Dead Water (46 page)

Nageen closes his eyes.

Sabir tries to stand. He gets as far as his knees and shuffles to the nearest man. Chief Engineer Sen rubs his wrists, takes the scissors from the boy and cuts his ankles free. He stumbles to his feet, gripping the scissors.

‘Sen –’

‘Fuck you,’ says Sen to all of them, and hobbles from the mess room, gripping the scissors like a knife.

Sabir is on his feet now. ‘Wait,’ he says, and follows Sen out into the corridor. Nageen groans and curls into a ball. A swell runs under the ship and outside there is a great and terrible groaning: huge animals are drowning out there...

‘Mr Nageen, sir!’

It’s Kamal, the first officer. ‘Mr Nageen, I can see you, sir!’ He’s sat up against the wall below the window, scraping and banging his head against the wall, trying to be rid of his blindfold.

The ship is listing more now, thrown out of balance by its containers as they topple and strain against their wire lashings.

‘Here.’

It is Sabir, back from the galley with a knife. Nageen watches as he frees Suniti. Suniti makes to embrace him but there’s no time: Sabir pushes her to the floor, cuts the band around her ankles and crosses to the window. Kamal shuffles back against the wall, afraid.

Nageen says, ‘Hold on, Mr Kamal.’

Suniti is on her feet. ‘I’m all right.’

‘Suniti.’ He absolutely must not weep.

Sabir saws through the cable tie securing Kamal’s legs. ‘Good boy,’ Kamal mutters, rubbing his ankles. ‘Right.’ He stands up, silhouetted against the window. The window explodes and his head goes with it. Suniti screams and drops to the ground. Armour-piercing bullets strafe the mess-room wall. Sabir crawls towards Nageen. Suniti reaches out a hand. Nageen rolls towards her, grips her hand and pulls. Under a rain of flaming ornaments, calendars and shattered safety notices, Nageen, Suniti and Sabir shimmy towards the door. The gunfire cannot drown the cries of the men they are abandoning.

As they reach deck level, the strafing stops. Nageen waits, slumped against the wall, fast running out of strength, while his wife and son struggle to undog the iron-house door. Containers are toppling into one another out there: creatures from nightmare, bellowing in pain. The ship tips sickeningly to starboard and Nageen slides to the rubberized floor of the gangway. Even five floors down, they can still hear screams spilling from the mess room. Now there’s a new sound: the motors of another ship. Not a workboat: something fast and manoeuvrable. It revs and slews around the stricken
Ka-Bham
.

Sabir opens the door a crack and looks out. ‘No one.’ The weight of the door is against them as Sabir and Suniti help Nageen jam his way through the gap and on to the deck.

Nageen cowers in the glare. He cannot see. He cannot breathe: the air’s too rich for him. His sight pulses black and he staggers, trying to hold on, trying to keep his feet. At the stern of the boat, hidden by the superstructure, the pirates’ boat is circling.

Suniti takes Nageen’s arm and drags him after Sabir: they’re heading for the containers. These are lashed lengthways to the deck, four abreast, but here and there the twistlocks have snapped and containers have toppled into their neighbours: it’s only a matter of minutes before the whole lot gives way and slides into the sea.

Behind them the engine of the pirates’ boat ratchets up a gear: they’re coming round. Nageen finds his feet and topples forward into Suniti, propelling her into an alleyway between the stacks. Sabir is already there, crouching, craning up in fear as the topmost containers groan and tip with the motion of the boat.

They hunker here a moment. It’s cool here between the bottom-most cans – cool, at least, in comparison to the sun-flamed deck – but they cannot stay. They are as fragile as insects here. The stacks have only to shift a couple of feet and they will all be crushed.

The pirates’ ship comes starboard of the
Ka-Bham
, its motor rolling down. Its wash nudges the
Ka-Bham
’s lumbering hull: it tips, returns, tips, returns, swinging, port to starboard and back, a deadly see-saw. The ship is foundering, drifting out of true: it is side-on to the waves now and the end, when it comes, will come fast.

