two larger ones remaining, then he turned and walked out.

He couldn’t put Madhusree back in her cot; even if she didn’t start screaming, he wasn’t willing to leave her alone again. So he carried the hull to the beach with Madhusree following him on foot. The hull was incredibly light, but since his arms couldn’t quite stretch between the sides of the upturned boat at its centre of gravity, he either had to hold it nearer to the bow, where the sides were closer together—in which case he had to fight the unbalanced weight—or walk with his arms straight up and his palms supporting the floor of the boat, which was almost as awkward and tiring. He ended up alternating between the two methods, but he still had to stop and rest after ever-shorter stretches. This did have one advantage: Madhusree had no trouble keeping up with him.

He rested on the beach for a few minutes, then carried Madhusree back to the kampung and started out with the motor. A third of the way to the beach she sat down on the path and refused to walk any further. Prabir knelt down and coaxed her into putting her arms around his neck and clinging to his back with her legs. He usually hooked his arms under her legs when he carried her this way, reinforcing her grip and taking some of her weight, but the motor made that impossible. As her legs grew tired, she ended up virtually hanging on to him by her arms alone, and though Prabir leaned forward to try to shift some of her weight on to his back, by the time they reached the beach she was crying from exhaustion.

For a moment he was tempted to leave her on the beach—what harm could come to her, sleeping beneath a palm tree?—but then he wrapped her in his arms and trudged back to the kampung. He managed to hang the three bags of clothes and food from his neck and shoulders, leaving his arms free.

Down to the beach, back to the kampung. Two cans of fuel and two cans of water remained—each weighing about ten kilograms. He’d been fooling himself: even without Madhusree, he’d never have been able to move them all in one trip. Cradling her in his right arm, holding her against his side the way his mother did, he carried the cans to the beach one by one.

By the time he dropped the last can of fuel on to the sand beside the boat, it was almost three o’clock. Prabir dug his notepad out of one of the bags: it was fully charged, which meant eight hours’ normal operation, but the battery drained three times faster when the screen had to be electronically illuminated. Still, even if they were at sea in darkness he wouldn’t need the map constantly visible.

Madhusree had grown resentful; she’d never been dragged back and forth like this for the sake of a boat trip before. She sat in the shade at the edge of the beach, calling for Ma every minute or two. Prabir replied soothingly, but equally mechanically, ‘We’re going to Ma.’

The notepad’s GPS software included a respectable world map, but Teranesia wasn’t on it; as far as the software was concerned they were already in the middle of the Banda Sea. The Tanimbar Islands were shown, but the smaller islands in the group were just blobs of two or three pixels, and the coastlines of the larger ones appeared crudely rendered, as if they’d been extracted automatically from a satellite image or a cheap printed map. With access to the net Prabir could have substituted the official navigation chart for the region, complete with water depths and information on currents; he’d viewed it a dozen times, but never thought to keep a copy in his notepad. But there was no use dwelling on that. At least Jakarta hadn’t been able to block the GPS signals; if he’d been left with dead reckoning, the sun and the stars, he would have been afraid to leave the island at all.

He fitted the motor to the hull, filled the fuel tank, then dragged the empty boat into the shallows. An image came to him suddenly, from a video his parents had watched back in Calcutta; he’d been asleep in his mother’s arms for most of it, but he’d woken near the end. A man on a deserted beach had tried to drag a wooden boat into the ocean, to make his escape from some war or revolution. But the boat had been too large, too heavy, and no matter how he strove it had remained firmly beached. Prabir shuddered at the memory, but at least he knew they wouldn’t share that fate. Whatever else happened, they wouldn’t be stranded.

He loaded everything into the boat. It sank dismayingly low in the water, but his parents’ combined weight must have been more than the weight of these provisions, and the boat had carried the whole family safely out to the ferry dozens of times. He fetched Madhusree; she didn’t struggle or complain as he fitted her life jacket, merely glaring at him suspiciously.

Prabir put her in the boat, then climbed in himself and stood looking back across the beach. He wouldn’t be gone long; if he completed the test his parents would have no reason to send him away, and everything would be back to normal within a couple of days. The poisoned chrysalis would be forgiven; it was only one butterfly out of all the thousands on the island. Anything could be forgiven if he proved he was capable of getting Madhusree to safety.

