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!’
‘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.