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.
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.