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.