Dead Water (20 page)

Sion: a suburb of Mumbai.

Centuries ago the Jesuits built a chapel here and named it after Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The chapel has vanished, and even the British fort on its hill, which once marked the boundary between Bombay and Salsette Island, is vandalized and done, its few remaining timbers scored and scorched. Close your eyes. The drone of the Eastern Express Highway competes with the rustle of used prophylactics. Open them. Woods. Parrots. Broken paths and exposed plumbing.

To the east, in the shadow of the K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology, a slum line sheathes the railway line to Chunabhatti. To the west, suburbs nibble like a grey leprosy at the skirts of Maharashtra Nature Park.

The dead boys, Abhik and Kaneer, becalmed, take the chapel for their own and lick their wounds with a forked tongue. They are accomplished djinn by now. They shape the narratives through which they flow. Still, their parents’ murder remains an open wound: a mystery they cannot yet explain.

Lovely Auntie Roopa has rented a cramped apartment for herself and her son overlooking the rain trees and casual cricketers of Shivaji Park. The plumbing here is bad: she has to wait until 2.00 a.m. to have a shit. Day after day, while Nitesh is hauled, at some expense, from one bin to another – nursery, breakfast club, supper club, homework club, school – Roopa sits slumped in front of the television. The TV is the family that no longer speaks to her. The TV is the circle of friends she no longer has. Now and again she dabs at her ruined mouth with a balled-up tissue. Her spit comes away pink as fragments of tooth circulate in her gums.

Her dentures lie forgotten in the bottom of a drawer. She watches movies. Bollywood noirs. Frustrated at her inaction, her defeat, Abhik and Kaneer break her television. It’s an old cathode-ray tube model, and it takes no more than a tail-flick to damage the set.

And if this was the kind of movie Roopa spends her days watching, there would be an important beat here. The dead boys would rip off the back of the set and there, tucked into the housing, taped there, would be a brandnew Glock wrapped in an oilcloth and about one hundred thousand rupees in small denomination bills. The discovery would signal a new act.

This is not a movie. The boys achieve precisely nothing. The first thing Roopa does when she discovers the TV isn’t working is to phone the rental company. By lunchtime there they are again, Auntie Roopa, baby Nitesh, dead Abhik, dead Kaneer, eating
vada pav
sandwiches in front of an LG flat-screen, watching a rerun of
The Stoneman Murders
. Vikram Gokhale plays Roopa’s dad.

The green Honda is gone. Vinod is gone. Yash Yadav himself is gone: disappeared, scot-free. As for mum and dad, no one living even brings them to mind any more. The Nankars may as well have never lived. What more can Roopa do? There’s only so much that djinn can ask of one small, broken woman.

Feeling sorry for themselves, Abhik and Kaneer take themselves off again to the ruins of the Chapel of Zion and curl up in the litter there. Bags of glue. Old needles. Shitty tissues. Shattered rum bottles. Glass flecks sting the eyes and disturb the sleep of every glue-sniffing vagrant who passes out in this place.

‘I told her to make the chapattis and then, when she was leaning over the bowl, kneading the dough, I took the pan from the wall and I lifted it over my head and I brought it down on her head and it rang like a bell.’

The boys flex, steeped in horror and pity, and the failure of the world.

‘I expected her to fall over. That was the idea. To fall over empty, eyes shut. She didn’t fall over. She leant there over the bowl, like she was waiting. Then she wailed. She lifted her hands and they looked wrong, like an old woman’s hands, because they were covered in wet dough. She put her hands around my waist and called me darling.’

The boys wrap themselves around each other, weeping bright and bitter tears.

‘I got the kerosene from out the corner and the cap came off easily enough and I upended it over her, wanting it to be done, for a line to be drawn. But I couldn’t find the matches. She was moving about the room on all fours, her sari was getting in her way, it was caught under her knees, she could only move her arms, she was turning around and around like she had lost something, and I said to her, “Where are the matches?” I noticed that she was breathing in this strange way, like she was straining the air through her teeth. Anyway, I found the matches.’

