Authors: Chris Speyer
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Zaki lay in bed wondering whether or not he should get up. He couldn’t hear any sounds of people moving about. What time did the Dalals have breakfast? Did they have breakfast? He should have asked Anusha. He decided to get up anyway, dressed, and made his way to the kitchen, where he found Mr Dalal seated at the kitchen table, working on something on his laptop computer.
‘Sorry,’ said Zaki, when Mr Dalal looked up, ‘didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Mr Dalal. ‘I am only doing some stupid emails and I am only doing that because I have nobody to talk to. Did you sleep well?’
‘Quite well,’ Zaki lied.
‘Good, because there were some people creeping around the house last night, and I thought they might have woken you. Cup of tea?’
‘Um – thank you,’ said Zaki, embarrassed that their midnight comings and goings had not gone unnoticed.
While Mr Dalal was busy making a fresh pot of tea, Zaki looked around the room. Every available surface seemed to support a little line of carved elephants. Some lines were arranged in ascending height; in other lines all the elephants were more or less the same size but were carved out of different materials. The majority were made from wood, but some were fashioned from coloured stone. They marched across the tops of cupboards, shared shelves with the crockery, and one very large stone elephant served as a doorstop.
‘The elephants belong to my wife,’ said Mr Dalal. ‘She bought one when I first took her to India. My family decided she must love elephants and now they send her one every time they find a new one, which in India can be very, very often.’
Mr Dalal poured mugs of tea and pulled a chair out for Zaki at the table.
‘I was thinking about something you said last night, about not being just bodies,’ Zaki said.
‘Body and mind?’
‘Yes. Do you think it might be possible for our minds to – I don’t know – to get changed somehow?’
‘I change my mind all the time. Ask my dear wife.’
‘I didn’t mean like that.’
‘No, of course you didn’t. Excuse me – I was only teasing.’
‘What I meant was . . . can something happen so that your mind can exist without your body?’
‘Some say there is really only one mind, that exists everywhere, and that each of our minds is a little bit of it.’
Zaki shook his head, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Imagine a big, big window that has been painted completely black. Now, I scratch a hole in the paint on the left side and you scratch a hole in the paint on the right side. When we look through the holes, we can both see the same view but we see it from slightly different angles. The holes are our minds, what we are looking at is the one mind. Does that help?’
‘A little,’ said Zaki.
‘When we talk about mind like this, we are not talking about brain.’ Mr Dalal wagged his finger.
‘Could my mind work in somebody else’s body?’
This time it was Mr Dalal’s turn to shake his head in puzzlement. ‘That is a truly wonderful question . . . and, if you ever find the answer, you must tell me what it is.’ The next to arrive in the kitchen was Anusha’s mother. She regarded the two at the table, heads together, like a pair of conspirators.
‘Sandeep, has that poor boy had any breakfast?’
‘Certainly! Cup of tea, and yogic wisdom.’
‘Oh, honestly! You could at least have given him some cereal. And where is Anusha?’
‘Sleeping, I expect. Perhaps I should wake her.’
‘Perhaps you should. Now, Zaki, what would you like? Cereal, toast, eggs?’
‘Toast would be fine, thanks.’
Mr Dalal left to wake Anusha while his wife bustled around the kitchen making toast, and setting out plates, bowls and cereals on the kitchen table.
Zaki went back to examining the carved elephants. He noticed one that looked rather odd and he got up from the table to take a closer look. The little elephant had been given a place of honour. It was seated in a niche in the wall. Unlike the other elephants, it was brightly painted. Now Zaki saw that it had the head of an elephant but the body of a human, except that the body had four arms. One of the four hands held a noose, one held a sort of stick, the third was held up, palm forward, the fourth held a broken tusk. There was a snake around the creature’s waist and a mouse at its feet.
‘That’s Ganesha,’ said Anusha.
Zaki turned to find her standing behind him. Her hair was still wet from the shower.
‘Why does he look like that?’
‘Well, there are two different stories, but anyway he lost his head when he was a baby and his father, Shiva, who is a god of course, gave him an elephant’s head. The really important thing is that he’s the remover of obstacles.’
‘The remover of obstacles,’ Zaki repeated.