He started the motor. The boat rose up in the water and sped away from the beach, like an amphibious creature suddenly revived from a dormant state. Having the tiller firmly in his hand gave Prabir no immediate sense of control; he’d never been allowed to steer the boat. Nervously, he shifted the tiller back and forth a few degrees. The boat responded smoothly enough, turning more readily than he’d anticipated. This was encouraging, though it made his balance seem all the more precarious; if he stumbled and made the boat swerve sharply, the acceleration might knock him right off his feet.

He had to remain standing to watch for the gap in the reef. Prabir was used to recognising the gap as they passed through it, when safe passage was a fait accompli. The breaking waves approached with alarming speed; he hunted for a stretch of darker water, leading to a region where the waves raised less foam. He spotted one candidate, but he had no clear memories of the approach to confirm his choice, and the signs were far from convincing.

Madhusree looked up at him, disoriented, rubbing her eyes. ‘Baba should!’ she exclaimed accusingly. When Prabir ignored her she started crying. Tears flooded down her face, but Prabir was unmoved; she could make the slightest fit of pique sound like gut-wrenching anguish. He’d done it himself, countless times. He could remember that much very clearly.

‘Shut up, Maddy,’ he suggested mildly. ‘You’re not fooling anyone.’ She redoubled her efforts, and gave herself hiccups. Now Prabir felt sorry for her; hiccups were awful.

They were approaching the reef. The channel he’d picked looked more promising than ever, but now that he had a target to aim for, steering was proving to be harder than he’d realised. The boat was headed too far to the left; he struggled to picture their motion from above, and the turning arc that would neatly convert their present course into the one they needed.

He glanced down at his notepad on the floor of the boat. He hadn’t thought he’d have any use for it until they hit the open sea; the software knew nothing of the reef, and at the present magnification the record of their entire journey so far was just a speck. But it was the map that was crude, not the navigation system. The commercial GPS that had superseded the US military version gave unencrypted signals that resolved the receiver’s position to the nearest centimetre.

Prabir shouted, ‘Notepad: zoom in. More… more… stop!’ The speck became a crooked line against a blank background; all landmarks had vanished from the screen, but the magnified trail of the boat itself gave him his bearings. He glanced back towards the beach, then compared how far they’d come with the distance remaining to the reef. The image at his feet made perfect sense now; he could place the channel on it in his mind’s eye.

He leant gently on the tiller, and observed the effect: in reality, and on the map. The curve was still too shallow; he nudged the tiller, watching the growing arc and visualising its extension.

The boat shot through the reef without a bump, without a scratch. Prabir was overcome with pride and happiness. He could do this, it wasn’t beyond him. He’d be reunited with his parents soon—and whether it was midnight or dawn when he finally tracked them down, it would be long before they’d expected him. They’d teasingly beg his forgiveness for ever doubting him, then they’d take him in their arms and spin him around, lifting him up towards the sky.

His elation lasted until sunset.

By daylight, everything worked as planned. The sea felt far rougher than it did from the ferry—and in bad weather it might have been suicidal to attempt the crossing in such a small vessel—but it was still musim teduh, the calm season, and for all its relentless lurching the boat didn’t take much water. Setting the right course was a matter of trial and error—quite apart from the current, the waves themselves seemed to deflect the boat as it cut across them—but by the time Teranesia’s volcanic peak had shrunk to insignificance the GPS software showed that they were making steady progress south-south-east, at about ten kilometres an hour.

Once she’d recovered from the shock of finding herself at sea—with no Ma, no Baba, no ferry full of strangers, and no real conception of where they were headed—Madhusree grew positively entranced by the experience. The expression of delight on her face reminded Prabir of the way he felt in the middle of a wonderfully surreal dream. He was nauseous himself, but her fearlessness shamed him into stoicism. Madhusree sucked her bottles of fruit juice, ate a whole packet of biscuits, and used her potty without complaint. Prabir had no appetite, but he drank plenty of water, and urinated overboard to Madhusree’s scandalised laughter.