All Abhik and Kaneer ever wanted was stories and hot milk. Cuddles now and then. A warm pallet. They’ve got stories now, all right.

‘By this time she had got around the whole room on all fours, spreading the kerosene, so when I dropped the match on her the fire spilled off her on to the floor and the whole room went up, pushing me out of the room, and the worst of it is she is following me, she’s standing in the doorway, burning, her hands, burning, pressed either side of the doorframe, and her head, burning, smoking like a chimney, the hair all gone, her eyes gone like cooked eggs but moving and her skin all white.’

Stories are their lifeblood now, their oxygen, their life support. Stories are their home. Their bricks. Their clay.

‘She came into the room. Very gentle tread she had. Small feet. The room was filling with smoke, black, tarry, tasty, it rolled over her head. Wild it was, and when it went it was like it left this doll behind, and it was this doll came knelt down in front of me. Well, I forgot myself. And I did this thing. Look. I laid it on her head, you see, laid it there as though she were still my wife. Even though it was burning. Even though there was nothing there. Bone. Aah –’ He gasps, hiding his face behind a crummy hand.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ Ogan blinks, smearing his useless hand across a stubbled cheek. ‘Got something in my eye.’

Saturday, 12 February, 2000: eight in the morning

Ogan Seth, wife-killer, flees to Mumbai’s port area. Hiding his ruined hand under bandages and blarney, he talks his way aboard a dhow bound across the Indian Ocean for Muscat, in Oman. Fabrics, mainly. Spices. Machine parts. Break bulk. ‘You’ll have to sleep on deck.’

‘Okay.’

‘Under that Hilux there,’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll give you passage. Food. No pay.’

‘Okay.’

‘Sign here.’

Easy. Ogan’s mark, his ‘X’, is much the same whichever hand he writes with.

‘You’ve a bedroll?’

‘No.’

‘Well. See what you can find.’

At night Ogan lies, whimpering and sleepless, wrapped inside an

‘antique’ rug.

(Rug / US$22.4 SQF / 168 SQF).

The boat’s dangerously overloaded, of course. The way it wallows whenever there’s a chop puts Ogan in mind of horses struggling across a river, nostrils flaring, in the curry westerns he used to enjoy with his wife when –

Anyway.

Captain Egaz Nageen’s a Thai who barely knows port from starboard. For sure, his paperwork’s a forge or fudge. He spends all day studying seamanship manuals when he thinks no one is looking.

• Speak loudly and clearly when delivering your report.

• Even if you cannot properly identify the object seen smelled or heard say what you think at that moment.

• When searching for an object scan the sky the sea and the horizon from left to right and from top to bottom and from bottom to top and from right to left and back again.

• Remain at the helm until entirely relieved.

No one’s fooled.

The voyage is peaceful enough, but the engine’s underperforming and the crossing takes the best part of a week. Nageen says they’ll put in at Ras al Hadd to resupply. It turns out he’s always had this trip in mind, that he fancies himself as some sort of self-educated world traveller. A stolen library book, concealed among his clothes, says:

Exhausted and demoralized by the sheer scale of the world they had hoped to conquer, the sheer numbing on-and-on-ness of everything, Alexander the Great and his expeditionary force returned at last, victorious yet self-defeated, and Niacus, Alexander’s admiral, laid up the whole fleet in Ras al Hadd to slap on lime.

A dull time they must have had of it, too. Gravel hills. Green inlets. Sinking sands. The beaches are made of puffer-fish needles and oyster shells. After so many days, so many nights being slowly squeezed inside his brightly coloured, rasping rug (its colours strangely persistent in the night, as though the stuff were flecked with glass), Ogan decides to stretch his legs. He wobbles down the wooden jetty and follows the spoor of a wild fox to an abandoned seaplane-refuelling depot on the other side of the hill: ‘1933’ above its door. Inside, under a large, rusted but still serviceable fuel tank, there is a buoy and a curl of fuel hose. Ogan, grateful for the shade, shuffles in. Under the buoy, Ogan finds a thing. Some sort of thing. Red leather. Nasty. There’s a tuck, a fold, he prises out a flap of leather, and inside there is a book, done in the same sickly red skin. Worth a bob or two, he’s sure. He turns the pages. Pictures. Scales and fangs and eyes. Strange.