‘What are all those things he’s holding?’
‘That’s a goad, a stick to prod you forward, and that’s the noose he uses to catch all the difficulties that are in your way. The snake is energy. He’s got big ears so that he can listen to you, and his elephant head is full of wisdom, it’s like the soul, and his human body denotes earthly existence. I’ve forgotten about the tusk. Mum? Why does Ganesha have a broken tusk?’
‘He used it as a pen to write the Mahabharata.’
‘Oh yes – that’s this huge big poem about all the gods and heroes and so on.’
‘And the mouse shows that he’s humble because he’s the destroyer of pride and selfishness,’ added Mrs Dalal.
For the next quarter of an hour they concentrated on eating. Mr Dalal didn’t rejoin them. Maybe he had gone to the recording studio, Zaki thought. He obviously knew they had been down there last night. Did he mind? Was he checking to see what they had been up to? Anusha didn’t seem at all concerned. Well, different families had different rules, he supposed.
‘The remover of obstacles’ – the words kept repeating in Zaki’s head. He could really do with one of those right now! Michael used to be his remover of obstacles. The one who went first: the first to climb a cliff, the first at the secondary school. He went ahead and came back and told Zaki what it was like, that it was safe. But now the obstacles had grown bigger and not even Michael could remove them.
He looked up from his plate and found Mrs Dalal smiling at him.
‘Mum,’ Anusha asked, as they tidied away the breakfast things, ‘can Zaki borrow the mask from the living room?’
‘There seems to be a lot of interest in that mask all of a sudden,’ her mother remarked.
‘We’re doing myths and stuff with Mrs Palmer and Zaki’s got to do a project.’
‘Well, yes, take it, by all means. But you might need to give it a bit of a dust.’
Anusha wrapped the mask carefully in an old tea towel and it joined the logbook and the borrowed CD in Zaki’s rucksack. Then they made themselves a picnic lunch to take with them to the boat.
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It was the sort of September day that seems to have borrowed its weather from mid-July; there was no wind to speak of and the sun shone out of a clear blue sky. Sitting beside Anusha, while the bus wound its way through the lanes to Salcombe, Zaki felt rather self-conscious in his school clothes on a Saturday, and, despite the sunshine streaming in through the bus window, he kept his jacket zipped up over his pale blue school sweatshirt. He could feel the slight weight of the bracelet in his jacket pocket.
‘What if
Curlew
is still anchored near your boat?’ asked Anusha as they walked from the bus to the boat shed. Zaki had been wondering the same thing, but they needn’t have worried.
‘She’s long gone,’ Grandad told them.
‘Up the estuary, or out to sea?’ asked Zaki.
‘Out to sea. Only one person aboard, far as I could tell.’
Zaki fetched
Morveren
’s cabin key from the nail by the door, lifejackets for himself and Anusha and the oars for the dinghy. Grandad offered to tow the dinghy out with the launch, but Zaki replied that Anusha could do with the rowing practice.
‘That shoulder of yours all right for rowin’?’
‘Seems to be fine,’ Zaki replied nonchalantly.
Grandad raised a quizzical eyebrow but let it go at that.
‘If you intend leavin’ the dinghy on
Morveren
, fly the mermaid when you want fetchin’.’ ‘The mermaid’ was a large square flag with a mermaid on it. ‘Flying the mermaid’ was the family’s way of letting those ashore know that they were wanted onboard. During holidays, when the mermaid was run up the mast, it was the signal that lunch was ready and that Zaki and Michael should stop whatever they were doing and get back to the boat. Zaki’s mum had made the flag. This summer it hadn’t been flown.
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They had the tide with them until they were level with the harbour office, but as soon as they headed out across the estuary the ebb swept them sideways and they had to pull hard at their oars to make the moorings by the opposite shore. However, Zaki’s newly healed shoulder allowed him to use both arms to row and he and Anusha were a well-balanced pair, matching stroke for stroke, so they were soon aboard
Morveren
with the dinghy tied to the yacht’s stern.
It was the first time Anusha had seen inside
Morveren
’s cabin. Every detail that was so familiar to Zaki was new to her. She was amazed at how many things had been dovetailed into such a small space. Eventually, when Anusha had made a thorough inspection of every nook and cranny and Zaki had satisfactorily answered all her questions, they settled themselves at the saloon table and opened the logbook.