As darkness fell, the wind rose and the waves grew higher. Madhusree vomited as Prabir was dressing her against the chill, and from that moment her mood worsened steadily. His shallow wounds were aching and itching; he wanted the metal out, whether it was harming him or not.

When Madhusree fell fitfully asleep, Prabir felt a strong urge to hold her. He picked her up and wrapped her in a blanket, but there seemed to be no way to keep his hand on the tiller that wouldn’t make them both uncomfortable, so he laid her down again gently. He watched her for a while, half wishing she’d wake and keep him company. But she needed to sleep—and a few hours alone was a small price to pay to save himself from years of exile.

The blackness around the boat was impenetrable, untouched by the dazzling hemisphere of stars, but Prabir felt no sense of physical danger lurking in the gloom. The chance of an encounter with a pirate ship or any vessel involved in the war seemed slender. He’d glimpsed a couple of small sharks by daylight, but as far as he could tell they’d been passing by, uninterested in pursuit. And though he knew that the boat might yet meet a wave large enough to overturn it, there was no point worrying about that.

It was the dark water itself, stretching to the horizon—and for all he knew as far beneath him—that chilled him with its emptiness. There was nothing to recognise, nothing to remember. The monotony of the view and the chugging of the motor could never have made him drowsy; his whole body had forsworn the possibility of sleep. But even wakefulness here felt blank and senseless, robbed of everything that made it worthwhile.

He glanced down at Madhusree, and hoped she was dreaming. Strange, complicated dreams.

The moon rose, swollen and yellow, not quite half full. With nothing else in sight it was hard not to stare at it, though its glare made his eyes water. The sea around the boat became visible for forty or fifty metres, but it looked as unreal as the jungle looked at the edge of the light from the kampung.

Prabir held his notepad up to the moonlight. The map showed them less than ten kilometres from their destination. Instead of heading straight for the northernmost island, he decided to aim slightly to the west of it. If the map turned out to be perfect he’d still spot the land, and then he could turn towards it. But he couldn’t trust the map to be accurate down to the last kilometre, so it seemed safer to risk missing their target by veering too far west; they’d still hit the main island of the group, Yamdena, in another fifty kilometres. Going too far east would send them down through the Arafura Sea, towards the northern coast of Australia, six hundred kilometres away. The error would eventually become obvious, but he didn’t have the fuel for much backtracking.

When the cliffs came into view, Prabir wondered if he was hallucinating, conjuring up the sight out of sheer need. But the land was real; the journey was almost over. He checked the notepad: the software showed the boat north-west of the island… but the cliffs were to his right. If he’d aimed true, they would have missed the islands completely.

As they drew nearer, Prabir saw that the cliffs didn’t quite meet the water; there was a narrow, rocky beach below. He had no idea whether this island was inhabited, but he felt sure that his parents would be waiting here: it was the nearest land, the simplest possible choice. He thought of circumnavigating the island, looking for the boat they’d used to make the crossing, but he didn’t trust himself to spot it in the dark. If he’d had any reason to believe that there was a harbour or a jetty he would have searched for that, but he wasn’t prepared to chase after the mere possibility.

He steered straight for the beach.

There was a grinding sound at his feet and the boat came to a shuddering halt. Madhusree rolled off the bench where she’d been sleeping, into the gap between the bench and the bow. Prabir grabbed the food bag beside him, dropped his notepad in, zipped it closed and draped the handle around his neck. Then he leapt forward and reached for Madhusree; she was only just waking, whimpering and confused. He lifted her up, wrapped his arms around her, and jumped into the water.

His feet touched rock. The water was waist high.

Prabir started crying, shaking with relief and unused adrenaline. Madhusree gazed at him uncertainly, as if trying to decide between a show of sympathy and a competitive display of tears.

She said tentatively, ‘I bumped my head.’

Prabir wiped his eyes with the heel of one palm. ‘Did you, darling? I’m sorry.’

He waded to the shore and put her down, then went back for the other two bags, then again for the unopened water can. The boat was dented, but the floor appeared dry; the composite hull was tougher than he’d realised.

He rested on the pebble-strewn beach, using the clothes bag as a pillow, cradling Madhusree on top of him. They were both still wearing their life jackets; when he closed his eyes, the universe shrank to the smell and squeak of plastic.