He leaves the fuel shed to examine the find more closely.

Alexander’s hoplites leap to their feet, startled, and brandish their swords in his face. They are young: more boys than men. There’s not a greybeard among them. They howl, peeling their lips back over blackened gums. Teeth, too, are in short supply. Ogan runs away screaming, pursued by catapulted stones and the spears of hula-skirted hypaspists. Overhead, other histories contend for domination of the skies. Avro 501s, held together with piano wire and prayer, wrestle in the turbulence kicked up by full-throated Rochester-built Short Cs. Oblivious to mankind’s future conquest of the air, a party of unarmed Napoleonic expeditionaries are lovingly buggering each other in the shallows, hands copper-green with the soft coral to which they cling while, on a small table of flat rock just above them, plump Mesopotamian princesses sprawl on leopard-fur chaises longues, sipping sherbets under parasols of finely beaten human skin, and the air fills with a complex stench made of sweat, horse dung, aviation fuel, cooked oysters, rancid asses’ milk and cordite.

The boys have ripped Ogan out of time. They have spread him thinly through history. They are doing this in part because they think he deserves it; mostly, they are doing it because they can. Ogan’s not the only one who’s been feeling restive after a long voyage.

A twofold and terrible djinn snaps at his heels as Ogan, alive at last to the majesty and tragedy of the human condition, scampers back to his ship, bursting with the need to atone for his paltry sins and misspent life. Returned seamlessly to present time, he runs the length of the jetty and flings himself upon his knees before Nageen, his master.

‘Sir, do your duty:
I have seen the error of my ways
!’

He’s sure as hell seen something’s put the fear of God in him. Nageen sighs. He’s just this second stepped on to dry land. His head’s a-swim with nautical bullet points and handy ship-shape tricks, cheats and hints. Catechisms. Acronyms: ATON, LOB, POB, POD. He’s clinging to his command by the skin of his teeth here. His only real nautical experience has been how to squat in the bows of a patched RIB, intimidating South Korean trawlers with a knock-off AK-56. He’s done with all that, but the climb from there to here has been vast and scary. He’s never crossed a whole ocean before today and there’s no one to toast his achievement: just this lunatic sprung from the pages of a
Boy’s Own
annual.

‘Clap me in irons, begad!’

More likely (given the cost and weight of ferrous metals) the most this poor, deranged sod can expect is cable ties and a trip to the nearest hospital.

‘I have killed! I have gone and besmirched my very soul!’ Ordinary Seaman Ogan Seth has eyes that dance with rainbow light. A schizophrenic. All that Nageen needs.

Now that they’ve had their fun, Abhik and Kaneer withdraw. Playing up to everyone’s idea of an angry and vengeful God is amusing, so far as it goes, but there’s something much more urgent they have to deal with.

The red notebook.

They have seen this before – but where?

They arrive back at the fuel shed to find the book is gone. They go hunting about for it, dust-devilling their way into the past, but it is not there and soon even the buoy and the fuel hose are gone, deployed to fuel the seaplanes bobbing at anchor nearby. Further back and the fuel shed unbuilds itself, and there’s still no sign of the red book.

They’ve come the wrong way. They’ve been looking for the book in the past. Rapidly they wind their way back to present time and into the future. Nine uneventful years scroll by before, all of a sudden, the book appears, beneath the buoy, dropped like an egg in a nest of decayed fuel hose.

They pause a moment, the book spread open between them, and gaze out of the door at the rocky platform, the empty sea, the jumbo jetstreaked sky. Nothing’s changed much in nine years. Nothing’s changed much in nine hundred years, come to that. The dry heat of the Middle East swiftly disorders the past but it consumes nothing. There’s no soil, no mulch, no mould to help things rot. There are oyster shells round here that Alexander’s hypaspists cranked open, drank dry and threw aside.