The first entry was dated 15th October 1907 and gave details of a day’s oyster dredging in the Carrick Roads including notes on the size and quantity of oysters harvested. Similar entries continued throughout the autumn and winter months – mostly oyster-dredging but some days the boat had been used for fishing. There was no mention of crew, so the skipper must have worked alone.
Occasionally, in the margin beside an entry, there was a drawing of a dolphin. Around a third of the way through the book the short log entries stopped. Zaki flicked forward through the remaining pages. They were all filled with the same neat, sloping handwriting. It appeared to be one long entry.
‘What’s this all about?’ Anusha wondered.
‘Only one way to find out,’ Zaki replied, turning back to the page where the entry began.
Heads together, their elbows on the table, they settled down to read.
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1st March 1908
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Oh Una – where are you? If only I could talk to you. If only I could ask your forgiveness for what I have done. But I did it to stay near you – you must know that – or as near to you as I can be. No – no, perhaps it is you who should ask me for forgiveness! After all, it was you who deserted me.
Yes, I went back. Yes, I took some of the more valuable pieces that I had hidden. And yes, yes! I know they are for ever stained with blood – the blood of other innocent people. It would have been so much easier to have died along with our parents the night of the wreck. You saved us. You see? It was you! You really are to blame! I don’t mean that. You know I don’t mean that. But why save me and then leave me on my own, trapped in this life? It was cruel of you, Una, so cruel.
I know you are sometimes not far away. That is why I bought this boat. And some days you come to play. It is you? You and your friends?
Yes, Una, I went back and I took a few valuables. And I know I swore I would not, but how else could I get the money for the boat? Now I have blood on my hands.
And I have nightmares. I should never have gone back to that cursed rock. I dream every night that I am him again and I am on that beach, killing, killing, killing. I think I will go mad. There is no one I can talk to. I am becoming confused. Even during the day I sometimes wonder who I am. Is it possible I once had a normal life – was a young girl with loving parents and a sister? Una, what shall I do?
Yes, Una, you are right. How sensible of you. You always were the clever one. I must set it all down. I must start from the beginning. Get it clear in my poor, confused head. That is the thing to do. I will imagine I am telling a stranger, somebody kind and patient who listens and asks no questions, somebody – and this is important – somebody who is capable of believing the unbelievable.
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Dear Stranger (may I call you that?) – how should I start? Shall I tell you who I am? Yes, since we have not met before, I should introduce myself. My name is Rhiannon Davies. I have a twin sister named Una. We were born in June under the twin sign of Gemini and were so alike that even our parents had difficulty telling us one from the other. (Our parents! Oh, Una, I’m beginning to forget what they looked like!)
I’m sorry – let me continue. Our father was the Reverend Bryn Davies, our mother Gwyneth Davies.
Our father believed that God wished him to be a missionary, to preach the Word in those dark corners of the world where it had not been heard. And it was this belief that propelled our little family of four in the spring of 1851, with our few possessions and a great many Bibles, from the Welsh Valleys to a tropical paradise, where there were already a good many gods and where my father was amazed to discover that his own god had been known since the time of St Thomas, although considered to be no greater than any of the others.
We arrived in Ceylon, or Serendip as the ancients called it, soon after Una and I had celebrated our ninth birthday, and we remained there for a little over five years. While our father and mother were engaged in ‘civilising the natives’ and ‘steering them away from their dark superstitions’, the natives were engaged in steering us, their children, towards those very same dark beliefs and practices. Our chief instructor in this was the local Edura (or ‘idolatrous witch doctor’ as our father called him), a kindly old man who, when not driving out demons, cast bronze statues of gods and goddesses and of all the local saints, and made bells and cymbals for ritual dances.
It is the belief, in those parts, that there exists a host of different demons and that every illness and misfortune is caused by a particular one of them. It is the Edura’s duty to determine which demon is the cause of each affliction and then, through the terrifying Yakum Natim or Devil Dances, in the disguise of that very demon, to persuade it to leave the body of the sufferer.