Prabir was woken by someone shouting a single word, far away. He listened for a while, but there was nothing more. Maybe he’d dreamt it.

It was still dark. He manoeuvred Madhusree on to one side, and checked his watch. It was just after four.

He’d dreamt that his father was standing at the top of the cliffs, calling his name. But if the image had only been a dream, the sound might still have been real.

Prabir rose to his feet, leaving Madhusree lying where he’d been. He’d have to take her with him if he explored the top of the cliffs. He couldn’t bring much else, though. He’d make do with a canteen of water.

He urinated into the sea, shivering. The stones were cold beneath his feet. He’d forgotten to bring shoes.

He walked along the beach for fifteen minutes before he found a break in the cliff wall, with a steep rocky path to the top. He scrambled up, nearly losing his footing half a dozen times. Madhusree slept on in his arms, oblivious.

There was thick coarse grass at the top of the cliff, and what he guessed was dense jungle in the distance. There was no fire, no light, no sign of life. The moonlight seemed to reveal that there was no one but the two of them from the cliff edge to the jungle, but then Prabir heard the voice again.

It was a man’s voice, but it wasn’t his father. The word he was shouting was ‘Allah!’

Prabir walked towards the sound, aware of the danger but tired of thinking of nothing else. His parents should have been there to meet him on the beach. He’d done all he could to get Madhusree to safety; anything that happened now was their fault.

He found the man lying on his back in the grass. He was an Indonesian soldier, almost shaven-headed, dressed in neat green camouflage and combat boots. He looked about nineteen. Some kind of long-barrelled weapon lay by his side.

Prabir said, in his halting Indonesian, ‘We’re friends, we won’t hurt you.’

The man turned on his side, fear in his eyes, clutching at his weapon. His face shone with sweat. There was a huge dark stain in his shirt over his abdomen.

Prabir said, ‘I’ll get help. Tell me where to go.’

The man stared at him mistrustfully. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know where they are. I don’t know where to send you.’

Prabir squatted down and offered him the canteen. The man hesitated, then took it and drank from it. When he offered it back, Prabir said, ‘Keep it.’ He still had ten litres on the beach.

It was hard to know how to talk to the soldier without angering him, but Prabir suggested tentatively, ‘The local people might help you.’

The man shook his head, grimacing, closing his eyes against the pain.

Madhusree woke, yawning and befuddled. She took in her new surroundings, then gazed at Prabir with intense disappointment. ‘I want Ma!’

The man opened his eyes and smiled at her. He propped himself up and held out his arms. Madhusree shook her head, unafraid but unwilling to indulge this stranger. He gave an understanding shrug, then screwed up his face suddenly and cried out again, ‘Allah!’ Tears escaped his eyelids and flowed down his cheeks.

Prabir felt his legs grow weak. He sat down in the grass, clutching Madhusree to his chest. There were so many things he’d forgotten to bring from the island: bandages, painkillers, antibiotics.

Madhusree dozed off again. The man fell silent; he seemed to have lost consciousness, though he was still breathing loudly. Prabir wondered if he really believed in Allah—an Allah who could send his comrades back to help him, or at least welcome him into Paradise—or if he’d merely been shouting the word from habit, like a curse. When Prabir had asked his father why so many people believed in gods, his father had said, ‘When things are hard, there’s a part of everyone that wants to believe there’s someone watching over them. Someone ready to help, or even just to judge their actions and acknowledge that they’ve done their best. But that’s not the way the world is.’

Prabir put Madhusree down on the grass; she stirred unhappily, but didn’t wake. He walked over to the soldier and sat beside him, cradling the dying man’s head in his arms.

Just before dawn, with birds screaming in the jungle, two heavily bearded men in ragged clothes approached.

Prabir said, ‘Don’t kill us. He won’t hurt anyone. He just needs a doctor. He can still be saved.’

One of the men lifted Madhusree into his arms, then grabbed Prabir by the shoulder and jerked him to his feet.

The other man squatted by the soldier and drew a knife. As Prabir was being led away, he heard a choking sound, like a swimmer coughing up sea water. He didn’t look back, and after a few seconds it stopped.