Above their heads the containers groan.

On hands and knees Nageen edges between the cans. They’re stacked against each other, nose to tail, on top of the hatch covers. Between the hatches there’s open space. Nageen bobs into the gap and back again, not daring to show himself for more than a second. He glimpses the pirates’ boat: a real rusted piece of shit. In the bow men are wrestling with the innards of a Bofors gun.

He waits five seconds, then peers out again. The boat is past the gap, chugging gently forward and round the bow. Sabir and Suniti come up behind him. If the pirates spot them they will kill them: no doubt of that. They can’t stay here either: the cans will crush them, if not in the next minute then in the minute after that, or the one after that. The ship is going to roll.

To starboard the sea, drunken, uptilted, rolls towards them and now, edging into view – yes – a dinky orange self-inflating life raft. A man kneels in the raft, paddling frantically. It’s Sen. He’s going backwards. The sea is against him. The breeze is against him. The breaths of two dead boys are against him. See them flexing in the sky! And here comes the pirates’ boat. Slowly, inexorably, it rounds the bow of the
Ka-Bham
. The pirates open up with everything they’ve got. Handguns. AKs. The life raft shivers and shimmies, the roof shreds away, and Sen falls into the water.

Suniti pulls Nageen back into the dark of the alley. The pirates’ boat revs and swings around the starboard side of the
Ka-Bham
. Its wash, coinciding with a swell, catches the ship broadside. The deck pendulums. Each moment longer, wilder than the last. A lashing wire snaps, whipcracking the containers stacked above their heads. Nageen feels strong arms around him. He paddles ruined feet against the deck as the containers start to slide. He feels the passageway contract, the kiss of steel on his arms, and he closes his eyes.

Sabir falls back, dropping Nageen. Nageen’s head strikes the deck. He opens his eyes. He’s sprawled in the open space between hatches. The
Ka-Bham
is rocking, he reaches out to save himself from rolling, it’s happening, it’s happening now.

Far away, under the screams issuing from the shattered mess-room windows, Nageen hears the pirates’ boat tearing at the water. Downhill, the sea rolls and slaps the inclined hull. Through intermittent walls of spray, he sees the pirates’ boat, low in the water, half-hidden already by the ocean’s soft swells: it is speeding away.

Seawater spills over the starboard rail. He turns uphill, sees only steel and sky. The ship is going to roll. Ahead of him, Suniti scrambles up the deck against the incline. She grabs the port-side rail and reaches down for Sabir. Sabir catches hold of her hand and reaches for Nageen. On bleeding hands and broken knees, Nageen climbs towards them. Sabir catches him under the arm. Nageen paddles his feet.

The
Ka-Bham
rolls.

Lashing bursts and containers thunder into the foaming water. Nageen flails and cracks his wrist against the combing of a hatch.
A handhold
: he clings. He pulls. Sabir lets go. The sea thunders up in a wave to lick Nageen’s burnt feet. He paddles, grabs, misses, and falls backwards into the sea. He enters the water and cracks his back on something solid. Air bursts from his lungs in a great rush, turning him in the water. He sees something sliding beneath him: something white and corrugated: he imagines sandy shallows.

Letters slide before his drowning eyes:

The ribbed floor, so close he might touch it, resolves into the steel wall of a container. Egaz Nageen hangs face down in the water, breathless, weightless, without pain, submerged and staring as the can rolls under him, gathers speed, turns blue, turns pale, turns small, and disappears.

Rishi has shut up the workshop in Darukhana. He’s arranged passage to Toronto. All he has to do now is clear out the apartment.

He turns the key, letting himself in for the last time. What a shame that he has to leave all this behind! Rental on the place approaches the annual domestic product of Chhaphandi, and ever since Roopa started getting under his skin he’s been filling it with furnishings that wouldn’t look out of place in one of those glossy magazines of hers.