Every day, as soon as our mother had finished giving us our morning lessons, my sister and I would scamper off to the Edura’s. There we would squat in the heat and semi-darkness, watching him work and listening, wide-eyed, to his tales of the Yakka, or demons, and the many tricks and ruses he had used to overcome them. All around us, on the walls, lit by the red, flickering glare from the hearth, hung the masks of the Yakka, their faces twisted and distorted in cruel reflection of the diseases they caused: Naga Sanni Yakka, bringer of nightmares; Kori Sanni Yakka, the paralyser; Amuku Sanni Yakka, green-faced inflictor of stomach ills; Dala Sanni Yakka, causer of whooping cough; Riri Yakka, the fearsome blood demon; Kola Sanni Yakka, leader of the devils, and all the rest of his ghastly retinue.
The Edura worked stripped to the waist, his old skin, like creased leather, moving over the protruding bones of his arms and ribs as he shaped an image in wax or fanned the coals to a white heat to melt metals for casting. From time to time he would pause and point a finger at one of the masks, cackling as he recounted the ways in which he had outwitted this or that demon.
Best of all was to watch as the Edura cast a new god or goddess; the hot, smoking wax pouring out; the molten metal pouring like liquid fire from the crucible into the mould and then the miracle of the moment when the lithe, beautiful, dancing body of the god broke from its clay shell. What chance had my father’s dry sermons and crucified God against this astonishing marriage of heaven and hell?
Some days when we went to the Edura’s hut we would find him beneath his favourite tree, legs crossed, face serene, deep in meditation. We would settle ourselves on either side of him, copy his pose and see which of us could sit for the longest. Una always won. I would begin to yawn, then to fidget, and soon I would run off to find something else to do.
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Who knows how long we would have remained in Ceylon had we not fallen ill? Always doing everything together, Una and I succumbed to fever on the same day. My mother nursed, my father prayed, but our condition rapidly worsened. Our bodies seemed on fire one moment and frozen the next; one moment the sweat poured from us, soaking the bed sheets, the next we were seized by such shivering that our teeth rattled in our heads. We could eat nothing and soon we sank into delirium. Our father, fearing the worst, set out on the three-day overland journey to the coast in the hope of finding a doctor, but each day he was away we grew weaker until finally, in desperation, our mother turned to the Edura. The old man came and stood at our bedside. He bent low over each of us and smelt our breaths, then nodded; he knew this devil well – one of the worst, Riri Yakka, Demon of Blood. This devil drove a hard bargain; the price would be high. My mother cried that she would give anything, anything if our lives could be spared. The Edura said he would do his best. We must be brought that night to the clearing behind his hut; he would go and make the necessary preparations.
When darkness fell, we were carried out and laid in the clearing. Flaming torches were lit and the drumming began; slow at first, a single drum with a beat like a pounding heart. Then the rhythm quickened, other drums joined and the circle of drummers closed in around us, hands and sticks beating faster, whipping the air until it throbbed with a pulse that deafened our ears and convulsed our bodies.
Suddenly there was silence and the circle broke. There stood the Edura, his back to us, his face hidden. The old man’s body was transformed: bronze and silver bracelets encircled his arms and legs; muscles swelled where the skin had once sagged; his back was straight as a rod of iron; from our position on the ground, he seemed twice his previous height. Then, quick as a cat, as all the drums roared into life, he spun round and leapt towards us, his face hideously disfigured by the Yakka mask. As we watched, terrified, the mask was no longer a thing carved in wood, but alive and moving, a devil incarnate. The Edura had become the Yakka and he was about to devour us!
Shaking and screaming, we clung to each other on the ground as the monster descended. Saliva poured from its jaws. Its eyes flashed and flamed. Clawed hands plunged through our flesh and tore dark, smoking forms from each of our bodies. We lay twitching in the dirt, emptied like gutted fish, as the drums pounded and the battle of the demons raged above us in the resin-filled, smoky torchlight. Then it was over. The demons fled. The drummers vanished. All was silent except for the sputtering of the dying torches.
We sat up and looked at each other. The fever had gone. The warm night air enfolded us. The smoke cleared and the stars glittered. A little breeze sprang up and rattled the palm fronds. And then our mother was helping us to our feet, supporting us, guiding us home and repeating over and over, ‘Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God,’ as the tears streamed down her face.
Of course, after that, my father’s mission could not continue – the local gods and demons had triumphed. All knew that the missionary’s wife had begged the help of the Edura. All could see that the Edura had succeeded where my father had failed. What could my father do but pack up his family and return to Wales?
In the days before we left, my sister and I were forbidden to visit the Edura, but we could think of doing nothing else; it was as if an invisible cord tugged at something deep within us, drawing us towards his hut. We fidgeted through our morning lessons, sulked on the veranda in the sweltering heat of the afternoons or plucked peevishly at the luxuriant plants that grew in the garden. But when we were certain no one was observing us we scuttled to that forbidden place. Furtively, we crept to the rear of the building, where a hole in the thatched wall afforded us a view of the Edura bent over his crucible, into which he was dropping small fragments of copper and other metals. He turned and lifted something small, wrapped in a piece of cloth, from the low table by the wall. He carefully unwrapped the little parcel and lifted up a fine silver chain from which dangled the simple silver cross that always hung around our mother’s neck. We both gasped and then, fearful that he would detect us, held our breaths. What was he doing with our mother’s precious cross? Had he stolen it? Had she given it to him? If she had, what could this possibly mean? Gently, he lowered the cross and then the chain into the molten metal in the crucible. We pressed our faces closer to the hole, eager to see what would happen next, but we were suddenly seized from behind by two strong hands that dragged us from the wall. We found ourselves, in the next instant, confronting our father, whose face was purple with rage.
We were only to see the Edura one more time and that was on the day that we departed for the coast. Our father had gone ahead and we were preparing to follow with our mother on the ox cart with all our possessions. As the cart began to move, the Edura emerged from the shadows and pressed something into our mother’s hands with an instruction that I could not overhear. She quickly hid whatever he had given her in a bag that she kept with her for the rest of the journey.
Five days later we boarded the barque
Persephone
and set sail for England. As the palm-fringed shores dropped away, I felt as Eve must have felt when the angel of the Lord drove her from the garden of Eden; I was losing my paradise, but I was not to know that this ill-omened ship was carrying us into Hell!
For us children, the passage home was long, the monotony of the many weeks at sea only broken occasionally by the sight of dolphins that came to leap and play about our ship. Some sixth sense seemed to tell my sister, Una, when the dolphins were coming and she would hurry us all on deck to watch them.
The weather was, on the whole, fair and, although we encountered large seas when rounding the Cape of Good Hope, there were no serious storms until we had crossed the Bay of Biscay. Then, as we approached the English coast, the skies darkened, the seas rose and the ship was struck by a sudden and violent squall. Our first sight of England was just before nightfall when a headland, that the ship’s master took to be Lizard Point, was briefly visible through the driving rain. As the sun set, the storm increased in ferocity. Now each black wave that rushed upon our ship was crowned with a crest of foaming white and towered like a toppling mountain above the deck. Each wave seemed certain to overwhelm us. The motion of the ship grew ever more extreme and the sound of the storm rose to a deafening crescendo.
Now the waves swept across the decks. The longboat was carried away into the blackness of the night together with the unfortunate crewmen who bravely threw themselves in its path in a desperate attempt to save it. With a terrible splintering crash a hatch cover was breached and a dark, freezing torrent cascaded into the cabin where we two girls clung to our mother, believing that every moment would be our last. All hands above ran to man the pumps while our father exalted us to fall to our knees and pray to the Lord for our deliverance. It was clear to all that if we could not reach shelter soon the ship would surely founder.
A shout went up, ‘Lights! Lights ashore! Lights off the port bow!’
‘God be praised!’ my father cried. ‘Salvation is at hand!’
Despite the ever-present danger of being washed overboard, all who were not too sick to stand clambered on deck. Only those who have been in such mortal peril could understand the comfort that we gained from those glimmers of light. To know that safety, warmth and comfort were within our reach; surely these lights were lit to guide poor mariners home!
‘’Tis Plymouth,’ the boatswain yelled, ‘’Tis Plymouth! I know the lights!’ And all believed him because that is what we all wished to believe – safe harbour and an easy entrance.