What the place really needed, he knows – more than money, more than things – was for them to stay here together more than a couple of nights at a stretch. Rishi himself has spent so little time here he’s been sliding off things. He’s been stubbing his toes on things, an inept guest in a tooexpensive hotel room. The oven still had the plastic on – he found that out only last night, trying to warm up a take-away halloumi pizza. There are gadgets in his bathroom he’s never found the uses for, shit-kicker that he is. Chhaphandi boy. Komatsu driver.

He’s sorry to be leaving, and who can blame him? He loves the life he’s led here. After Firozabad, after Devnagar, after Chhaphandi, who wouldn’t love this life? Most everyone in the world would kill to have this life, even a week of this life, if only so they could just sit and think for once, not worrying about where the next meal was coming from.

Each comfort he has acquired has made him a little bit more the person he set out to be that night on the Sher Shah Suri Marg. Someone who appreciates a comfortable cushion, a well-cooked meal, a decent shirt. This is the person he wants to see in the mirror of a morning. Not some bloody beast of burden.

Passport, and cards, and keys, and phone. Don’t look back. Don’t give in. Relocate and regroup. Toronto. The uninspired choice of hungry men. He knows what he’s doing.

The hire car’s where he left it. He thumbs the phone on, tosses it on to the front passenger seat, and sets the car humming around him. Radio, air conditioning, motive force. Put it in gear. Drive.

Traffic’s as bad as he expected: it takes him nearly an hour to arrive at the Port Trust gate. He’s sorry to be leaving Mumbai. The city has been good to him. It has given him a place to work undisturbed. It has even brought him some happiness. Days out. Evenings in. A woman he cared for. A boy who might one day have called him ‘Dad’.

A son! A home! Oh, run away, Rishi. Get out while the going’s still good!

The dongle suckered to his windshield was weeks in the making and cost him a small fortune, but it does the job handsomely: the Port Trust barrier swings up automatically and he sails through at 20 mph. The road takes a long curve around warehouses and lorry parks. He pulls up under a concrete awning, opens his window and hands to the duty guard a paper that’s all his own work (he’s always taken pride in his work). The guard hands him a yellow hard hat and gives him directions to Riverside Upper.

He pulls up in a small, cramped square of tarmac under huge metal daisies. Floodlights and cameras hang off them like petals. He opens the window, smells diesel and the sea. A wall of containers stacked five or six high hides the water. There are regular four-foot gaps between each column of containers. Through the gap directly ahead of him he spots a red hull.

A straddle-carrier trundles past, lines itself up, and rolls over the stack in front of him, wheels filling the crawlways either side. Behind it blue mobile gantries trundle back and forth along the quay, whining like monstrous children. The crawler stops and a man in a yellow hard hat climbs out of his tinted glass cabin and down a ladder, and disappears.

The phone on the passenger seat jangles at full volume. Heart thumping, he fumbles for the green button.

‘
Sir, are you ready?
’

He’s ready. He’s ripe. Get out of the car.

‘We can see you. I think. Raise your hand.’

Do it.

‘
Thank you, sir. Now, you’ll have to move fast. You see the alleyway straight ahead of you?
’

‘Yes.’

‘
Go three cans left
.’

He’s done this before, across the Indian Ocean, many times. When he started he hid out in the bilges of dhows. He’s come up in the world since, but the principle is the same. Most people in his line of work travel this way, especially since the airports got so uncomfortable.

‘
Good. Now when you’re in the alley we won’t be able to see you and I don’t suppose the mobile will work well either in all that tin. Just go all the way down to the quay and we’ll pick you up at the other end
.’

He reads as he goes: it’s impossible not to. Hamburg Süd. Moyse. Maersk. CSAV. There is something magical in this: the world’s bounty boxed up like so many heavy-duty Christmas presents. How the world goes round, packed, palletized, boxed, numbered, turned to paper, turned to figures, turned to logic gates and light, to symbols he will never grasp. Concepts that evaporate as soon as they are spoken. The world transfigured so we might have our dolphin lamps. Our mattresses. Our peacock-pattern drapes. We fight tooth and nail to keep this life of ours. You couldn’t stop this if you tried.